Common sense is the knack of seeing things as they are and doing things as they ought to be done (Josh Billings)

      Simpler times in 2011 - Ali bin Abi Taleb school -
       Abdulla, Salem, me, Abdelazim (HOD), Shaban

Some of my favourite memories of my time advising at Ali bin Abi Taleb school in Al Foah (Al Ain, UAE) are around moderation sessions with the teachers.

I wrote about them at the time in a couple of 2010/2011 posts - 'all things in moderation, including moderation'. and 'got my mojo workin'.

In that 2011 post I said: 

Nu Zild educators could learn heaps from the rigorous moderation procedures we use here BEFORE the teachers mark their tests. They then have a benchmark to mark against. It so much harder to moderate after the fact.

And less is more, as this extract indicates (and Mark Twain's quote summarises):

Moderation is considered a key part of a person's personal development in Taoist philosophy and religion. There is nothing that cannot be moderated including ones actions, ones desires and even thoughts. It is believed that by doing so one achieves a more natural state, faces less resistance in life and recognises one's limits. Taken to the extreme, moderation is complex and can be difficult to not only accept, but also understand and implement. It can also be recursive in that one should moderate how much they moderate (i.e. to not be too worried about moderating everything or not to try too hard in finding a middle ground).

I'm reminded of all this after following the 2025 moderation processes at my current school. Doing moderation cover pages (if I had a degree to navigate these docs I would still get lost every time), distributing papers around my equally busy colleagues to moderate, putting the results on Kamar, attaching moderation notes, writing assessment comments and so on. 

All. Mind. Numbing.

Beam me back to Ali bin Abi Taleb 2011! Pleeeeeease!