Some things are meant to be

Last week, I had the indescribable pleasure of invigilating not one but two exams during the week of the bac blanc, (mock exams) at my lycée. However, for you my beloved readers, I shall endeavour to overcome the ineffability of this, the most thrilling of endeavours, and put down in the written word an account of my experiences.

In my discoveries of the variety of the English language, I learnt that ‘to invigilate’ is not a verb commonly used in American English, much to the confusion of my friends from across the pond when I tried to explain what I was gearing up for in the next week of teaching. Somewhat appropriately though, the word that they use instead for supervising candidates during an exam is the verb ‘to proctor’. Clearly fate had a hand in this somewhere…

Having previously been told that I wouldn’t have classes during the week of the mock exams, I’d somewhat foolishly assumed that I was going to have a week off teaching at the lycée. After some initial confusion and mixed signals whilst talking to the Spanish assistant at my school, I later received a text from the head of English, telling me that I would actually need to sign up for invigilating during the week in question to make up for the hours I wasn’t teaching. So much for a 3-hour working week.

After standing in front of the noticeboard for about 15 minutes, I finally managed to figure out the exams and times I’d been allocated, and thankfully they weren’t too bad. I’d managed to get afternoon exams, thereby avoiding the French 8am school starts, and I’d also avoided the pinnacle of the French secondary education system, the 4 hour philosophy exam, always the first exam of the French baccalauréat.

However, I had been allocated two science exams, SVT (Sciences de la Vie et de la Terre, or Life and Earth Sciences (think Biology and Geology)), and Physics & Chemistry, both of which lasted 3 hours and 30 minutes, so longer than any exam I’ve had to sit before.

Given that my school doesn’t have a large hall of any kind for communal gatherings or exams, the mock exams were taking place in normal classrooms, with the class of around 30 students split between two adjacent rooms so that the desks could be sufficiently spaced out. The result of this for the invigilating meant that there was a teacher assigned to each room, and then a member of staff allocated to both rooms. I asked the head of English what this would entail, to which the response was along the lines of “err, I’m not sure. Ask the deputy head.”

As it turns out, the Deputy Head’s vision with this was that the third member of staff would be there to be on hand if one of the other two teachers needed assistance or to leave the room for any period of time. Or, as the Deputy Head more bluntly put it, I was to be on toilet duty for a total of 7 hours. I get all the best jobs.

While I can’t say that my role was actually anything much beyond that, except from standing at the front of the room whilst the main teacher went to go and grab something she’d left in the staffroom, the experience wasn’t at least as bad as it might have been. Given that we only had around 16 students in each room and that it was a mock exam rather than the real thing, procedure became a little lax as a result. In both of the exams I was in, the exam seemed to have hardly begun before the teacher pulled out a newspaper or a stack of marking to do. One even took the time to update her Facebook profile and cover photos during that time, as I later found out when I got home. Taking this as my cue to get on with something else and only keep half an eye on the students sitting and working in front of me, I managed to get some lesson planning done (alas, such is my life), as well as some reading. However, I wasn’t best pleased when I had to stop reading and move to the front to keep a closer eye on proceedings when one girl decided she needed to go to the toilet when I was right in the middle of the murder scene in Thérèse Raquin. (On that note, reading about murder and adultery whilst sitting in a room full of 17 and 18 year olds doing an exam is an unusual experience, especially when you pause to look up.)

Whilst I did refrain from playing any of the usual invigilator games (stand next to the pupil most likely to: fall asleep, fail, have made poor fashion choices, etc.), I did enjoy whispering to the other teacher in one of the exams about who was going to be the next to leave. The rule was that the pupils were allowed to leave at any point during the final hour of the exam, but I don’t think we were quite expecting the exodus that took place within the first few minutes of the final hour being announced. No sooner had the nearing end of the exam been announced, then two students leapt up from their seats and almost ran to give their papers in and to be free of their confinement. After that we had a steady stream of people, until we’d gone from 16 to 7 students within the space of about 20 minutes, whereas in the room next door they were all in for the long haul. The final student left about 15 minutes before the official end of the exam, and with no one left in the room and the probability of someone needing to leave to go to the toilet rapidly approaching the realms of the impossible, we just decided to go.

Of course, as with all of my experiences in these schools, there are tales to be told of the students’ antics. We had the typical last minute students, with the record being the last student walking in at 13:59 for a 14:00 exam start. (He was still taking off his coat when we started.) We had someone who decided a brief two minute nap towards the end of the exam was the order of the day, and the best tactic to adopt before proof-reading his exam paper. We even had one candidate, who clearly felt constrained by the examination setting, and so decided to liberate himself a little by taking off his shoes and sitting cross-legged at his desk to sit his exam.