Donald Hiscock | Articles | The Guardian
Every exam season brings fresh concerns. This summer, for instance, has apparently seen a zooming rise in the number of teenagers popping anti-depressants and other pills to see them through. What of their teachers, though?
Nobody gives much thought to their June ordeals. But in colleges the increased crabbiness, shortening tempers and loosening grips on reality are far from student monopolies.
Lecturers are just as prone to the effects of battle fatigue as their charges. Relying on coffee to keep going, as many no doubt do, is hardly the solution. In the war against weariness the ultimate weapon is sleep, but that can be hard to come by.
The sight of tired and listless personnel is all too evident in colleges, where the stress of performing - or getting others to perform - in exams reaches a peak at this time of year.
"We've done a lot of extra teaching recently by offering extra support workshops after college and in lunchtimes," says Julia Brown, an English lecturer at High Pavement Sixth Form College, Nottingham.
Brown and her colleagues have even put in time during holidays, and leave their office door open for students to drop in at any time of the day. "You need to be careful how much time staff are putting in," she says. "It all ends up meaning that people have a lot less time to themselves to unwind."
Work weariness is hardly confined to education. Awake, a "fatigue management consultancy" linked to the Loughborough University Sleep Research Centre, recently published a survey which revealed that almost 40% of Britons feel sleepy at work. More than half admit to making mistakes when tired and 62% claim tiredness affects their social lives.
The survey reveals men and women have different experiences of workplace tiredness. While 64% of women say tiredness makes them irritable, men are more likely to say they make mistakes when tired. "I do tend to forget things from past lessons," says Lawrence Perry, a lecturer at a Hampshire college. "But I haven't got to the stage of some of my colleagues, who have admitted delivering the same lesson twice. The strange thing is that the students didn't raise any objections."
So are students even more tired and forgetful than their lecturers? Anila Khanna, a student at High Pavement College, is not sure. "A lot of the lecturers are stressed at the moment and look tired," she says. "They look as if they could do with a break."
Anila is aware that, although she packs in as much sleep as possible before exams, she still wakes up tired. "I'm losing sleep because I'm nervous about the exams. I wake up in the morning and I still feel tired."
According to Josh Lewis, who attends a Southampton college, students have been known to nod off in class at other times of the year. But when teachers succumb to pre-exam grouchiness, the chance of taking a power nap in the classroom is remote. "The staff are really as tense and nervous as us," he says. "They are only snapping at us because there's pressure on them for us to succeed."
Julia Brown says: "I have noticed an increased level of irritability in students. They get very anxious about their performance in revision tests, even disputing maybe half a mark."
But Brown has noticed other reasons for the increased sleepiness in class: "Some students keep their part-time jobs going right through the exam period. They find it a very hard balancing act to work and study."
Perry is also aware that lecturers are juggling with the work-life balance, and that when tired staff meet tired students, tensions can increase. "This is my third year of teaching and I'm getting more headaches," he says. "During the day I get by on adrenalin and caffeine-fuelled soft drinks. When I get home I'm ready for a nap."
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