Concordia

Concordia Winter 2023

38

wanted my contract renewed and knew it was one of the few things I did that the boss would actually see, I decided to brave the wrath of the Common Room diehards and stick my head above the parapet with “computerized reports”. It was, in all truth, a gruelling schedule. Grades at the Half and subject reports at the end of the autumn term, subject reports for the Fifths and Upper Sixth after the “Trials” in January followed by grades at half term and tutor reports for the other year groups, with grades for everyone except the exam classes at Whit and subject reports at the end of term (but no grades for the exam classes in case we unwittingly gave hostages to

excellent, 4 for a boot up the backside) was sufficiently new still to elicit howls of anguish: how on earth could one measure effort? Little did we know that within five months Bill Gates would unleash Windows 95 and change the world of assessment forever. We wrote a lot of reports in those days. “With some 18,000 reports being written each year”, Notes for New Teachers solemnly informed the unwary, “it is a massive operation.” Partly because I’d already begun word processing reports when I taught in Brazil (and quickly realised that with a nip here and a tuck there you could recycle a decent set of them ad infinitum ) and partly because I