Before you read the post, watch this: https://vimeo.com/46652994
A wise woman once said that there are five stages in the response of
human beings to death:
1.
Denial
2.
Anger
3.
Fear
4.
Bargaining
5.
Acceptance
Many thanks to Homer for the comic illustration.
Now, IF I was prone to melodrama (Hildrew, Fry, Newton, stop smirking!) I would argue that, as Head
of Faculty, receiving a set of bad exam results is a kind of death.
The finality of the letter on the results page marks, for most students,
a blunt end to the processes of learning, revision and examination that have been
their life for at least two years. As in death, all GCSE students will face the day
of judgement that is results day.
When that letter isn’t the one that was hoped for, as Head of Faculty, you
also suffer a little death (and not the sexy French kind). For that black
letter is the crushing end product of the hopes and aspirations you’ve
fostered for your students, whether in your own class or those of others. In
some way, a tiny light you’ve been holding on to, flickering beneath your weather-worn
exterior, that perhaps, some way, they *might* just ‘pull it out of the bag’, when it really counts, is extinguished.
Of course, I’m not melodramatic. Not one jot. But, Kubler-Ross’ five
stages of grief do perfectly fit the emotional state I’ve found myself in since the end
of August.
Firstly, denial. The first alarm bells were sounded by a text message: ‘It’s
not good news.’ My super ego immediately kicked in: ‘Now let’s just think about
this. They could’ve made a mistake with their calculations. The double entries
between iGCSE and GCSE have just thrown them off! Silly boys.’ I’m a stubborn
old mule, and not until I’d created my own spreadsheet from my own
downloads of student results from e-AQA and manually crunched the numbers would
I finally accept what I’d heard hours earlier – and easily could have read from
SISRA Analytics or the spreadsheet our efficient AHT had already emailed round –
our results were bad. Students had, rather spectacularly, underperformed in the
exam, putting our Faculty and school, yet again, in a euphemistic ‘challenging
position’.
So, what did I do? I got mad. “We worked so hard! They must not have
revised!” I furiously typed to my DHoF. “Some students didn’t answer all the
questions!” I screamed at my slightly bewildered husband. “Bloody AQA’s
unreliable marking strikes again!” I tweeted to other HoFs. I even wrote a
fairly hysterical blog post that will never see the light of day in which I
sought to blame, well, pretty much anyone but myself. And it made me feel
better for a time (particularly when accompanied by a large glass of wine and
the company of sympathetic friends).
But anger, although cathartic, paralyses you. It leaves you charging round
like the proverbial bull in a china shop, damaging professional relationships
and yourself if you let it, making it just as unhelpful as the next stage to
visit me: fear.
I’m not going to drone on about just how SAD I felt when ‘fear’ hit. Read the latest Guardian ‘Secret
Teacher’ column if you want a sense of that. I will say that an internal voice
started piping up that maybe my school and Faculty would be better off without
me and will also confess that I did more than a little research into moving to Japan…
But, after five years as HoF I’m lucky enough to have strong support networks
to rely on when the ‘black dog’ hits (you know who you are).
I’m not one for swallowing my feelings and, as in the latest Pixar
offering ‘Inside Out’, I’ll happily champion a good sob and a wallow when it’s
needed, but at some point you’ve got to reapply your mascara and move on. (OK, the fear of not being good enough is
still there. However I’m pretty sure that’s true of most people and I don’t
think that, when it’s under control, it is a bad thing. It’s that feeling that
constantly makes me want to learn more, do better, and has driven me to finish
my NPQSL and sign up to present at TLT15.)
So, now far more calm and
collected, it became time to take that cold, icy stare at those little black letters
and start to work out how to navigate the way ahead. I guess applying for
re-marks could be seen by some as ‘bargaining’, but for me, a tweet I received
from a student sums them up best: “I don’t mind if my mark goes up or down.
It was just unexpected. At least then I’ll know the mark I got is right.”
I’m pleased to say that at some
point this week I reached the final stage: acceptance. Going into school to get
stuck into the mundane task of clearing our horribly messy stock cupboard
definitely helped. Not only is sweeping up what, inexplicably, appeared to be
dog hair from under our display boards a fantastic leveller, but it’s the best
possible reminder that LIFE GOES ON. SCHOOL GOES ON.
I’m ready to meet with the
governors, the Head, my team. I’m ready to talk about our results and what we’re
going to do to make sure it never happens again. And I’m ready to explain to
them that in fact, exam results – good or bad – are no death at all. No. They’re
the start of the next thoroughly exciting stage of our wonderful students’
lives and, just as before, we will go on supporting them to the absolute best
of our ability to achieve what we know they’re capable of, even if (especially
if?) they don’t know it themselves.
