Red and Blue (but mostly red)

There were a lot of things going on last week, especially towards its latter half, as the exam papers of all my classes were ongoing, which also meant that my foot-high pile of marking also came in by last Friday. Meanwhile, the UK general election was going on, and especially with so many late results coming in, on Friday morning i was alternating between invigilating, checking on how my students were doing with their/my paper, and dashing back into the staff room whenever i could to catch the live streaming of the Beeb's election coverage.

While i'm less familiar with UK politics than i am with the situation in the States (and as such am still getting accustomed to the Tories' colour being blue and Labour's red, when their ideological counterparts across the pond adopt the exact opposite colors), it still was very interesting to see how things developed, especially with a credible third party also among the fray. That's even if thanks to excessive media hype, it seemed to culminate in a spectacular anti-climax when they actually experienced a net loss of seats. (It was extraordinary though, to see how all the news networks were harping on the disappointment for the Lib Dems after all the spotlight on Nick Clegg. Did they fail to see the irony of the fact that it was them who fed this angle incessantly in the first place?)

One thing that i was, and to a lesser extent, still am confused about, is the degree of importance they accord to exit polls and projections of winners. Of course that's partly because over here there are no exit polls (or for that matter, any means of political opinion polling in the first place), and practically everyone can project who the overall winner will be even before the election is called.

Conveniently enough, however, through marking my students' papers i did at least get some semblance of how this can work. Since i generally started marking from the easiest section onwards, by the time i reached the final section, and looking at the recorded marks from the previous sections, i could more or less project who would pass (my expectations are low), based on mental calculations on how many more marks they would require, weighed against the so-called swing from their previous test marks that would be needed. Somewhat confusing stuff, but it makes more sense when you actually are doing the marking.

But for the moment, at least, both (the elections and the exams, at least for me) are over, and the break (or whatever i'm able to take from it) is coming up. Not a moment too soon.