Rain and fish

It has now been raining for over twelve hours and, while it is not cold, it is wet and I am not happy.  Not happy also with the edition that I have been sent of Hard Times which is the wrong one.  On the other hand, with my instinctive mercantile approach to problems, I have decided to buy a luxury hardback Penguin edition of the novel to compensate for my disappointment – and I have ordered it with an express delivery charge as well.  Never let it be said that I was behindhand with my attempts to stimulate the economy by the injection of hard cash!

We in the staffroom are all of a mind that we should have stayed in bed this morning, and disturbingly, from the fact that only three of us are actually in at the moment, our other colleagues seem to have taken the advice!  Though I have to admit that I sincerely hope it not the case as this is one of my “short” days and I have no intention of staying beyond my appointed “time” - especially as there is a meeting this evening and, under no circumstances whatsoever am I going to be drawn into that!

To my absolute horror I have been roped into invigilating an examination at the end of my “short” day!  This means that my short-est day becomes merely a short-er day, which is not the same thing at all.  At all!  And this 'extra time' will produce even less time for me, because this will be the start of my marking.   
     Marking which has to be finished in double-quick time because there is a meeting (which unfortunately clashes with a tutorial for me, so you can tell which one is going to have preference) on Saturday (!) and all marks have to be in and noted in the various ways that the school deems appropriate.   
     Sigh!  And, indeed double sigh!

On the other hand I am almost at the stage when I can begin to count the days left.  Almost, but not quite.  I think I will wait until after the Easter holidays before I revert into man-in-cell-marking-the-days mode.  I feel that I should have “The Final Countdown” playing in the background!

My sixth form examination was something of a disaster with the kids whimpering with horror at the questions that they had to attempt.   
     I do have some sympathy as their examination is based on a previous study of a random photocopy with a series of unrelated words and phrases and a smattering of odd clause structures.  Just the sort of thing to keep them interested at the fag end of a long, long term.   
     And please to remember that we do not have a half term holiday as such.  Still, this is very much what Spanish kids are used to: vast piles of fact-heavy material which needs to be memorized and regurgitated at regular intervals.

I have completed my marking, ironically during the time when my colleagues were incarcerated in school experiencing another (!) two hours of lecturing about the new “platform” that has been installed on the school computer system to allow the easier (!) input of examination results.  I think that I may have used the time a little more usefully!

Tomorrow is a “long” day and I will be thoroughly grumpy by the end of it, but it will be a day nearer to the arrival of the “proper” version of my book (at great cost, but I don’t bloody care) and the weekend can be given over to writing the next draft of The Essay.

My notes have now reached a ridiculous level of complexity and I am no nearer getting a clear overview of what I hope to write.  I could follow the outline given to us, but I am still hoping to find my own way of 'seeing' to give some life to what could be a fairly arid exercise.  During the more deadly moments in exam supervision I even thought of a good opening for the essay, but I couldn’t write it down because that would have meant taking my eye off the kids and given their propensity to cheat that would have been disaster! 

This weekend really does have to be the time when I break the back of this assignment, because the marking will come thick and fast in the following week as each sullen examination room empties and the paper detritus is shoved towards the unwilling pen-wielding hands of we educational hacks!

Ever since the Great Winds and Lashing Rain of a few days ago which stripped the pines in this area of their surplus needles (which look like thin, joined chopsticks) one of them lodged under part of the windscreen wiper arm meaning that it smeared a path across the screen every time it rained.

 

The solution, you would have thought, was easy.  Take the needle away.  Yes.  But this is where the “Goldfish Effect” comes into play.  It is a well known, though alas specious fact, that goldfish have an attention span of five seconds (or 70% longer than the average school child) and therefore they forget with an ease unmatched except for members of the ruling class here in Spain who use their faulty memories to cover all their obvious misdemeanours in a way which would embarrass a forgetful carp.

