Failed planning paled into insignificance after a hastily called meeting of the primary school staff this morning.
What, you might ask was the meeting about.
Was it perchance some complex decision about the ramifications of the implementation of some tricky part of the curriculum? Perhaps it was concerned with an aspect of pupil safety? Parental involvement in the forthcoming Parents’ Evening might have been the crucial aspect demanding our immediate attention.
Get real.
Teachers, parents, kids? Who cares? Certainly not the powers that be in our place. No, this meeting was concerned with something far more important than any professional irritations.
Our head dinner lady had threatened to resign!
Now that is something to get the administration into overdrive!
What had prompted this ultimatum? The selfishness of teachers.
Let me explain. The canteen is on the ground floor together with the foetal section of the school. Primary is on the first floor and secondary on the second. The staff room is located on the first floor as seen from the playground (The Patio) but at road level from the main entrance (confusingly.)
Teachers are served their meals in large, ugly, grey, plastic, compartmentalised troughs with a lid. These have to be carried upstairs by individual members of staff where the cold meal (after all our duties it is inevitable that the food is frigid) can be eaten in the staff room.
Our every caring dinner lady decided that these were boxes too far. She would no longer put meals in them. Obviously, as a dinner lady far outranks any mere teacher in our place Something Had To Be Done.
The Primary meeting was told (no discussion) that from now on teaching staff would eat with the kids. A separate table possibly, but with the kids none the less. So, having taught all morning, you have a meal with the kids then you go out to the playground to supervise them.
We were told that in the Never Never Land of something called ‘Next Year’ there would be a utopian existence for teachers where all the lunchtime supervision would be done by Others. Though obviously such pampered namby-pamby sybaritic teachers, lounging in their staff room kid free for a brief break would have correspondingly lower salaries.
Oh, and by the way, we were told, anyone who had said that they were ‘undecided’ about whether they wanted to continue their productive career in the school next year would be considered as dangerously subversive recidivists and treated with horror and contempt. Actually that last bit was my gloss on what was actually said as their interpretation of ‘undecided’ was not coming back.
So, for the second great year the secondary section of our Great School looks as though it is going to resign en mass!
I might also point out that such high handed carelessness in the management of already disgruntled staff does not bode well for the forthcoming double inspection to discover if our school is ready for accreditation. If it wasn’t actually going to happen you would just laugh all of this off as a bad joke.
As wild horses would not induce me to eat with the kids (in my last school I didn’t even go into the dining hall to get food from the canteen to eat in the staff room) I decided to stop taking the food from the school at once.
As soon as my interminable thirty minutes of supervision of kids whose manipulation of knife and fork looked as though they were auditioning for an extra’s role in some rustic medieval banquet, I flounced out of the school and went into the sports’ centre which is next to our place.
As a gesture of revolutionary solidarity and a solid blow against the power of the autocrat of our administration I decided to have the menu del dia.
When I am making a gesture I don’t count the cost. This actually turned out to be about €11 including a bottle of beer and a cortado.
Much refreshed I walked back to the school and, if I had not stopped to chat with a colleague in the foetus section of the school I would have timed my reappearance to collect my class with an almost military precision.
No sooner inside the school than I discovered that the ‘hard pressed’ dinner lady had actually shouted at one of my colleagues in front of teachers, other staff and pupils. Fully to understand the basis of this disagreement you would have to be a member of staff of the school. Suffice to say that a loud mouthed boor acted with characteristic discourtesy towards a colleague marked for her professionalism, poise and politeness.
What, in a real school, would have resulted in a written warning and a demand for a full written apology will instead result in nothing - because the dinner lady is a close associate of The Owner and therefore the dinner lady’s word, however inaccurate, will be taken above that of any bunch of teachers.
And there are still two days left before the holiday!
What, you might ask was the meeting about.
Was it perchance some complex decision about the ramifications of the implementation of some tricky part of the curriculum? Perhaps it was concerned with an aspect of pupil safety? Parental involvement in the forthcoming Parents’ Evening might have been the crucial aspect demanding our immediate attention.
Get real.
Teachers, parents, kids? Who cares? Certainly not the powers that be in our place. No, this meeting was concerned with something far more important than any professional irritations.
Our head dinner lady had threatened to resign!
Now that is something to get the administration into overdrive!
What had prompted this ultimatum? The selfishness of teachers.
Let me explain. The canteen is on the ground floor together with the foetal section of the school. Primary is on the first floor and secondary on the second. The staff room is located on the first floor as seen from the playground (The Patio) but at road level from the main entrance (confusingly.)
Teachers are served their meals in large, ugly, grey, plastic, compartmentalised troughs with a lid. These have to be carried upstairs by individual members of staff where the cold meal (after all our duties it is inevitable that the food is frigid) can be eaten in the staff room.
Our every caring dinner lady decided that these were boxes too far. She would no longer put meals in them. Obviously, as a dinner lady far outranks any mere teacher in our place Something Had To Be Done.
The Primary meeting was told (no discussion) that from now on teaching staff would eat with the kids. A separate table possibly, but with the kids none the less. So, having taught all morning, you have a meal with the kids then you go out to the playground to supervise them.
We were told that in the Never Never Land of something called ‘Next Year’ there would be a utopian existence for teachers where all the lunchtime supervision would be done by Others. Though obviously such pampered namby-pamby sybaritic teachers, lounging in their staff room kid free for a brief break would have correspondingly lower salaries.
Oh, and by the way, we were told, anyone who had said that they were ‘undecided’ about whether they wanted to continue their productive career in the school next year would be considered as dangerously subversive recidivists and treated with horror and contempt. Actually that last bit was my gloss on what was actually said as their interpretation of ‘undecided’ was not coming back.
So, for the second great year the secondary section of our Great School looks as though it is going to resign en mass!
I might also point out that such high handed carelessness in the management of already disgruntled staff does not bode well for the forthcoming double inspection to discover if our school is ready for accreditation. If it wasn’t actually going to happen you would just laugh all of this off as a bad joke.
As wild horses would not induce me to eat with the kids (in my last school I didn’t even go into the dining hall to get food from the canteen to eat in the staff room) I decided to stop taking the food from the school at once.
As soon as my interminable thirty minutes of supervision of kids whose manipulation of knife and fork looked as though they were auditioning for an extra’s role in some rustic medieval banquet, I flounced out of the school and went into the sports’ centre which is next to our place.
As a gesture of revolutionary solidarity and a solid blow against the power of the autocrat of our administration I decided to have the menu del dia.
When I am making a gesture I don’t count the cost. This actually turned out to be about €11 including a bottle of beer and a cortado.
Much refreshed I walked back to the school and, if I had not stopped to chat with a colleague in the foetus section of the school I would have timed my reappearance to collect my class with an almost military precision.
No sooner inside the school than I discovered that the ‘hard pressed’ dinner lady had actually shouted at one of my colleagues in front of teachers, other staff and pupils. Fully to understand the basis of this disagreement you would have to be a member of staff of the school. Suffice to say that a loud mouthed boor acted with characteristic discourtesy towards a colleague marked for her professionalism, poise and politeness.
What, in a real school, would have resulted in a written warning and a demand for a full written apology will instead result in nothing - because the dinner lady is a close associate of The Owner and therefore the dinner lady’s word, however inaccurate, will be taken above that of any bunch of teachers.
And there are still two days left before the holiday!
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