So You’ve Sent Your Students off for Study Leave – Now What?
Just because your pupils are off preparing for exams, it doesn’t mean you stop thinking about them, says Vanessa McCulloch – but do they know that?
And so it has come to pass: the last week of lessons with my Grade 12 English Language B class before they depart on study leave, sit a batch of intense exams, and then start their lives away from secondary school.
Naturally, as their teacher I want the best possible results for them. But there are other thoughts I have, reaching beyond final grades, which I expect are experienced in the minds of many educators at this time. I do wonder what my students would think of these…
For at the same time as aspiring on their behalf to academic achievement, I also hope that there is someone in their lives who might sneak up, interrupt their revision, and whisper in their ears that there is more to life than this, and that their love is unconnected to success or failure in school tests.
Might they be surprised to learn that my opinion of them as human beings will be completely unaltered by the results of the exams that I have been training them for over the past two years?
Questions and concerns
Actually, mine being a small school, I have taught many of these young people for much longer than the duration of this particular course. Without wishing to get too maudlin, we have indeed done the ‘laughing and crying’ thing together.
We have argued and annoyed each other; we have learned about grammar and about listening respectfully, and we have watched a good few episodes of Would I Lie To You? on YouTube to mark the end of another term, or just because they looked too exhausted to do anything productive last thing on a Friday.
I will miss them. I will also wake up at 4am one morning soon and recall a tip, a link, a handout that I should have remembered to give them before they went off for the exam leave. Damn. Will it make a difference?
Then I will proceed to agonise about whether to email it to them. Would that be a good idea or will it simply add to revision stress? Would they read it anyway? I will wonder if any of them are awake and worrying too.
When both Paper 1 and Paper 2 are over and teachers are allowed a look, I will scour them to see if I think they represent a fair test, trying to evaluate the last two years of my teaching and how well I helped my students to prepare for those two blocks of 90 minutes; a total of three hours about which I can now do nothing.
I will be indignant on their behalf should I espy any questions I consider unreasonable, too difficult, or lacking in clarity.
I will start to guess which of them would have attempted which essay topics.
I will hope that one or two of them might swing by my classroom to smile and say that the paper was at least “not too bad”, “better than the mock” and they were “able to finish in time”.
Never forgotten
A couple of months after ‘pens down’ on the last exam, summer holidays are punctuated by the arrival of results, at which point, teachers become obliged to consider their students in ways which do not come naturally to them: assessing how they perform as a homogeneous mass.
And how their homogeneous student mass compares to other homogeneous student masses from other schools that they know nothing about. It’s a strange thing to have to do.
Ah, but after it is all over, the ex-students who come back for a visit – unexpectedly sticking their slightly changed faces around the classroom door to say, “Hi”, and tell me all about what they are doing with their lives – provide some of the nicest moments of the job.
Much of the time, on such occasions, I don’t remember what that young person ‘got’ for my subject. But I always remember them.
Vanessa McCulloch is Chair of the Language Acquisition Department, and a teacher of English Language B (IB) at Antwerp International School, Belgium. Download our AQA English Language Paper 1 ultimate revision booklet.
