Her tears smudged her writing which eventually petered out in her agony.One cannot fail to be moved by such personal tragedy or by the arguments of one student who wrote a 20-sided account of why, given the imminence of Armageddon, this particular A-level was just a waste of time.Finally, we come to our last packet of scripts and, our task now done, we vow never to mark again. By the end of the day we should, in theory, have achieved some kind of uniformity.What is always taken for granted is that we actually know something about what we are marking This is a dangerous assumption. Many admit in private they simply haven't a clue about some of the areas of the syllabus. But then, for pounds 500, you can't expect everything.We return home to set about our task. Over the next few weeks we send regular samples of our marking to the team leaders to ensure that we are keeping to the agreed standard. Some boards even re-mark a cross-section of scripts at the end of the marking period to further guarantee consistency.Even so, things can go wrong.
Erratic or incompetent marking is not always detected and, even when it is, it is sometimes too late to do much about it. They should take risks, show a bit of daring: children will accept anything of quality."British Federation of Young Choirs: 01509 211664.. The exam season may be nearly over for the examinees but it is only just beginning for those whose job it is to mark this mountain of paper - the examiners. Who are we? Well, by and large, we are teachers and lecturers trying to earn a few extra pounds to pay for a summer holiday Not that you get much of a vacation for pounds 500. That's about what most of us earn, after stoppages, for three weeks of hard slog. Our masochistic purdah begins immediately after the standardisation meeting which is usually held in a hotel or conference centre. For many of us, it is the one chance we get of seeing how sales reps live every day of the week.
Boeuf bourguignon or cochon de lait certainly make a change from school dinners.It is at the standardisation meeting that we really familiarise ourselves with the marking scheme and get practice working through sample scripts. Teachers often underestimate what the pupils are capable of, but they shouldn't just stick to popular music. Richard Frostick, music inspector for Islington, runs a Saturday music centre for 400 local children from six to 17, and says he spends a good deal of time arranging music to suit changing voices - anything from 14th century rounds and canons, to "Let It Be" and drinking songs from La Traviata."Young people love to do unusual repertoire. "That gets them interested: I find boys are quite curious about their new voices - and we are usually singing in two parts by the end of an hour."Finding suitable repertoire for teenagers is not easy - and music publishers would do well to address this, says Janice Chapman. "When you sing, you give away what you really are, your inner essence - it's like being asked to take your clothes off," says Tom Scratchley, a BFYC choral teacher in Kent, who helps schools to develop choral work.Rather than asking gawky, reluctant teenage boys to sing straight out, Mr Scratchley finds a better approach is to get them talking about how they have changed physically - how much they have grown, what has happened to their speaking voices, to their Adam's apple. "Then they find their voice starting to change physically - and they become even more disenfranchised."With the onset of adolescence, singing becomes, particularly for boys, a source of embarrassment. By the age of seven, up to a third of children are singing "out of tune", and two or three times as many of these are boys as girls.
"By the time they reach 11, there is a hard core of boys - 6 to 10 per cent - who are not singing in tune," says Professor Welch. What would help, Professor Welch argues, is to learn the tune and words separately before putting them together.Boys fare worse than girls, the research shows. According to research by Professor Welch and others, all young children are capable of improving their ability to sing in tune, if they are given simple vocal pitch tasks. What tends to happen, however, is that confronted with complete songs some of them get worse, because they concentrate on the words rather than on matching pitch. But Professor Graham Welch, Dean of the Faculty of Education at Roehampton Institute, in London, complains that because of the increasing amounts of time trainee teachers spend in the classroom, there is no time to prepare them properly.
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