We don't start until the 14th as well. Think it is only the IGCSEs that have started already.
Art is causing more stress here. The Art exam and materials related to it were done a month ago, but the Art teacher has been reviewing their coursework (ie 60%) and apparently they can still annotate it up until the 20th of May, and she has suggested he needs more annotations and a bit of touching up here and there to his folders. He needed this like a hole in the head. Admittedly the annotations were a bit thin, and there were a lot of spelling mistakes and gramatical mistakes in them (they were done in a tearing hurry in Dec/Jan, and not looked over properly, there are clearly words missing in sentences). So he spent a whole lot of bank holiday Monday amending and adding new ones (luckily he had done them all on the computer, so he can cut out and stick over the new ones, and muggans here did some proof reading (as did Google spell check and grammar check), and then I did the guillotining to cut them all out (I figured a bit of mechanical help cutting out with a guillotine wasn't breaching any rules about his own work. And then he took them into school with folder 1, and discussed with his teacher and stuck them all in. So folder 1 is now at school and completely finished. But he has to do the same exercise in folder 2 (which contains 3/4 of the pages of folder 1, and more artist analyses, which need correcting. She has now been through them, and made comments, but I noticed that she didn't even pick up some of his spelling mistakes - he uses "affective" all over the place where he means "effective"). So last night I was guillotining the first part of the new annotations in folder 2 (also because he was finishing off the art work in folder 2 in December/Jan, the annotations got really skimpy by then), and pointed out that this one - he had described the artist without a capital letter to his name, and that one he had said "on the right" but the only place it could go mean that it was "on the left". And of course he completely fell apart, because he still had "biology and french and geography and an English essay" to do last night, and he couldn't deal with more Art. As he is not at school, and hasn't been for weeks, all of this is self generated (he took in a stack of essays to school yesterday for the teachers to mark). And one just wants to say - forget the Art, but the teacher seems to be suggesting that if he can get these annotations, the coursework might go up at least a grade. She is very hopeful he is in line for a good grade in the exam portion (40%) and she is a pretty experienced teacher, so if she is saying this is what he needs to get the coursework up, I can understand that he should do it. Folder 1 (after having read all the annotations) is holding together so much better than it did before, I can really see the point, but it is adding yet more stress.