Marking up a storm

It's senior exam time at my school, and this means piles of marking! On the plus side it also means the seniors are out for a week and a half, so I only have one regular class to teach. I have a bunch of exam cover and relief lessons (including being a PE teacher yesterday, which I found tedious and inconvenient as most other kinds of relief lesson at least afford a few minutes to do marking). Not having a junior form class is also awesome come exam time - for this first time I get to enjoy the benefits of not having to run form time in the morning, or be tied to a middle of the day watch-kids-eat-lunch appointment. Today that means that I will be able to go home for lunch at lunch time (around 12), rather than at school-lunch-time which is 12.35pm. Given how hungry I am that's a very good thing. I get to be a Maths teacher for an hour this afternoon, and again next week. I actually like being a guest Maths teacher sometimes. The kids don't always love the subject but if it's a junior class and the work is easy I enjoy the opportunity to explain something concrete for a change, and enjoy the light-bulb moment (when it happens) when a kids goes from not being able to simplify fractions to being able to do it. One seldom sees such a precise step in the learning process in English (though there are moments where a kid says something like "Aha! Owen is trying to show people exactly how bad war is so they won't keep saying it's glorious!" and it is, for them, a light bulb moment. Even though it was something I'd said ten minutes earlier. And they'd read in the textbook. And we'd been discussing as a class for 10 minutes.). English tends to be about increasingly sophisticated understanding of and ability to express ideas about texts, and that's simply not as binary as can/cannot add.