Today marks the day when I have achieved a Black Belt level of acceptance in Castelldefels.
The café at the bottom of the street laid out my takeaway meal on real plates. Not only that, but they also offered me two glasses of beer and a tapa of spicy anchovies. For nothing.
The recourse to takeaway was because of paper overload.
I was acutely aware that, this afternoon, one of my colleagues came into my class and saw me gibbering quietly behind an avalanche of miscellaneous paper – official, educational, pupil and rubbish. I decided that Something Had To Be Done.
School ended and, an hour and a half later the various strata of papers had been excavated and various interesting discoveries had been made. The most useful was a cache of photocopyable OHP slides together with finding other ‘Lost’ documents.
In deference to Toni’s shocked discovery (via an unhelpful TV programme) that your average keyboard was actually dirtier than your average toilet! (can that be true?) I cleaned the surface of my desk. The surface being visible for the first time in some months!
The exhaustion produced by this Augean effort necessitated the assistance of sustenance from your friendly corner café. And a substantial glass of Rioja in a rather splendid glass
completed my near regeneration.
And tomorrow the kids will come back into the classroom and bugger everything up again!
As a member of the Registry staff in Swansea University once remarked to me during one vacation, “You know Stephen, this place works so well when the students aren’t here!” How often do those in education feel fully confident when their customers are elsewhere!
Tomorrow is a full teaching day with no free periods and a bewilderingly large and varied series of lessons with a clientele ranging from the uninformed, the unable, the unworthy and the unlettered to the not any of the previously named!
I wonder how uncluttered my desk will be by the end of the day.
Or not.
The café at the bottom of the street laid out my takeaway meal on real plates. Not only that, but they also offered me two glasses of beer and a tapa of spicy anchovies. For nothing.
The recourse to takeaway was because of paper overload.
I was acutely aware that, this afternoon, one of my colleagues came into my class and saw me gibbering quietly behind an avalanche of miscellaneous paper – official, educational, pupil and rubbish. I decided that Something Had To Be Done.
School ended and, an hour and a half later the various strata of papers had been excavated and various interesting discoveries had been made. The most useful was a cache of photocopyable OHP slides together with finding other ‘Lost’ documents.
In deference to Toni’s shocked discovery (via an unhelpful TV programme) that your average keyboard was actually dirtier than your average toilet! (can that be true?) I cleaned the surface of my desk. The surface being visible for the first time in some months!
The exhaustion produced by this Augean effort necessitated the assistance of sustenance from your friendly corner café. And a substantial glass of Rioja in a rather splendid glass
completed my near regeneration.And tomorrow the kids will come back into the classroom and bugger everything up again!
As a member of the Registry staff in Swansea University once remarked to me during one vacation, “You know Stephen, this place works so well when the students aren’t here!” How often do those in education feel fully confident when their customers are elsewhere!
Tomorrow is a full teaching day with no free periods and a bewilderingly large and varied series of lessons with a clientele ranging from the uninformed, the unable, the unworthy and the unlettered to the not any of the previously named!
I wonder how uncluttered my desk will be by the end of the day.
Or not.
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