Chocolate Week got off to a good start with people resenting the fact that they were not given a piece of one of my delicious Brownies as a right because they were not members of the English department.
Not only that but the person who was in the English department and was next in line to produce some chocolate confection for Day Two was properly apprehensive about producing something to match the glory that was my effort in the culinary field on Day One.
I must admit that my overwhelming feeling was one of relief that people found them edible. I must also admit that I was struck with the full force of a natural teacher trait: one-upmanship.
It is never enough for a teacher (publically) to do what is required; there always has to be something beyond the ordinary – to have that little bit more.
So, you could say that the additions of the elegant chocolate square on which was placed a chocolate sweet and the whole construction sprinkled with the essential dust of icing sugar was merely my giving in to the natural inclination of a teacher to show off to save putative face.
Teachers are so chronically insecure (why else would they become teachers?) that the “extra bit” becomes obligatory. Left to their own devices teachers can whip up enough fear from a simple situation to shatter the strongest constitution.
Meanwhile there is something else going on which is taking over the thoughts and minds of the workers in this tired institution.
Examinations!
The lifeblood of our body politic!
Children wandering around with sheaves of papers and parroting learned facts. In Spain the “First Aid in English” approach is extended to all subjects: if it can’t be learned in a list then it isn’t education!
There is something almost touching in hearing pupils prepare for their geography examination by reciting capital cities of the world! Including Wales!
I am sitting with about a third of a class who have turned up to use their first early lesson as an opportunity to revise. Their examinations start about an hour later than the official start of their timetable today and they remind me of myself at their age when I remember learning a list of ten reasons why Britain lost the American colonies. Which I duly reproduced in a history examination and was as duly told off as “history is a literary subject” and I should have written in fluent, presumably Churchillian, prose.
Which brings me to Bloody Mary. I have, during my academic career, written exactly the same essay in Form 3; Form 4; Form 5; Form 6; 1st Year University: “Why was Mary Tudor unpopular?” They didn’t even change the wording! The essay on the loss of the American colonies I wrote only three times. What a lack of imagination – but how lucky for we plodding learners who like lists for examinations!
Today I should hear if my investment in La Caixa has been accepted. This was a debenture issue with a reasonable rate of interest on the money and 50% of it being transferred into shares. The exact details escape me, but it does look like a reasonable approach to keeping the money away from my scrabbling fingers!
This investment has prompted me to ask my bank in Britain what rate of interest they are paying on my so-called “Savings” account. 0.25% is the astonishingly small amount they are prepared to pay. This compares with their rate of interest on the money they lend in no way, shape or form. I will have to Do Something about it. Not that the amount of money there is vast, but it does exist and I fail to see why I should provide the banks with capital when they are not even keeping pace with inflation in my account! But there again, what account does!
I think that I will have to add sorting the financial arrangements to the growing list of Things To Do on my summer schedule. I think I probably have more chance of getting things done because Britain does not shut down so entirely as it does in this country during the months of July of August! And, as an added bonus, we finish school at the end of June so there is the whole of July which is a possible month for action!
As usual the spectre of organizing the books in the library is beginning to haunt me but as the library (as a room) itself has been made a little tidier there is more imaginative space for me to begin the monumental task of arranging the books into some semblance of order. I look forward to what I might find, as logic (rather than convenience) begins to dictate the placing of the books!
I am almost convinced to regard the summer holidays as a time when I can also Sort Out those piles of things that I have carefully carried with me from Wales to Catalonia and have not used once since I got here. Space is at a premium and perhaps I need to be more selective about what I keep.
As a solicitor might say, “I hear what you say.”
Reality? Aye, there’s the rub!
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