For the last few days, as I get behind the wheel, I cannot fail to notice that the irritating fronds are still there.  Each time I drive I resolve to remove the offending vegetation just as soon as I get out of the car.  And the next time I drive, I note that it is still there.  This has gone on for so long that I have become more frenzied in my determination to remove it, and to remember to do it, that it has become more and more difficult.  And each time I get behind the wheel, there it is again!

It had become so ridiculous that I even began formulating philosophies and sociological explanations for my seeming inability.  But you will notice that I used the past tense in the last sentence and that is because today, at last, memory and action came together in a triumphant affirmation of human capability and I actually picked out the tree dirt and felt somehow refreshed and reformed!

Unfortunately it is only Tuesday and there is much of the week left.  Too much.  Still, one examination down and two more to go.  Not an unbearable burden.  At least not until the essay becomes a pressing necessity and trembling fingers will try and pick an electronic way through the verbiage of which I am capable to find a cogent expression of OU acceptable description to fulfil my academic obligation.

Or to put it another way, just get on with it and stop talking!

What is the answer!

The days starts, as it often does, with an extended moan about the educational system in which we find ourselves trapped – more particularly the examinations which we impose on our kids. 

We find it increasingly difficult to understand why we are forcing the kids to sit pointless exercises in short term memory gain when we are not teaching them the skills that make the individual facts that they are learning meaningful. 

This is the sort of grizzling that goes on and on and, as we lack the political clout to do anything about the system, there is no satisfactory end in sight – except of course for the exhaustion of red pen after red pen!

The weather is a little more sombre today after the unexpected gift of a sunny Sunday yesterday.  At our lofty elevation we are in the clouds and Barcelona is lost in the off-white blanket of pollution rolling down the mountains.

As the examination season has come to a climax there will be spasm after spasm of pen pushing during the day which will unsettle our teaching and turn us into disgruntled invigilators and make the day so much longer.  For me this is a “long” day anyway so I will be whimpering with frustration by the end of the day – and god help any of the selfish parents who have triple parked blocking my car today!

The one positive point is that Amazon should call today with yet more discs and, more importantly, my real version of Hard Times.  I have tried to use the electronic version and it simply does not work when you are using it for academic purposes and are trying to find the right section of the book.  In some way the electronic version is idea when you have half remembered a quotation you can type in the words and hey presto! there it is!  But for quoting when writing an essay on the computer it is a disaster – or perhaps I am merely saying that I am more comfortable with a book!

I have just gone up to the two sixth form classes that are about to have a Spanish exam and, much like the creatures in Monsters Inc., I fed on their fear and feel much refreshed!  I am going to take over from colleagues who are at present starting the exam so I will have the opportunity to see how they have fared during the hour of examination delight before I continue their watching.  And watch them you have to do because they take every opportunity to cheat.  Examinations are not a time for relaxed working on your own affairs, you have to maintain a vigilance which would do the SAS proud if you want anything like a realistic result from the pen pushing!

I am now stuck in front of a class “doing” their exam and, I simply cannot face staring at them without doing something, so I can at least touch type so I can watch them and let me fingers pretend that they are doing something useful as well.  Their paper is a mixture of multiple choice and discursive questions but it does look as though the general level of work is only for memory yet again.  The kids are thoroughly bored and have does as much as they can, they are now in that dangerous time when they have to make up what they don’t know and hope for the best.  The ideal time to start cheating.  They are fascinated by the fact that I am typing without looking at the keyboard and I suppose, if nothing else, it gives them something to think about or watch rather than cheat!

I am conscious that there is a limit to the amount of vacuous typing that I can do, and there is another piece of written work that should be occupying my time – but I have given up writing the essay until I can hold the text in my hands.

The Text (the capital letters are well deserved) has arrived and it is the wrong one!  Although the description states that it is Dickens’ novel with the introduction by Kate Flint this is not the case and I have been sent a cheap version of the Penguin Classic.  Ah well, at least it is the text in book form and I can work with that.

