I’ve got absolutely nothing worth writing about tonight, so let’s talk about work.

Today was the last day of teaching for Term 1 and I now have a day to relax before exam hell begins. I will, of course, spend the day in the most productive manner possible.

Well, not really. I’ll just loaf.

As I’ve written before, it was a strange term. We have a new building and three new teachers and although everyone settled in quickly, it still felt strange. Then there was the self-inflicted pain caused by having the students make two minute videos. That in itself would have been fine if it were actually the students making the videos and not us. That said, I managed to film my last two students today when they turned up, without any prompting by me, to do their video. They, of course, cheated by gluing their script to the back of their product poster and they lost points for being lazy. (They just sat down and read as if they were news anchors.) But, it’s all finished.

Exams themselves are kind of goofy. We stand around during the exams waiting to answer any questions that might arise and to quickly correct, by writing on the blackboards, any mistakes suddenly discovered in the exams. After the exam, we wait for the proctors to bring the actual exam papers and we then sort them by class and start marking.

Well, actually, that’s what’s supposed to happen. I usually have to have at least one day of denial in which I spend a lot of time parsing time and convincing myself that days actually do have 25 or 26 hours and that three days are actually five. This means I have plenty of time to goof around and play games and I feel no guilt doing do. This period of denial is followed by late night marathon marking sessions fueled by coffee and chocolate.

I first enter the “ah heck, this ain’t so bad phase” in which I make actual progress. Eventually, though, “ah heck, this ain’t so bad phase” smashes into the first wall in the form of “Will this madness never end?” phase in which it seems, no matter how long you mark, as if there’s always the same number of tests left to mark. “Will this madness never end?” smashes into the wall called “My God, my god, why has Thou forsaken me?” phase in which even one test causes physical pain to get through.

Eventually, I get through all the exams and pass them back to the students and all is well, at least until the end of summer and the cycle starts again.