Oh the sweaty palms, the tired minds, the aching hands....

Yep, you may have guessed it, it's exam time!!! (ie. Time of the red pen)

This feels like a holiday, no students to teach, no set times to obey, just an endless sea of marking that threatens to engulf your very soul until you dream of ticks and crosses... 

Cough... anyway...

I remember what it was like; the long days of studying, being stuffed into a hall with your peers, having to write fast enough to finish the papers, getting annoyed with the snifflers and the pen tappers... and lastly, the annoying teachers who pace up and down staring at you....

Yeah, and now I've become one.

Thing is, we never stopped to think how BORING it was for those teachers! Imagine it, being stuck looking after 100 or so girls who are writing a paper with absolutely NOTHING to do except walk up and down the rows making sure they aren't cheating. 

So, having been given the task of invigilator for the first time in my life, I have been compiling a list of interesting things for teachers to do during the long hour sessions of walking up and down watching desperate souls frantically scribbling their future on to pages of infinity...

So here is my list of 15 tried and tested things to do while invigilating! (Warning, some of these only work if you are invigilating alone)
 
1.  Count the bricks on the walls.
2.  If there are no bricks, count the amount of cracks you can find.
3.  Sing all the lyrics you know in your head.
4.  Imagine different music videos to these songs.
5.  Write mental poetry.
6.  Make a mental grocery list. If this fails, plan ahead for Christmas.
7.  Compare how many girls have ponytails, plaits, buns, or some other creative hairstyes.
8.  Count how many pens there are in the entire venue.
9.  Plan your outfit for the next week.
10. Practise your model walk.
11. Go through exit strategies if a zombie apocalypse occurs.
12. Count how many times a girl tucks her hair behind her ear.
13. Stare at each student until they look up at you, reward them points based on how long it takes.
14. Imagine how awesome it would be if the whole venue leaped up and broke out dancing.
15. Go to the back of the room and pull faces and do weird dance moves where the students can't see you, if one turns around act perfectly normal.

 

"When I was your age blah blah blah..."

I have a confession.

No I'm not an alcoholic.

Well... okay, yes, I have resorted to a glass of wine every now and then while marking.

Only one, and only in desperation.

Okay that one time it was two, but if you had read some of those answers you would've finished that bottle!! 

But back to my confession:

When I was in school, my peers and I would roll our eyes anytime a teacher would say "You know, in MY day, we never had cellphone etc etc blah blah fishpaste", and I always vowed I'd never become like that.

And yet, at the ripe old age of 23, I find my teenaged sponges just so DIFFERENT...  In my school days we certainly didn't have smartphones, camera phones which slid open would be the coolest of the cool. We certainly didn't like male popstars that look like overgrown babies (not mentioning names here... cough...) or skip school to watch their concerts. We would've been caught dead in neon see-through shirts and shorts that were designed to make half your butt fall out. We actually knew how to use the dewy decimal system in the library and projects weren't just copied and pasted off the net.

But my students know nothing of this life. And I feel the urgent need to remind them of a time when life wasn't all Blackberrys and Ipads. 

So, I confess, I found myself the other day musing out loud: "You know girls, back when I was in school, we didn't have half the things you did, Facebook was only invented when I was almost out of high school!", in response a very sweet, quiet girl in the front row pipes up: "Wow miss, you must really be OLD!"

Sigh.

I think I'll go back to my knitting.