As a young, female American, teaching English at Winchester College has proved a very educational experience.
Early in my career, for instance, one of my students kindly informed me that his house was, in fact, older than my country. I was also most surprised to learn, via the grapevine, that I had been a cheerleader in high school. Perhaps more significantly, I was taught to forsake the SAT and take up the English Language IGCSE.
But, unlike accepting my country's youth and my new past as a bringer of cheer, dealing with the IGCSE has got harder rather than easier - not because of the test itself but because of the constant criticism this exam system seems to be eliciting from the public.
Worries that tests are being "dumbed down" became so prevalent earlier this school year that an "independent watchdog", breaking from the qualifications and curriculum authority, was specifically commissioned to battle rumours of inadequacy and any truth behind them.
Headed by the education secretary, Ed Balls, the body was meant to ensure that exam standards were "robust" and that Great Britain did not fall behind "international competitors" in the business of producing bright young minds.
Winchester's English Department attempted internally to address this problem years ago, by adopting the IGCSE instead of the national GCSE. Whereas the latter had allowed rather nebulous qualities, such as "empathy", to be rewarded, the former required a disciplined understanding of old-school grammar and style. But even this shift has not made students impervious to the hype that anything with "GCSE" in the title is too impracticable. Hence, some of the boys I teach have taken up cry that the exam is not worth their time.
The particular spin I get from the Winchester College sceptic, who brands himself as an intellectual from an early age, is that he could be doing things truly to broaden his mind instead of regurgitating exam technique. And though I might once have agreed with him, in theory, my response now falls along schoolmarm lines: "There will be plenty of time for this mind-broadening business," I say, "once you've mastered the ways of the comma and understood the connotations of using more than one exclamation point at the end of a sentence."
The main objection the dubious students have adopted is that the skills used in the exam are non-transferable; and I agree that these boys are unlikely to ever have a damsel rush up to them in a moment of urgency and ask them to examine the use of metaphor in Passage A.
But believing that the exam tests only the ability to answer questions in a certain format is inaccurate. The test effectively uses a format to see whether you can write sensibly, to see whether you understand what you're reading, to see whether you can tell why people choose the phrases they do, and what powerful change can be made to a description with the altering of a single word.
A slightly more thoughtful argument about the exam's purpose has also been appropriated by some of my pupils: why should they learn GCSE-style grammatical rules that are likely to change within their lifetime?
Call me old fashioned, but I like a man who breaks the rules to have a solid understanding of the rules in the first place. Jackson Pollock's most famous works look as if they were made after he ate a box of crayons and threw them up through a straw. However, he did produce "classically" sound and impressive paintings before he got abstract, and seeing these made me much more sympathetic to appreciating what he did to spite the norm.
The main problem is this: though there is some validity to the general resentment of exams - they do force students into specific paths very early on, they do cause huge amounts of stress, and they don't gauge enthusiasm or even certain kinds of intelligence - most of my students who think they can gain no useful skills from the English Language IGCSE have yet truly to understand where a full stop goes.
And now, in an age where few jobs are issued without an email address, understanding the basics of written English is arguably the most important ability a boy can have.
This is not to imply that I think Wykehamists are in any way "basic" young men. I believe their reputation as capable and curious students is highly deserved, and I would love nothing more than for us to go running through the fields, analysing Milton in the sunshine. But tedious grammatical exercises must have their day first. The right skills are being tested, and students deserve to have faith in this exam despite its being dogged by bad press.
A boy in one of my classes recently used the word "humour" as a verb in an assignment. Well, yes, I hear you say: "He humoured me; I humoured you" - that's perfectly reasonable. No, he used it as a synonym for the verb "to joke".
Since then, a conversation with the dissenters has been playing over and over in my head. "What's the point of doing the English Language IGCSE?" asks Simon.
"There is no point," I respond. Really?!?!?!?" he inquires with delight. "No, Simon. I'm just humouring."
