A Bit Of An Anti-Climax

I meant to post this blog last night but inadvertently deleted it by accident. Nothing worse, eh?

Yesterday 3rd June was Intermediate and Higher Psychology Exam day. I presented two sections at each level. In FE there is always the worry that folk don’t turn up for their exams. Mainly because they take cold feet. As usual some didn’t appear, while others did whom you thought had chucked the course! The latter usually fail before they put pen to paper, for fairly obvious reasons.

My Higher class are all school students. Their age is a big disadvantage in Higher psychology in that the bulk of the candidature are a lot older. Night-time college students, adult returnees in FE etc. This creates false expectations of 17 year olds by our examiners. As a result I will be delighted if I get a 75% pass rate. And I think this
just might happen as they did their level best in all the circumstances. Some walked out early as happens, but the rest remained until the bitter end writing like fury. Superb effort all round.

As to my Intermediates, who are full time adult returnees, they were absolute stars. One failed to read the instructions on the paper properly and may have bombed, but the rest should do very well indeed. Of these two deserve special mention.

Norrie Doran for showing great courage, guts and determination. And Polly Barnes who didn’t make the exam, but was as much this group’s teacher as I was. You are both an inspiration.

Exam day is murder for me. I was in, in the morning cajoling, reminding, joking, teasing and teaching right up until they went into the exam at 1.00 p.m. I paced around fretting like an expectant father until the end as I waited to see how all had done. And then, bang! It’s over. They drift off, and many you never see again. I got depressed at this as I always do. You think, ‘Could I have done anything more to make that exam more passable?’ Post exam anxiety disorder! The symptoms being a colossal feeling of anti-climax from the teachers point of view.

What made my mood state even worse was being given my timetable for next session, 20 minutes after I put this years mob into the exam hall! My boss wasn’t to know, but I thought ‘Christ, can you not leave this until later. I have just put the chalk down for THIS year! Gie’s a break’ as we say in Glasgow.

If the powers that be had their way I would be teaching 24/7 all the year round. The policy twonks and politicians think the job is easy. I’ll swap them any day, to help dispel this myth.

By today I had bounced back if not quite to a state of euphoria. I had a rare old natter at lunchtime with Mick Roebuck our Principal, Peter Kerr, Charlie Coyle who are fellow social scientists, and Gianna Devin my Head of Faculty. Mick told us a very funny story about a chemistry teacher of his acquaintance, now retired, who used to teach his class using a ventriloquists dummy perched on his knee. Big Coyle immediately pointed at me and said, ‘I can use you next year as mine to help me teach sociology!’

Excellent stuff if only because a few days earlier, another colleague Joe Lappin who was having coffee with us said, ‘I’ll better away and push back the frontiers of knowledge.’ To which I replied, ‘You’ll be resigning then Joe?!’