It can only get better!

An ‘Open Morning’ means that parents – usually kept safely outside the school gates – are allowed, nay, encouraged to break the boundaries of common decency and parade themselves around the classroom while consorting with their offspring in full view of the teacher! Appalling but true!

So the parents came in and fussed over the books of their kids and sometimes managed to penetrate the cordon of pupils around me and engage me in conversation. The dialogue was entirely predictable, but a necessary part of the relationship between parent and teacher. Or PR as we generally know it.

Given what your school does and doesn’t do, whenever I speak to parents there is a whole script which I never use and I think that some of the parents sense that there are more important things to do about our institution than indulge in fairly meaningless banter about the relative niceness of their kids.

The hour that the parents were there was a fairly painless, anodyne experience – though it did take place during a free period of mine!

The next exciting episode in my day was a meeting with The Owner. This took the now familiar form of a partial monologue on her part of blustering reasonableness which ignored implications and facts and resolved itself into a series of exasperated ‘explanations’ which were anything but. Clarification will have to wait until Friday when we will have a response to our questions which we are going to formulate tomorrow.

At the end of the meeting I went to a colleague and reported back, only to be interrupted by The Owner herself (paranoid as ever) who testily informed me that conversations with individuals in doorways was not acceptable! Ah me!

I then returned to my sewing.

I know, I know. Primary teaching means never being settled in a subject. My class and I have been making money containers and this has involved a certain amount of needlework – taught by my good self. Our end results defy categorization. And that is a good place to end my account!

The fun and intrigue were not, however, over.

While waiting at the gate for the kids to be shunted off to their parents, a Dutch mother approached me and in a transparently suspicious manner asked if she could have a meeting between a handful of teachers and parents ‘without The Owner’ so that she could find out ‘the other side.’ While professional reserved dictates that such a meeting must be impossible, simple justice would seem to demand that something should be done. I think that most of the staff (with a few signal exceptions) would welcome an opportunity to say what they really think about the place.

I prevaricated with the parents and said that I would think about what she had said and contact her later. I know what I want to do, but discretion and practicality dictates a certain amount of caution.

The last time that the parents tried to form an association in the school The Owner asked all the ‘guilty’ parents to take their children out of the school! Unbelievable, but true!

From this tempting conversation I did the only sensible thing possible and drove to Gava to buy a false beard and witches’ hat.

This is not an example of disturbing displacement activity, but rather an active attempt to create my costume for the Readathon tomorrow.

Finding my degree gown was an epic story of moving everything in the flat and feeling more and more frustrated as it refused to turn up. You have probably guessed the figure from ‘literature’ that I had decided to personate.

Not only did I find my Cardinal’s outfit and a realization of how svelte my university body had been, but I also found my Herod outfit still a blazing gleam of gold lame and a welcome realization that it still fitted!

A full day of delight. Who knows what the morrow will bring?

I suppose I should just wave my wand and find out!

If only.