As an ex-engineer turned adult education lecturer, I got into the exam marking business after running evening classes on my hobby interest of GCSE psychology. The move to marking several hundred exam papers came quite naturally after marking coursework for my students.
I spotted a job recruitment poster by one of the main UK examboards pinned to the tutor noticeboard and this intrigued me enough to apply for my first examiner post. Thirteen years on I now write exam questions and mark them too – and I've returned to my roots writing engineering questions and also use my self-employment knowledge to write and mark entrepreneurship qualifications.
I'm also rather interested in wine – so much so that the tutoring of evening classes included Wine Appreciation. This later branched out into courses on whisky tasting, and tea and coffee appreciation.
These interests, combined with a love of words, led me to approach magazines, and then later websites, with news stories and features on wine and also examining - since 2008 I've been writing a weekly wine review column for Mature Times and contributing articles to both the national press and assessment industry websites that help explain what examining is all about.
I'm a Fellow of The Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors – where I initiated and ran their latest campaign The Future for the Examiner looking at improving examiner recruitment and retention - and a member of the e-Assessment Association.
If you want to read more of my words then have a look at my website paulagoddard.com (wine-related) or read, and hopefully respond, to my tweets on Twitter @huxelrebe (it's the name of a grape which can be allowably used in English wine) or if you want to interact on examining-related issues then you'll find me on Twitter, again, as @exam_writer.
This article first appeared within the newsletter of AlphaPlus Consultancy
I've always wanted my own tea plant. Being a complete teaophile I've tinkered with teabags and then discovered the delights of loose leaf tea, but this has never completely satisfied my urge to make my own cup of tea from scratch.
Wine, dark chocolate and tea improve thinking and memory skills in men and women aged over 70. A study conducted by researchers from the universities of Oxford and Oslo found that a combination of wine, dark chocolate, and tea, consumed in moderate amounts, enhanced cognitive performance in the elderly. All three food stuffs contain relatively high levels of flavonoids.
Growing a grapevine on the allotment or in a conservatory is not that unusual. I even know of a fully functioning coffee tree growing inside a house (each year the kitchen-bound tree produces about half a pound of coffee beans), but I know of no-one else with tea bushes growing in pots on their bathroom windowsill. They're still rather small but when they're fully grown (reaching about three feet high in larger pots) the Camellia sinensis plants should provide me with enough tea leaves to make about 250 cups of tea.
