Mostly all I did was sit around today. There wasn’t much else for me to do.

During exams at the school where I work our main job, after writing the exams and recording the listening sections, is to sit and wait. We are not the exam proctors, but we are on call in case there are questions and/or crises.

During high school exams we at least get to sit at our desks and “do work” but during junior high exams our job is to occupy desks that are not ours and generally be loud and obnoxious.

Some of us, though, well, some of the others actually, do attempt to “do work”.

We sit in the tiny junior high teachers’ offices and wait to be called. Typically there aren’t that many questions, but that seems to alternate between years. In the past, we’ve discovered mistakes on exams that required us to enter the rooms and write the corrections on the blackboards.

The main hassle is the jhs teachers’ offices are tiny little rooms that remind me of the guard rooms at prisons. (In fact, the rooms overlook a large atrium that could be mistaken for a cell block, if you ignore that there are no bars or women in orange suits.)

Because the rooms are so small, even a quiet conversation between us becomes a disturbingly loud distraction to any poor teachers attempting to “do work”.

After that, we sorted our exams and I then spent the rest of the day sitting whilst I marked exams.