Scottish Qualifications Authority invigilators, currently treading the boards of exam halls across the country, are an eagle-eyed lot when it comes to looking for banned mobile phones. They’re becoming as adept at detecting the potential cheating devices as the kids are at concealing them.
But one chief invigilator was just a little concerned to discover that a member of her staff was becoming over-eager in searching out the objects of candidate desire.
“It wasn’t that I minded the vigilance,” she said. “It was just that an invigilator putting too much ocular attention on teenage pelvic regions, while looking for bulging objects, might be misconstrued.”
Health education in harmony
Christopher Bell, conductor of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra Junior Chorus, told his audience at Glasgow City Halls last Saturday that he was glad health education was obviously effective in the schools his young singers are drawn from.
“I was explaining what the words of ‘What Will We Do With the Drunken Sailor?’ meant to our training choir,” he said.
“I asked what the word ‘sober’ meant, as in the song. A hand went up and a boy told me: ‘It’s when you wake up the next morning after drinking and can’t remember the night before.”
Saddle sore
Inspectors and pupils struck up a good rapport when HMIE came to Glasgow’s St Andrew’s Secondary a couple of years ago, as headteacher Bruce Malone recalled at a leadership event recently.
One pupil, asked to sum up how things had gone, asserted that they’d got on “like a horse on fire”.
Entertainment at its most precious
Zaf Hussain had a rapt, if somewhat bemused, audience when he bounded on stage at the NASUWT annual conference during a debate on chartered teachers.
“My preciousssss!” hissed the North Lanarkshire physics teacher with a menacing scowl, as he proceeded to run through a bewilderingly rapid adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, interspersed with constant references to chartered teachers.
As well as Middle Earth villains Gollum and Sauron, Mr Hussein’s unique performance made reference to the snaggle-toothed Ferengi from Star Trek and hallucinogenic vintage kids’ cartoon Crystal Tipps and Alistair.
Bizarrely entertaining as this was, The TESS could not work out the analogy and caught up with Mr Hussain to seek an explanation. “Oh, there’s no analogy,” he conceded. “I just thought it would make it more entertaining.”
