Tired and drained? Why not try a lobster paella with a sturdy house vino tinto and a mediocre crema catalana?
It worked for me! There is nothing like a good meal (even with a putrid postre) to take your mind away from the day to day problems of life and get them on to something more useful and productive!
In school: injury, illness and accident seem to be claiming a higher and higher percentage of the teaching population. There seems to be no ‘fall back’ plan to ensure that pupils continue to be taught apart from the ‘can you ask your friend if he will give a hand?’ sort of approach. When I asked about agencies for supply teachers for International Schools I was met with blank looks – there is obviously a niche in the market waiting to be filled with work for desperate teachers who thought that Catalonia was a cheap place to live and are now having to find a job to pay the rent.
Next week is Ski Week and one of my colleagues is joining the kids (for the après ski as far as I can tell) and to care for the casualties as they merrily fracture the necessary bones to make Ski Week a success.
As only a few of the kids are going on the trip, others who are going to be left behind in school are going to take the week off: I only hope that a substantial portion of my class is going to do the same! Isn’t private education a wonderful thing!
Talking of wonderful things; from casual gossip around the usually deserted staffroom I understand that events such as ‘parents evening’ and ‘open mornings’ are about to occur. I have no idea what form these occasions take, but, from my experience of they way in which this school does everything they promise to be outré and other worldly. I await with wide eyed innocence the surrealistic phantasmagoria that such ordinary events must surely generate. At least they will be near Easter so that there can be a degree of recovery and revitalisation for the succeeding term!
I have heard nothing from the school in Castelldefels and today was the date by which people were supposed to have been informed if they had made the short list for interview.
I don’t know whether to be depressed, elated, mystified, angry or phlegmatic about this apparent rejection. My CV read like a description of an amalgam of Kent Clark, RAB Butler and Roald Dahl with a few minor sporting details thrown in. I suppose, if I am truthful, that my secondary career seems like a distant twisted dark dream rather than a concrete reality on which to build a career in a new country, but still, I mean, even so, what are my rivals going to have in their CVs which will equal mine? Apart, of course, from a rather more immediate contact with the target pupils. And a rather more immediate date of emerging into the rat race!
We shall see.
Especially as I already have an hour’s experience of working in the Castelldefels institution already!
It worked for me! There is nothing like a good meal (even with a putrid postre) to take your mind away from the day to day problems of life and get them on to something more useful and productive!
In school: injury, illness and accident seem to be claiming a higher and higher percentage of the teaching population. There seems to be no ‘fall back’ plan to ensure that pupils continue to be taught apart from the ‘can you ask your friend if he will give a hand?’ sort of approach. When I asked about agencies for supply teachers for International Schools I was met with blank looks – there is obviously a niche in the market waiting to be filled with work for desperate teachers who thought that Catalonia was a cheap place to live and are now having to find a job to pay the rent.
Next week is Ski Week and one of my colleagues is joining the kids (for the après ski as far as I can tell) and to care for the casualties as they merrily fracture the necessary bones to make Ski Week a success.
As only a few of the kids are going on the trip, others who are going to be left behind in school are going to take the week off: I only hope that a substantial portion of my class is going to do the same! Isn’t private education a wonderful thing!
Talking of wonderful things; from casual gossip around the usually deserted staffroom I understand that events such as ‘parents evening’ and ‘open mornings’ are about to occur. I have no idea what form these occasions take, but, from my experience of they way in which this school does everything they promise to be outré and other worldly. I await with wide eyed innocence the surrealistic phantasmagoria that such ordinary events must surely generate. At least they will be near Easter so that there can be a degree of recovery and revitalisation for the succeeding term!
I have heard nothing from the school in Castelldefels and today was the date by which people were supposed to have been informed if they had made the short list for interview.
I don’t know whether to be depressed, elated, mystified, angry or phlegmatic about this apparent rejection. My CV read like a description of an amalgam of Kent Clark, RAB Butler and Roald Dahl with a few minor sporting details thrown in. I suppose, if I am truthful, that my secondary career seems like a distant twisted dark dream rather than a concrete reality on which to build a career in a new country, but still, I mean, even so, what are my rivals going to have in their CVs which will equal mine? Apart, of course, from a rather more immediate contact with the target pupils. And a rather more immediate date of emerging into the rat race!
We shall see.
Especially as I already have an hour’s experience of working in the Castelldefels institution already!
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