The Scintillating Life of an Exam Invigilator

If you have never had the pleasure of experiencing what it is like to supervise candidates during an exam, then this one’s for you.

You see, to the untrained eye, it may appear as though it’s a nice and peaceful three-hour session in which one (invigilator) continuously sips on fresh cups of hot tea or coffee while browsing the contents of a classroom’s décor, and passing the time contemplating life’s unanswered questions in complete and utter silence.

Except that nothing could be further from the truth.

Three hours is, a, long, time. Seriously. It, is, long.

And it’s not all that quiet either; perhaps in terms of the spoken word, yes, however, there will never be actual silence. This is because there in every session, there is always at least one learner who is a continuous ‘cougher-er’; one who is a consistent ‘sneezer-er’; one who is an intermittent ‘dropper-er of stationery’; at least seven of whom will put their hands up and say ‘I need more paper’; also, there’ll no doubt be an obnoxiously loud ‘sigher-er’ (or two); and then…and then there’s possibly the most infuriating no-spoken-word-noise-maker-in-exam-invigilation-history…the dreaded ‘pen-tapper-er’. Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

Not annoying at all right?  

And we’re only half-an-hour in…

Also, there are the voices. You know, the voices – the ones that occur in our heads that cause us to ponder upon the unlimited number of ponders that one individual human mind can ponder on at any given time.

Aliens. Do they exist? Or are they a mere figment of Hollywood’s imagination?

And the human body. How does it work? I mean how does it really work? How is it that I can think about thinking? Am I even human? What if this is all just a simulation and I am merely a character in a video game called ‘Life’?

Did I leave the stove on?

There are also only so many cups of tea or coffee that can go in before needing to come out. One cup - you’re mostly good. Two cups - um, you may be pushing the boundaries a little bit here. Three cups - amateur, you won’t even make it to the half-way mark. Four cups - no way! I don’t believe it. Impossible. Five cups - what are you some kind of liquid-gulping machine? Where did you even get all that coffee from? Nowhere?

Exactly! At best you’ll have to nurse the one you walked in with for the next 180 minutes.

So then…how do we keep ourselves occupied?

Laps. We do laps around the classroom in a start/finish type fashion all the while watching the clock and ensuring that each trip around the imagined track is faster than the previous one until our current lap-record cannot physically be beaten because, of course, all of this has to happen within reason; it’s not like after 5 minutes of lapping that we have a bunch of teachers who have now broken out into a slight jog around the classroom subsequently working up a sweat like they’re training for the Comrades marathon in the heat of summer, all so that they might shave off a minuscule amount of time from their previous-best effort around the circuit. No, not like that. Not like that at all.

Nope, we generally only run if someone is chasing us. And even then, the risk involved in moving faster than walking-pace versus dying an untimely death would be quickly and expertly calculated as to whether it would, indeed, really be worth the effort of making a jog-for-it or not. Probably not…

Fun fact: Do you know that the collective noun for a group of teachers is a faculty? Neither did we!

How long has it been now?

Footwear. Something that we can focus our attention on for a while. (You know, to soften the voices). 

The voices are everywhere.

Out of the sixteen matric learners who wrote their Mathematics prelim recently; did you know that six learners wore Nikes, five donned Vans, three rocked Adidas, one dressed in a crisp white pair of Converse, and the teacher who supervised them couldn’t count?

The voices are everywhere.

Calculators. Did you know that scientific calculators are available in an array of colours these days? You want pink? Done. Bright Blue? Yep. Black with orange flair? Uh-huh. Orange with black flair? Of course. Light blue? Too easy. White? Yes sir. Red? Nope. Red means danger. And if you’re using a scientific calculator, you’re most likely in danger. It’s most likely Science.

And who in their right mind would couple danger with danger? Not us.

Matric jacket nicknames. ‘Okay, this will pass some time.’ Because The voices are everywhere. One learner wears the tag ‘Princess’ (fair enough) because her boyfriend wears, ‘Prince’ (awwwwww, cute man!); one has ‘The Chief’ written on the back (um, chief of?); other monikers included the likes of ‘Prof.Pabloza’ (whatever that means), ‘Yogi Bear’ (okay, but why?),‘Prometheus’ (the god of fire?), and ‘Neuropsych’ (huh?).

We don’t understand it either…

Then there are those learners who kept their jacket labels safer than Porsche’s design team has kept their blueprints over the past 50 years; by using subtle variations (except in this instance it’s of their names and/or surnames) such as ‘Foxy’ (Foxcroft), ‘Dr Dré’ (Dreyden), ‘Dan Dan’ (Daniella), ‘Lakes’ (Laken), and our personal favourite, ‘Joshua’ (Joshua).

“But there’s no variation on that last one we hear you say.” Just like Porsche kids. Just like Porsche.

Two hours in. Keep going you’re almost there…

At this stage of the game, you’re really just watching your life pass by minute-by-minute. You start looking at the clock carefully calculating exactly how much time you have left (to the second) because, let’s be honest, one extra unnecessary tick of the clock could mean the difference between one retaining one’s sanity and the voices finally taking over for good. Because they’re everywhere…

‘What is love? Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more’. See? There go the voices again, threatening to lock us into ‘listening’ to a song for all of eternity that we literally have no idea what any of the other words are.

What is love? Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more’. 

What is love? Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more’. 

What are the other words?!

You’ve got that song stuck in your head now right? Well, apparently just chorus. Thanks, Haddaway. We’d prefer to hideaway.

That was an English joke (by the way).

Fun Fact: An earworm, sometimes known as a brain-worm, sticky music, stuck song syndrome, or Involuntary Musical Imagery, is a catchy piece of music that continually repeats through a person’s mind after it is no longer playing.

This is how we learn!

Okay, 15 minutes to go. We can do this…

Examination crunch-time. Those learners who are yet to finish have suddenly realised that time is now, more than ever, of the essence; and that successfully navigating the next quarter-of-an-hour will be crucial and could be the difference between achieving the dreaded 79th percentile, or cracking a hard-earned distinction.

Or perhaps this time will be imperative in avoiding the even-more-dreaded 39th percentile versus that shiny ‘pass’ benchmark set at forty. It could be touch-and-go for some…

Invigilator crunch-time. This is the ‘my-feet-are-throbbing-from-all-the-standing-around-and-need-to-urgently-be-unburdened-from-having-to-carry-around-the-sheer-weight-of-my-lifelong-emotional-baggage-and-the-Krispy-Kreme-doughnut-I-had-for-breakfast’ time. Especially in those heels.

Wait. Did somebody wear heels to invigilate a three-hour exam-paper? Actually, we aren’t even mad, that’s amazing…

The time is up! At last…

It is at this point that we now realise that, during this time, had we been watching the movie Titanic, (which is three-and-a-half-hours long), we would most likely be at the part when Jack is struggling to keep Rose company from his partially-submerged position in the water of the sub-zero Atlantic Ocean (-2.2 °C); and it’s here that we cannot help but think to ourselves, ‘surely there was enough space for both of them on that door?’

The voices are everywhere.

Now go get a fresh cup of coffee. You’ve earned it.