"I can cope with disappointment: it's the hope I find unbearable."

Placement tests today. Twenty three students, and we split them into three groups. My group complained straightaway, with some justification, about the quality of the sound recording on the listening test. We’ll have to put that right.

We’d arrived early – and couldn’t get into the temporary-temporary teaching block. Standing in the sunshine (the climate’s really lovely at this time of year), LM mentioned something he’d picked up from the DoS’s pep talk yesterday, which I’d missed: it’s envisaged that there’ll be 600 students in due course – but that only one in ten of applicants will meet the English language criteria. So that means, six thousand people doing “my” placement test.

So it’s in the light of this that T2 went from seeming a bit eccentric to acting downright weird later this morning. After the first testing session, (the listening, then grammar, reading and writing), we were in the temporary-temporary staff room and she said that she thought the first writing question – which simply requires the students to copy out some text in their own handwriting – was “patronising”. LM said that he had thought it was too simplistic until I’d explained it to him, and I was genuinely curious as to why she thought it was patronising, and was starting to say I was looking forward to discussing the test when she just walked out of the room.

LM looked at me in perplexity and said, “This is becoming a problem.” Indeed, she’s done this several times: for example, we’re having an on-the-hoof discussion about the best kind of folders to provide the students with, when she just walks away whilst LM is in mid-sentence.

Anyway, I didn’t respond to LM’s observation. It’s a management thing. Time will tell. Maybe she’s just ignorant, being from Manchester.

Back at the ranch, and two identically dressed skinny blokes get us connected to the Wi-Fi router, and thence to the Internet. Hooray! Except that the connexion’s so slow as to be next to useless. Bah! We’re promised that we’ve got 256mb, but that’s temporary, it’ll go up to a gig tomorrow. As someone once said (I wish I could remember who), I can cope with disappointment: it’s the hope I find unbearable.