3rd: Anyone for tea and biscuits?

I know that in ‘the States’, they say that thing about Southern hospitality, and I’m sure it really just depends on who you’re with. I remember being in Tennessee and found everyone particularly rude – couldn’t get a decent cup of tea anywhere. And when I tried to get a biscuit, well, quite the different thing over there. Anyway, there is one thing you can be sure about in Southern Italy, and that’s that they realise that a happy examiner is going to be a good examiner. Now, I’m not saying that I can be bought off with cakes and tea and substantial lunches of the kind that mean I don’t need any dinner, but it is nice to be attempted to be bribed with hospitality every now and then. I suppose the cynics would call it a bribe, but I’ll call it good protocol. After all, we all know where we’d be without appropriate protocol. Answers on a postcard not required, this time.

Was examining at a school in Aversa (just north of Naples) yesterday and it was the first time they’d done the exams – a mother and daughter team with a pioneer spirit, going against the wishes of the rank and file teachers who were concerned about getting their teaching externally moderated. They needn’t have worried, all went well. But the anticipation of the results was quite something. I don’t think I’ve been ‘whooped’ before when leaving the centre, and I think it’s also the first time there’s been a photo with the group. The fact that everyone passed really had nothing to do with the fact that I was taken to lunch at a posh pizza restaurant (it seems hard to imagine pizza gets posher than ‘Pizza Express’). Of the few notable points from the day was the comment that, “it’s difficult to eat lunch when you only have one hour...” You can only pray that this blissful state of belief holds out against private sector pressures for as long as possible. It was the same the day before when, after over an hour of banqueting, I had to request to get back to the centre as we were already late for the afternoon session with candidates waiting. I left the majority of the teachers there waiting for the fourth course. Perhaps a little tighter team-keeping wouldn’t go a-miss, though.

Today, however, they got it just right. After four hour’s examining I wasn’t driven to a restaurant ten miles from the centre because that’s where somebody knows someone and they personally recommended the spaghetti vongole there, lunch was ordered in. A small three courser arrived in tin foil trays for me to eat in the privacy of the exam room without having to make polite and slightly stilted conversation. Ever the one for conversation gambits, it can wear a touch thin every now and then. So today started with a lasagne first course, followed by pork cutlet in a cheese and mushroom sauce, with a little chocolate biscuity thing for dessert. It was quite delicious and made me wonder if the candidates who’d been examined first thing had been primed before entering the exam. They should ask questions as part of the test, and sometimes, I found that they were asking questions off topic about my favourite food, or certainly food that I liked. And lo! What should happen if some of the things I mentioned only turned up for lunch. Gold star for the teacher who prepped those kids.

As well as a continuous supply of tea, biscuits and savouries, something which helps the day go by is the odd examining gem. Non-examiner readers, apologies as these gems are of the slightest possible nature. Today there was a large kid who could barely fit into the chair – I was almost worried he’d spy my pastries and gobble them down with a frog-like tongue, swatting them and curling them back into his mouth within the blink of an eye (thankfully a carefully e-positioned satchel prevented any possibility of this from happening). So this fellow, who’s not doing terribly well but would scrape a pass, tells me he’s got a cat. My first thought is, ‘I’m surprised he hasn’t eaten the cat’ (you get the idea about this guy). I ask the cat’s name, only to be told in flawless, perfectly intoned English that it’s, “I haven’t got a train ticket”. I check, but yes, that’s the cat’s name. All language around the name is broken and badly inflected, but the name itself, a piece of perfectly chunked English. Language pedagogists, take note, please.

The other thing that works well when dealing with examiners is a) reducing their workload, and b) addressing them correctly. As you can see from the fax I received yesterday, the centre has pretty much got it right, allowing me the day off on Friday and getting far nearer my correct title than any other centre has yet. It's even enough to make you forgive the odd missed comma...