I’m An A-Level Teacher Forced To Grade My Pupils. I’m Dreading Results Day
Schools thrive on routine: from bells or klaxons every hour, to weekly timetables and the annual plays, prize-givings and sporting events.
But since March, when schools across the country locked-down to a skeleton service, we have lost so many of our punchlines, seasonal celebrations and rites of passage. In my school, there was no shirt-signing last day of term for our pupils. There was no dressing-up for the prom, and no days of silent corridors near the exam hall. This has been incredibly hard on my students, but as a teacher, I too mourn these losses – though they pale in comparison with the loss of life we have experienced in this global pandemic.
Yet it is with much trepidation that we face the final benchmark this week: A-Level results day. With no exams sat due to the pandemic, it’s classroom teachers like myself who have been put into the unenviable position of grading our own students – not for a weekly essay, but for life.
How will our students react on the day they open their results, and how can we console them when teachers have been professor, judge and executioner?
When schools closed with 48 hours notice, our entire job also changed. You will have known about the worksheets, the Zoom calls and the ‘virtual learning hubs’. But at a deeper level teachers have morphed from years of being both strict and also encouraging, from instilling a positive ‘can-do’ approach in our students and telling them that anything really is possible, into a summer term of judging their every move and determining grades which they will have to put on their CVs for the rest of their life.
The burden of judgement weighs heavy on our shoulders. In May, we worried: did we submit high enough teacher-assessed grades? Have we been fair to all students, across all backgrounds, and not just the articulate and well-organised ones? How will our students react on the day they open their results, and how can we console them when teachers have been professor, judge and...
