Bone tiredness precluded any intellectual activity after I returned from Barcelona having completed my “lesson” with my “pupil” in an outside café with a couple of glasses of red wine.
There is something draining about being with class after class of chatty Spanish and Catalan students who are “discussing” ways forward in their projects around computers that refuse to connect to the internet. It is almost easier to teach them rather than let them be!
Tomorrow is the day of their presentations when, surprise, surprise I will be sitting with classes supervising them as they wait to make their pitch for good marks – because without the carrot of a mark, nothing would get done. “Does it have a mark?” is the cry which greets any piece of work which is given to these students; without a “mark” any attempt to get students to take something seriously is doomed to failure.
Anyway, refreshed after something like ten hours sleep I can face the future with something almost approaching placidity. After a number of exciting periods babysitting I have the enticing prospect of hard, intellectually demanding work: counting dictionaries in the various rooms in the school. Given the tedium of my other “work” during the past few days, I can sincerely say that I am looking forward to wandering around with a little list and counting any volumes I find! Sad isn’t it – but the end of term (and more importantly the earlier date which signals the departure of the students) is within sight!
I can now (almost) find my way to the café which is the site for my “lesson” without the aid of a GPS. Almost!
Yesterday’s journey was enlivened by my attempting to kill a policeman.
The first part of my descent to Barcelona from our eerie-like school, perched precariously on one of the steep (yet affluent) sides of a Barcelona hill, takes me past a Monastery with an “open season” roundabout where it is every one for himself and even when you are around it you have to negotiate a transition from one road to another by crossing solid white lines and cutting into traffic.
Imagine my horror when, added to this transport nightmare, I saw that the whole of the traffic light system had failed and, to make the terror yet more terrific, policemen were directing the hapless motorists!
One policeman (barely more than a child) held up an imperious hand to stop me and then with an airily dismissive wave seemed to direct me down another road. I might add that this child was actually standing in the middle of the route on which I would normally have continued my journey, so I held my hand up palm forward to indicate that I expected to travel over him! Meanwhile one of his colleagues had encouraged a stream of traffic to make its way down the road that I thought he was indicating me to use!
The situation was exacerbated by his moving towards my car and looking furiously through the windscreen; indicating that I lower my driver’s side window; listening in disbelief to my stuttering Spanish (you try translating, “I thought that you were indicating an alternative route and I misunderstood your clearly contradictory casual gestures,” while looking at an perversely bearded, irritated, uniformed child) and finally by his uttering some sort of veiled threat.
I eventually escaped by all his other colleagues working together to create a space for me to slip into a stream of traffic making its escape from the scene of confusion and distress.
Thank god the rest of the traffic light system was in good working order and I simply had to cope with rush hour Barcelona!
Today was Toni’s nephew’s second birthday. He has a four year old brother. Most people who have had or are in the process of bringing up children will be able to fill in all the details that I might mention about the unwrapping of presents and the searing envy, jealousy and tantrums that ensued.
As the seven hundred and fiftieth present is unwrapped and discarded one cannot, OK “I” cannot help but think back to my own birthdays and the decorous present unwrapping that I engaged in punctuated with many expressions of gratitude. And perhaps I should stop at this point before I become maudlin and resentful. I wonder what I had for my second birthday. But such musings are not productive in 2010 with kids born in a TV dominated and materialist society. Ah me!
I have been reading “A Separate Peace” by John Knowles. This is the best known book of a writer of whom, before today I had never heard. The only reason I read it was because it has been suggested for the sixth form as a relatively simple reader.
I must admit that I was vastly unimpressed. Originally the novel was published in 1959 (“Catcher in the Rye” published 1951) and it is set largely in 1942-1943. It is a bildungsroman or "coming of age" novel which is largely set in an exclusive American prep school and concerns itself with the friendship between two unequal young men whose friendship and animosity proves both productive and fatally destructive and yet allows the main character to realize some sort of human potential within himself. Possibly.
There is some fine lyric writing and it is a fairly compelling portrait of torture that self knowledge can demand, but it is not an easy read and the action is limited - though some fairly dramatic events take place.
Overall this is a duty read rather than a pleasure and I can see this being a particularly hard slog getting the subtleties through to the cynical members of an English as a second language sixth form!
