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Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Reality?

It had to happen sooner or later!

Tomorrow I become a biology teacher for two days.

My qualifications for this post are based on a single year’s study; much drawing of single celled creatures and a drawing of a bird’s wing which actually got a “Very good!” comment from the teacher. As I remember it at the end of the year we had to make the sort of ‘art’ or ‘biology’ sort of choice. And I chose art so that was the end of my descriptive scientific education. I prefer not to talk about my career in ‘O’ level Chemistry.

To be fair this is golden opportunity to find out how the British School in Barcelona (Castelldefels actually) operates. It gives me an opportunity to meet the staff and pupils and, more importantly for them to meet me. Teaching (well, supply teaching) again!

Pause for thought and red pens!

Of course the real irony is that Toni has time off. He had to take his ‘holiday’ days this month and decided to take a few days into the weekend to give himself a five day holiday. Yesterday we thought about taking a flight to Malaga or Rome or Lisbon – but it was all too expensive. You have to bear in mind that we set ourselves an upper limit of fifty pounds for the return flights to wherever we were going and, on that basis, all the flights that we looked at for our impromptu holiday were outside our limits. But for our parsimony we would have been in the vicinity of the Vatican today and not able for me to take up the challenge of entering the portals of an education establishment for gain! This is a good thing isn’t it?

Toni asked if I felt nervous about going into a new school, with new people, in a different country and ‘teaching’ a subject which is not my own. Up to that point my mood had been more amusedly anticipatory than anything else. Toni’s comments though, convinced me to become much more concerned and tentative. It is one thing going to a new school confident in your ability in your chosen subject, it is quite another to be placed in a new situation and totally deskilled by being out of your professional educational context.

I can’t wait to experience it all: it’s almost like being transported back to your first job!

Apart from ‘The Call’ to duty the day has been uneventful though I was able to continue to scandalize polite society in Castelldefels by continuing to wear summer clothing, looking somewhat conspicuous amid the muffled and shrouded pedestrians protected against a cold that wasn’t there.

But enough of this, tomorrow, is very much another day.

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