Supervising mocks and my experience on the preparation of in-house exams

Niall Phelan
G00396329
Weekly Reflection
05/02/2023
This week was my first week experiencing in house pre leaving and junior cert examinations.
For the last week the students have been undertaking the mocks exams, the leaving certs
starting on Monday and the junior certs starting their exams on Tuesday. As I am team
teaching the 6th year DCG class I have been supervising the exams for the class time that I
would normally have the 6th years. I have found this to be a very educational experience and
more difficult than I thought it would have been when I was completing my exams. As a
student your focus is completely on your exams, and it is a teacher’s job to be their
supervising while also being invisible and completing jobs of their own.
When I was in school, I found the click of high heels and dress shoes in an echoey sports hall
to distract my focus from my own exam and it can be irritating as a student to have a
constant noise reminding you of a teacher’s presence. It’s as if an army sergeant was
walking around, watching you trying to complete the hardest tasks and exams you’ve
completed to this date.” Becoming the age of attention deficits, however, relies on the
construction of an imagined surplus of attention elsewhere” Phillips, 2016. The attention
that students pay elsewhere in an exam hall can take from their quality of work. Learning
from this traumatizing experience I have tried to be invisible while supervising the students.
The routine of the role of the teachers supervising get exams is clearly defined. One teacher
is over the toilet breaks, two students one male and one female allowed at a time to go but
they must be signed out by one designated teacher. All of the teachers must be on the same
wavelength as it is difficult to know who has gone to the bathroom and to know if they are
back. The other teacher must be watching the students as they work. At the end of the
exam each teacher has a certain subject or teachers test to collect. This is all very well
organised and leads to a smoothly run operation. All the exams must be brought to the
staffroom at the end for the teachers to collect.
From my observations I find that the students need all the help they can get and if that
means less distractions to a generation to have trouble focusing can be extremely helpful
even if they do not notice it.

Phillips, N. M. (2016). Distraction: Problems of attention in eighteenth-century literature.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.