I shall raid the reading cupboard before the end of term and arm myself with school books to while away the long months of freedom!
It does count as work you know!
There is something draining about being with class after class of chatty Spanish and Catalan students who are “discussing” ways forward in their projects around computers that refuse to connect to the internet. It is almost easier to teach them rather than let them be!
Tomorrow is the day of their presentations when, surprise, surprise I will be sitting with classes supervising them as they wait to make their pitch for good marks – because without the carrot of a mark, nothing would get done. “Does it have a mark?” is the cry which greets any piece of work which is given to these students; without a “mark” any attempt to get students to take something seriously is doomed to failure.
Anyway, refreshed after something like ten hours sleep I can face the future with something almost approaching placidity. After a number of exciting periods babysitting I have the enticing prospect of hard, intellectually demanding work: counting dictionaries in the various rooms in the school. Given the tedium of my other “work” during the past few days, I can sincerely say that I am looking forward to wandering around with a little list and counting any volumes I find! Sad isn’t it – but the end of term (and more importantly the earlier date which signals the departure of the students) is within sight!
I can now (almost) find my way to the café which is the site for my “lesson” without the aid of a GPS. Almost!
Yesterday’s journey was enlivened by my attempting to kill a policeman.
The first part of my descent to Barcelona from our eerie-like school, perched precariously on one of the steep (yet affluent) sides of a Barcelona hill, takes me past a Monastery with an “open season” roundabout where it is every one for himself and even when you are around it you have to negotiate a transition from one road to another by crossing solid white lines and cutting into traffic.
Imagine my horror when, added to this transport nightmare, I saw that the whole of the traffic light system had failed and, to make the terror yet more terrific, policemen were directing the hapless motorists!
One policeman (barely more than a child) held up an imperious hand to stop me and then with an airily dismissive wave seemed to direct me down another road. I might add that this child was actually standing in the middle of the route on which I would normally have continued my journey, so I held my hand up palm forward to indicate that I expected to travel over him! Meanwhile one of his colleagues had encouraged a stream of traffic to make its way down the road that I thought he was indicating me to use!
The situation was exacerbated by his moving towards my car and looking furiously through the windscreen; indicating that I lower my driver’s side window; listening in disbelief to my stuttering Spanish (you try translating, “I thought that you were indicating an alternative route and I misunderstood your clearly contradictory casual gestures,” while looking at an perversely bearded, irritated, uniformed child) and finally by his uttering some sort of veiled threat.
I eventually escaped by all his other colleagues working together to create a space for me to slip into a stream of traffic making its escape from the scene of confusion and distress.
Thank god the rest of the traffic light system was in good working order and I simply had to cope with rush hour Barcelona!
Today was Toni’s nephew’s second birthday. He has a four year old brother. Most people who have had or are in the process of bringing up children will be able to fill in all the details that I might mention about the unwrapping of presents and the searing envy, jealousy and tantrums that ensued.
As the seven hundred and fiftieth present is unwrapped and discarded one cannot, OK “I” cannot help but think back to my own birthdays and the decorous present unwrapping that I engaged in punctuated with many expressions of gratitude. And perhaps I should stop at this point before I become maudlin and resentful. I wonder what I had for my second birthday. But such musings are not productive in 2010 with kids born in a TV dominated and materialist society. Ah me!
I have been reading “A Separate Peace” by John Knowles. This is the best known book of a writer of whom, before today I had never heard. The only reason I read it was because it has been suggested for the sixth form as a relatively simple reader.
I must admit that I was vastly unimpressed. Originally the novel was published in 1959 (“Catcher in the Rye” published 1951) and it is set largely in 1942-1943. It is a bildungsroman or "coming of age" novel which is largely set in an exclusive American prep school and concerns itself with the friendship between two unequal young men whose friendship and animosity proves both productive and fatally destructive and yet allows the main character to realize some sort of human potential within himself. Possibly.
There is some fine lyric writing and it is a fairly compelling portrait of torture that self knowledge can demand, but it is not an easy read and the action is limited - though some fairly dramatic events take place.
Overall this is a duty read rather than a pleasure and I can see this being a particularly hard slog getting the subtleties through to the cynical members of an English as a second language sixth form!
I shall raid the reading cupboard before the end of term and arm myself with school books to while away the long months of freedom!
It does count as work you know!
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