Today was typical, BIG huge English exam, another candidate to cause me paperwork: bold as brass, end of the exam, as he walk out of the Exam Hall he gets his mobile phone out of his pocket. NO attempt to hide it……. Because this is the second time this has happened I know that I need a JCQ suspicion of malpractice form! In reality as it’s a big part of his English GCSE it’s going to be a round of complaints and excuses from him and his parents. I nearly prevented another boy from entering the exam because he arrived 45 minutes late. We actually woke him up when we rang home to see where he was. He’d misread his exam timetable, read Thursday instead of Tuesday and thought the exam was in the afternoon. I can’t imagine not being so nervous that I’d double check and then re-double check the exam timetable every two minutes! In the end it was this arrogance on his part that got him in to the exam. He was so insistant that he should be allowed in that I rang AQA and it turned out we’re allowed to let them in up to an hour after the exam has started rather than just 30 minutes as I’d thought.
I feel like I got next to nothing done today, exam paperwork and naughty kids traunting science got in the way. It’s the busiest time of year (in addition to exams I have options interviews and timetabling to get done) and absolutely no time to do it in – never mind the fact that I’m new at it and so it takes me twice as long as it should to get timetabling done.
I keep smiling and telling the Head it’s okay but I’m not sure how much longer I can keep that going without him smelling a rat. It’s a good thing that being a good actor is such a key teaching skill!