My notes continue to expand and my inclination to put coherent sentences on paper continues to shrink.  I still haven’t found a significantly original slant on what I have to do to prompt me to put my thoughts forward for critique.  I think I am trying too much and I should settle down and do as I am told in the Assignment Booklet notes and not strive for more – but we shall see after I have completed my umpteenth reading of the novel, but now with added sensual addition of feeling fingers on actual pages.  It makes all the difference.

To sweeten the blow of the wrong text being sent, I had another package from Amazon with my next slew of discs.  Toni is now frankly worried at my escalating rate of purchase, but I can’t stop myself because if the bargains are there, who am I to resist them.

The most interesting of my purchases in a five disc set of “Music from the Middle Ages” with disc five being entitled “L’agonie du Languedoc” and who can resist such an offering!  Well, realistically I suppose that the answer to that would be “most people” but as I already have music about the disgraceful slaughter of the Cathars (including a wonderful extract from an episcopal letter urging right thinking Christians to slaughter the heretical inhabitants of the Languedoc in the name of the God of Love!) I am one of the other group who looks forward to listening to such music with absolute relish!

The only oddity among the other box sets which include The Hilliard Ensemble with music by Ockenghem, Desprez, De la Rue and Lassus and another Baroque Collection with music by Albinoni, Bach, Handel, Palestrina, Monteverdi, Purcell, Telemann and Vivaldi is a box set of the ballets, orchestral works and film music of Prokofiev.

I think that “Lieutenant Kije” is a wonderful work and the “Troika” is one of my favourite pieces of music which, under the right circumstances, can reduce me to tears – once embarrassingly during a long drive on English motorways with me yelling the tune lustily and beating the steering wheel in time to the music.  God alone knows what startled drivers must have thought of me!

I am finding my present set of “car” discs irritatingly tame and some of the tracks quaintly antique in their recording quality, so I think I may substitute the newest arrivals – though it does mean that some time in the future I will be driving along a dismal motorway with suicidal motorists while listening to two discs of Orlando de Lassus’ Penitential Psalms.  Well, if nothing else I suspect that I will be having a unique listening experience on the orbital hell with encircles the city of Barcelona!

After a day of glorious sunshine yesterday, I suppose there had to be a reaction today and it has been dull, cold and this evening, wet.  This is the sort of uneven weather experience that I was used to in Britain but I have become less tolerant of it when it occurs in Catalonia.  Even though today was miserable, it was 14C, so one shouldn’t complain!

Now back to Dickens and trying to find that slant which has so far eluded me!

Where is the sun!

It rained solidly throughout the night.  Well, I don’t know that for a fact as I lapse into something not unlike a coma when I go to sleep so the gentle plashing or indeed vigorous lashing of the wet stuff does not intrude on my slumber – but it looked as though it had been raining all night when I, bleary and myopically eyed finally focused on what is laughingly called the weather over the past few days when I looked out of the bathroom window.

Yesterday we had no sun, not even the magical glimpse which is our due in this part of the world: the star always comes through even through the most unpropitious looking gloominess.  Not a moment of golden light.  Not one.  And today looks equally glum – though I have faith that some gleam will restore my faith.  Please!

On such a contrary day, each action leading towards the car and the commitment to driving to school was a conscious effort – and I can’t help feeling that the school will not be composed of a collection of joyful educationalists today!  I shall take refuge in the knowledge that this is a “short day” leading to the weekend.  And that will keep me going.

Today is of course, my National Day and I am wearing my Dragon Tie to mark the event.  I was a little taken aback by one of my colleagues responding to my tie by saying, “Ah yes, Saint Patrick!”  She was put right.  Although I have seen it written that Saint Patrick was a Welshman who went over the sea to bring Christianity to the benighted shores of that country which is obviously and literally not for old men!

