Come with me as I take you back to the moral squalor of Renaissance Italy and the paranoia of life under the Borgias! Experience the terror as you realise that every friendly face could mask the reality of a sneering villain! Shun shadows that could hide the glint of the stiletto waiting to sheath itself in your spine! Let your imagination rip and you could be there!
Or just pop along to our school where paranoia is as ordinary as deadly nightshade!
Toni’s seemingly cynical advice to “trust no-one” seems to be no more than a blindingly obvious precaution as we teachers slip numbed towards the end of term.
Wheels within wheels turn slowly as plots fester and suspicion hardens. Mixed metaphors rear upwards with the diabolical ease of succulent chocolates as we all look around and echo That Woman’s cry of “Is he one of us!” (Please excuse the sexist pronoun but you know how few women made it into the target area of significance in her regime.)
Spies (real and imagined) abound and any conversation is viewed as suspicious.
It all puts me in mind of G K Chesterton’s delightful book, ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’ where a man is infiltrated into a dangerous spy ring only (eventually) to discover that everyone else is an infiltrator too!
Which is not to say that something is not going on. Our school is superficially fine: teachers teach and children learn – it does what it says on the tin. But all the structures and the methods used to ensure that those structures work are rotten to the core. The central malaise means that to step outside your classroom is to enter a world where the structured normality of your teaching space is suddenly a distant planet in another star system in a parallel universe.
Which can be a little wearing. Something will eventually have to give and I only hope that it isn’t me!
Why should it be? I have survived a whole term of teaching, or at least what I think is covered by that term, in a school where the ordinary has been skewed some distance away from the generally accepted norms.
What have I achieved in my sojourn in the institution since January? I could leave that as a rhetorical question or I could attempt to find some sort of answer. After all this is the first time in my life that I have taught pupils so young! I really should be able to itemize a whole range of educational insights and professional achievements from such an extended period of time.
If we go on what is new for me; what is challenging; what is extraordinary then I would have to single out yesterday.
I held my first parental consultation in Spanish!
God alone knows what I said to the woman about her daughter but the proof of my competence in my adopted language was that she left smiling.
Although thinking about that, the smile could have been the quiet delight of a parent listening to the semi literate ravings of a teacher trying to communicate insights abut the communication difficulties of her daughter in Tarzan-like attempts at language!
I will have to look for the arched eyebrow of superiority when I next meet her!
Or just pop along to our school where paranoia is as ordinary as deadly nightshade!
Toni’s seemingly cynical advice to “trust no-one” seems to be no more than a blindingly obvious precaution as we teachers slip numbed towards the end of term.
Wheels within wheels turn slowly as plots fester and suspicion hardens. Mixed metaphors rear upwards with the diabolical ease of succulent chocolates as we all look around and echo That Woman’s cry of “Is he one of us!” (Please excuse the sexist pronoun but you know how few women made it into the target area of significance in her regime.)
Spies (real and imagined) abound and any conversation is viewed as suspicious.
It all puts me in mind of G K Chesterton’s delightful book, ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’ where a man is infiltrated into a dangerous spy ring only (eventually) to discover that everyone else is an infiltrator too!
Which is not to say that something is not going on. Our school is superficially fine: teachers teach and children learn – it does what it says on the tin. But all the structures and the methods used to ensure that those structures work are rotten to the core. The central malaise means that to step outside your classroom is to enter a world where the structured normality of your teaching space is suddenly a distant planet in another star system in a parallel universe.
Which can be a little wearing. Something will eventually have to give and I only hope that it isn’t me!
Why should it be? I have survived a whole term of teaching, or at least what I think is covered by that term, in a school where the ordinary has been skewed some distance away from the generally accepted norms.
What have I achieved in my sojourn in the institution since January? I could leave that as a rhetorical question or I could attempt to find some sort of answer. After all this is the first time in my life that I have taught pupils so young! I really should be able to itemize a whole range of educational insights and professional achievements from such an extended period of time.
If we go on what is new for me; what is challenging; what is extraordinary then I would have to single out yesterday.
I held my first parental consultation in Spanish!
God alone knows what I said to the woman about her daughter but the proof of my competence in my adopted language was that she left smiling.
Although thinking about that, the smile could have been the quiet delight of a parent listening to the semi literate ravings of a teacher trying to communicate insights abut the communication difficulties of her daughter in Tarzan-like attempts at language!
I will have to look for the arched eyebrow of superiority when I next meet her!
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