#exam-timing

#exam-timing

I am at the end of my tether with my three children. They are eight, 11 and 13 and every morning it is a giant battle to get them up out of bed and ready for school. I have tried everything - I have their clothes laid out, their breakfast on the table, their bags packed and their lunches made.

Ministers have asked the exams watchdog, Ofqual, to extend current arrangements, providing GCSE maths, physics, and combined science students with formula sheets. Ofqual is consulting on extending this until current GCSEs are reformed following a curriculum review. The government will then consider if memorisation is required for new qualifications.

Valentine's Day is out there with fire, arguing about who forgot what, and pretending not to look at who clicked on your Instagram story. Every year, in a big way, the day reminds us that we are all still very committed to love, maybe even irrationally so.

Or the one who grabs coffee nearby because they arrived at the restaurant fifteen minutes before your lunch date? I used to think they were just anxious or had terrible time management skills that made them overcompensate. But after interviewing over 200 people for various articles, I've noticed something fascinating: the consistently early arrivals tend to be the same people who seem to have their lives remarkably together.

This is a striking decision at a moment when public confidence in higher education is eroding. It is also puzzling because rigorous research and evaluation have demonstrated, over and over, the value of the work of centers for teaching and learning, including positive impacts on student learning outcomes, institutional effectiveness and faculty development.

They may be spending a lot of combined time at the office and commuting, or just putting in a lot of hours both at work and at home. Fixing that problem can't be done abstractly, though. If you're going to address the balance of work and life activities, you have to start getting specific about where your time is going and where you really want it to go.

The passion for teaching is a powerful force, but it's being tested like never before. Across the globe, educators are facing a crisis of burnout, and a significant, often overlooked, factor is the ever-increasing burden of administrative tasks. This isn't just about paperwork; it's a systemic issue that's driving talented tutors and teachers away from the profession, with profound consequences for the future of learning.

"It's just like a neverending game of musical chairs," Jensen says. Just when a teacher thinks they've perfected their seating chart, two neighboring students will have a fight, others won't stop talking or parents will email with their own seating preferences. "There's just so many things that you don't know on the surface that come to light really quickly once you put a kid next to another one," she says.

The most exciting moments for a teacher come when students stumble onto something unexpected-when they run to my office to tell me about a new twist in their thinking about birds in Sula or the discovery of yet another biblical reflection in Housekeeping. Those revelations come only when they survey the text as it is, not as they assume it to be.