Concordia

Concordia Winter 2023

The Art of Reporting

"My thoughts free-associating on a cocktail of exhaustion and caffeine, it occurred to me that I should try composing a report for each candidate in in the style of Wodehouse. Ideas came tumbling out so quickly I barely had time to dash to the front and jot them down..."

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battles as it was, so we cheerfully condemned yet another generation of young teachers to the gangplank: I’d wager they still double-check whenever they write “practice” that it shouldn’t be “practise”! My own sense was that if we had to write at length anyway, and the Head attached so much importance to it, we might as well do so with good grace. It was also unarguable that those of us who were English-wallahs had a particular responsibility to step up to the crease and do our bit to add a touch of colour to a set of reports. Having both the responsibility to role-model good writing and the blessing of seeing the boys four or five times a week, it obviously fell to us to offer something more: it went with the territory. I also felt that we owed it to the Head. It is perhaps hard now to realise just how inspirational Jon Gabitass was. He made the time to write marvellously detailed and discerning reports on every boy in the school. His knowledge of each pupil, and ability to frame that in a clear firm hand, was legendary. Given the sheer volume of issues that cross a Head’s desk every day, to do this without cutting corners and while continuing to be such a presence in the corridor and on the touch line, spoke volumes: his leadership and work ethic were exemplary. “Headmasters of

private schools”, wrote Wodehouse, “are divided into two classes: the workers and the runners-up-to London”: not only was Jon very much in the first class, but he was also slap– bang at the top of it, and I reckoned he deserved every ounce of support we could give him. One afternoon, towards the end of a tedious invigilation session in a drowsy, sun-soaked Examination Hall, I chanced upon a way that I could help. It was one of those three-hour papers with very few candidates, and I had exhausted the possibilities of the zoo game (which boy resembled a cassowary, which a warthog) pretty quickly. My thoughts free-associating should try composing a report for each candidate in in the style of Wodehouse. Ideas came tumbling out so quickly I barely had time to dash to the front and jot them down on the “rough paper” we always kept on the invigilators’ table. I had stumbled upon a formula: here was a way that English could contribute to a set of reports and rolemodel confident, lively, writing at the same time (“confidence” was the differentia specifica of top-grade GCSE writing back in the day). It would liven up a set of reports in the process. Of course, once I had gone down that road there was no turning back! on a cocktail of exhaustion and caffeine, it occurred to me that I

string theory; Heisenberg's uncertainty principle; quantum mechanics and the implications of probabilistic interpretations of quantum mechanics; the known hadrons and the six types of quark (together with their corresponding antiquarks) necessary to account for them”. A magisterial carriage-return prolonged the drama of the moment before Nigel unleashed his delicious, single-line, bare bodkin quietus: “His has been a quiet presence”. Microsoft contributed its own tuppence ha'pennyworth to the chaos. First, it developed (under the guidance of leading international linguists) an extremely sophisticated British English spellchecking tool, based – as it must be – on usage, rather than any abstract ‘correctness’, massively discombobulating those in Common Room who had come to maturity before 1995 who suddenly found themselves being stigmatized with a red squiggly line for using the (OED-preferred) -ize suffix, and being forced to embrace -ise, classed, as recently as 1989 as “illiterate” by none other than Inspector Morse (“It’s illiterate, Lewis, that’s what. The OED uses a z for words that end in –ize and so did Sir Julius!”). David Andrews argued the case for English as an international language with plural acceptable forms very forcefully, but it was a bridge too far for the traditionalists, who were losing enough