At this time of the year in most Hong Kong secondary schools, it's particularly difficult to move about in English language staff rooms.
It's hard enough at the best of times, when one has to weave and wiggle past towering bookshelves precariously perched on quite small desks, but the annual English exercise-book inspection brings a new challenge.
At this time of year, it's well nigh impossible to even venture within earshot of the desk of the English panel chairperson in a Hong Kong secondary school. They are totally boxed-in by light blue or dull brown skyscrapers of student exercise books.
When one considers that every Hong Kong student of English will maintain a minimum of six exercise books and two publishers' workbooks, that there are seven-year levels of instruction and that every teacher in the department would teach at least 150 students, that's an awful lot of books.
And if one considers that all the students in any one form all complete the same sets of exercises from the same textbooks in the exact same order - one wonders what on earth can be accomplished by the gathering of all these small books in the already tight confines of the English office.
To even ask such a question, however, comes very close to educational blasphemy in Hong Kong, because this is one of the most hallowed rituals of English language teaching here. The English panel chairperson's unenviable duty is to comb these mountainous piles for concrete evidence of their colleagues' professional competence.