There comes a time in every teacher’s life when you have to think of entirely and absolutely of yourself. Bugger professional responsibility and dedication to education. Yourself.
All this week I have not been well and although I rallied after Monday (which was just as well as I couldn’t have continued) I have not been entirely well for any one of the days. The evenings are the worst as the usual teacher approach of holding off incapacity for home time comes into play and you can be miserable in your own time rather than that of your employer!
The evening cough has been sometimes spectacular and entirely debilitating, but never severe enough to allow me to decide that going to school was out of the question.
But: there is teaching and teaching. “Bend it like Beckham” has been a positive godsend and I have been able to sink, metaphorically, into the darkness and indulge in perfectly harmless self-pity while the kids have been absorbed in the filmic action. One lesson down. This lesson is for the other part of the class that has been shown “Bend it like Beckham” already but as is always the case in this school there are examinations looming and out of the magnanimity of debilitated exhaustion I have graciously granted them time to study.
In our school this means time to memorize. All knowledge is discrete and committed to memory. It is duly disgorged during the examination and thus is it disposed of. Our kids make numerous sheets of information of various sizes ranging from the large pages which are for clutching in the playground so that it looks as though you are studying to those miniscule sheets of tiny print words, phrases and fact that I will charitably assume are meant to be carried inconspicuously and easily placed in a pocket. To aid learning of course, having nothing to do with giving yourself the unfair advantage of being able to refresh your memory by judicious use of sidelong glances.
Our kids are masters of memorizing and would (if they could act) be at home in provincial rep. with three different plays in performance every week; rehearsing one new one and learning another. They have been doing the equivalent of this throughout their school careers. And bear in mind that in this school their careers start at the age of three.
One of my colleagues, in a totally positive gesture that is repeated by each at some point during the year, has deposited a box of chocolate biscuits on the table in the staff room to commemorate the fact that it is her birthday. To celebrate her anniversary I pointedly did not kiss her like all the rest of my colleagues so that I could keep the germs with which I am crawling unselfishly to myself!
The pathetic weather which has characterized much of this week, and especially the last couple of days has given way to glorious sunshine. Listening to the Today programme on Radio 4 just before I set off for work that usually gives me the temperature in Cardiff constantly encourages me. Usually this is one of the highest temperatures in the country and it was again today with a high (high!) of 9°! Jaded and exhausted at the end of a long day (but not as long as it should be as this is my early departure!) it is a delight to look at the car temperature gauge and realize immediately part of the reason why I am here!
In the self-delusional way that teachers have, we are adept at finding positive elements in the mundane to keep us sane. Wednesday, for example has been renamed “The Tipping Day” when the balance of the week has been done and we are on the homeward path to the weekend. In a similar way I am willing myself to notice the slight difference in the early morning darkness which would indicate that the days are (as I know that they are) lengthening and that I will soon be going to work in daylight! Such things are important and keep one on the path of sanity.
We are building up to Carnival: a day of dressing up and desultory jollifications. We in the English Department add to the general mirth of the school by devising various word games to delight the youth, as they break free of their classes and parade around the school.
No sooner is Carnival over than Fiasco Week will be upon us. This was the week invented on the spur of the moment by a lunatic minister of education who decreed that all schools should have a week when the pupils could go skiing. As this was not given more than a gnat’s whisker of consideration before it was announced the practical problems of its implementation were ignored.
Not by the schools which had to make the week work.
Our school decided not to take the holiday and to work through so that the school year would still end at the end of the month of June, giving two clear months of holiday in the summer.
What was exactly was going to happen during this week was not made immediately clear and there have been various plans put forward; the most disturbing one suggesting that I would find myself helping in the foetal section of the school! I didn’t even lose my temper, as I knew that the plans would inevitably change – which they have. More than once.
In Britain it is half term week and you only have to work in the educational system of a country where they do not have half terms to see how essential they are for the well being of staff and pupils alike! The Fiasco Week is still a couple of weeks away and the two long weekends that we gain are like a Nirvana of hope in the far distance.
Before we get to these havens we have not only an obsessive/ compulsive examination week but also marking and our interminable staff meetings to get through. The staff meetings will be a treat to greet us on our return to what passes for normality.
These ridiculous meetings are going to be held on Friday evenings! This may seem like an absurdity until you realize that they were originally scheduled for Saturday mornings! No comment of mine can possibly do justice to the sheer pointlessness and emptiness of these experiences.
I have, I am ashamed to admit, been to a Saturday morning meeting. I spent the whole time stony faced and in a mood of barely supressed fury and looked with disgust at those colleagues who made light hearted comments or even produced fawning smiles from time to time.
The second the meeting was declared closed I hared to my car, jumped in, slammed the door and drove home in thin lipped horror at what I had done.
It was not the combination of school and a Saturday, you understand. I have been to other events on the weekend connected with school – but a bloody meeting! The perverse managerial thinking behind that leaves me (almost) speechless!
Still, the weekend is at last here and, after a little nap I feel ready to face the world.
Please let the sun shine tomorrow!
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