Weekend - Hurrah, hooray!

It has been a long and arduous week, with episodes of beastly nastiness that upset me too much to even blog about (students can be evil, or at least the evil ones can be, and not in a cool or clever 'evil' villain type way, just in a 'we're going to be really unpleasant' way), and also the stress of sending my first ever senior classes off to exams. They grow up so fast! Or rather they don't but time marches on and events their require a tad more maturity occur whether they are ready or not.

Friday afternoon was the first year 11 English exam. I had graveyard shift (supervising the exam 3.30-5.30) and it was really more stressful than I remeber my own mid-year exams being.

All the students from all the year 11 classes were set up in the hall since 2.30pm for their first three hour exam. From the account I was given by the teachers who were in charge of setting up the exam, I'm glad I didn't have to be responsible for the start fo the exam. It seems a large number of students forgot to bring their own pens and struggled with the information of what was necessary to write on each page. Admittedly it is a little more confusing than it was in my day. With NCEA exams students have a separate question and answer booklet for each Achievement Standard (for level 1 English, 5 different standards are Externally assessed). This means they have to write their name, their teacher's code and the correct Achievement Standard 5-digit code on each answer page. Sorting this out was apparently very tricky. I am just proud that all my students made it to the right place on time with at least two pens!

Apparently most students had seen those bottled water commericals that claim the dehydration can cause memory loss and poor concentration because they were all slurping furiously on the bottle of Pump and H2GO. Why study when you can just drink bottled water and everything you covered in class will just flow back into your super-hydrated brain.

The only problem with the drinking water throughout their exam was the fact of what happens when you drink a large amount of water. Generally speaking in life, what goes in must come out again. Hydration may give you super mental powers but nowhere on the ads does it claim that it makes you impervious to the calls of nature. Whilst guzzling a 750ml bottle of water (or in the case of the students eager avoid any chance of dehydration, the 1 litre 'SUPERPUMP') may imbue your mind with super English skills, it will then proceed to make its way to your bladder.

Unfortunately, exam rules state that only one student may be escorted out of the hall to go to the bathroom at a time lest students communicated about the exam or traded answers or whatever. This meant that after the first hour there were many out of the 200 students in the hall who had to wait wriggling and uncomfortable several minutes. In fact I spent most of the time walking out students to the bathroom and then walking back in to tell the next one it was their turn.

It made the hours go by quickly for me, probably not so much for them.