More importantly this morning was confirmation that my last expenditure on a timepiece has at least been partially justified as the date on my so-called “Perpetual” watch changed automatically to the 1^st today without the pathetic fumbling which is the inevitable accompaniment to the arrival of a month which does not have 31 days.  I think that it must have been in the far off days of early digital that I last had a watch that was capable of adjusting itself to the normal rhythm of odd months!  What an example of money well spent!

“Short days” mean long mornings, though I have hopes that the disruption which is a natural parallel to preparation for examinations will allow some wiggle-room for breathing space – which thinking about it may be an inelegant phrase but is a wonderfully mixed metaphor!

As I always set off at 7.15 am to avoid the traffic which is impossible if I leave later, I am always one of the first people in the school.  I am, therefore sitting in my accustomed place waiting for the horror to start, which in this school starts at 8.15 am!  So, when people galvanize themselves to teach the first lesson I feel impelled to do something as well.  I only teach at 8.15 am on two days a week, the other starts are 8.45 am (the normal start of school) and times nearer 9.00 am.  Some days I am packing up ready to start when the wonderful realization strikes me that I am ahead of myself.  This happened today and I therefore had time to prepare and make real a handout which previously was only a pious thought!

I am now stuck in front of a class of 4ESO, a year group I do not teach, because of the exams.  This has not worked out well as the group that I normally teach is doing exams and I have been released to cover another class.  The silence obtainable with 4ESO is markedly more difficult to obtain than with 3ESO, but is still a more real possibility than with the corresponding class in Britain.

Talking of classes in Britain; today is the last day of the Inspection (the capital is only fair in this case!) of Paul 1’s school.  It will be interesting to see how the Inspectorate react to the initiatives that the school has put in place, but which are too new to show clear results yet. 

I wish him well and hope that the Inspectors do not do what they did in one of my inspections and that is turn up on a Friday morning in my Drama class when I had been told that they would have completed all their observations by Thursday.  Indeed, I had take a little glass or seven with relieved friends and I was still feeling the effects when the inspector breezed in, to find me lying on the floor with the rest of the class!  Ah happy days!  That went well.

I have asked about inspections in this country and have been assured that they do take place.  But they seem to be a damn sight more unobtrusive than in Britain.  I think the adjective that I would apply would be “cosy” – and certainly nothing approaching the carefully chosen adjective “robust” which Paul used to describe the initial interviews on the Monday!

The morning wound its length along and I skipped out as soon as was decent.

Lunch today was in a restaurant on our little Ramblas leading up to the church.  The starter was a selection of tapas, followed by cod with garlic mousse, then a crema catalan cake.  Bloody brilliant!  It starts the weekend well.

My OU essay is not going as well as I would like because I think that I am consciously trying to be too clever and find a new approach in a text which has been analysed to buggery and back again.  Ah well, the other way is to stick to all the guidelines in the Guidance Notes and produce something which is as far as I can make it exactly what the OU wants.  Work in progress.

I continue to feed discs into the computer and discover bits and pieces of my past in them!  This evening it was a re-mastered recording of a Beecham version of Le Roi s’amuse by Delibes.  I first heard that while staying in The Great Western Hotel in Paddington as a representative of ASTMS (god, how long is it since I have written those initials!) before we went to a meeting in which Clive Jenkins himself graced our little gathering!  I must admit that I have always remembered the music I heard on the radio in the evening, while the meeting has rather faded in significance in my memory!

The Baroque Box continues to please with a sparse but sharp version of Vivaldi’s Gloria.  I confidently expect more pleasant discoveries as I work my way through the other discs that I have bought recently.  And more on Monday.  When my paperback copy of Hard Times should arrive too.  I should have restricted myself to the book, but I just couldn’t resist the suggestions of the ever-eager Amazon to take yet more of my money with other music offers.

The next major arrival is the EMI Eminence Collection another company re-mastering old recordings and selling them at bargain price to music junkies like myself! 

All I can say is “Keep feeding my habit!”