In keeping with one of my mottos, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” I did not look at the timetable for the remaining days of term. Which was just as well, as having read it would have ruined my mini-holiday over the extended weekend: two meetings top to tail during the day!
Having settled down into a mood of terminal grumpiness, imagine my ecstatic delight on finding out that my sullen presence was not required in the first (and shorter) of the meetings.
With an elation that is not a common adjunct to the task I then set myself, I started clearing out my staff room cupboard.
Half an hour later and a whole sack-full of paper placed in the bin - nothing had changed, there was still no space for anything.
I think that I will have to use my other cupboard in the other staffroom to store some of the literature that I have adapted for school use. When I say “adapted” I actually mean eviscerated. No matter how great the writer; no matter how delicious the style – I can make the storyline almost understandable to learners of English. Luckily students of literature are unlikely to read my blasphemous efforts so my reputation is secure.
I am now in a meeting which is discussing the fates of pupils in the lower school. I wonder what my colleagues think I am doing typing away here. Everyone is talking at the same time about kids who are not worth the effort. Some of reasoning being employed by colleague would have done credit to some of the less scrupulous members of the Society of Jesus!
Perhaps it is tempting fate, but we are making good speed through what can be a meeting of coruscating boredom.
We have now reached a pupil with few redeeming graces; she is lazy; sulky; disruptive and a thorough waste of space. Horrifically it is being suggested that she be kept down a year thereby destroying the normal working of yet another class. God help!
The meeting went on and on and I ran away for the last quarter, giving my proxy vote to a colleague with whom I team-teach.
Lunch, an ordinary menu del dia made up for the misery of the morning: a tapa of delicious tortilla with pepper; a starter of puff pasty filled with sea food; a main course of chicken with a creamy mushroom sauce and a sweet of copa de crema which you have to eat to understand. All washed down with a respectable red wine unrespectably diluted with gaseosa and a café con hielo - €13 the lot! And we ate outside under flawless blue skies and school had finished at 2.00 pm. Life is sometimes good!
The pool is now becoming a very important part of normal everyday life with the water retaining the heat of the day to maintain a very pleasant temperature. Unfortunately the equitable conditions encourage people other than myself to impertinently use the pool.
I resort to my usual tactics and swim in purposeful straight lines, using crawl my nails glint in the sunshine ready to slice anyone who gets in my way, switching to breast stroke my frog like kick maintains a cordon sanitaire around my surging form.
Tomorrow we have a computer course. My memory from last year was of a similarly innocuously entitled course which lasted for four straight hours. No break. No respite. No pity. And in bloody Spanish!
The one tomorrow at least has one break and I intend to take supplies and an electronic book to keep my equilibrium in place. I have also bought an iPod Nano (7th generation): one of those impossibly small tactile squares which can store music, podcasts, photos, films and other things which are clearly against the law of god.
It seems to have been designed specifically to assist in the maintenance of sanity of hard pressed English teachers surrounded by machinations of those not of his nationality!
Still, and I am counting, there are only three days to go!
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