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Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Petard of Pixels




Stymied by technology!

My credentials as someone who is computer savvy have now taken a punishing bump from my incompetence with the reports.

In our school everything possible is done electronically. This has nothing to do with being cutting edge and everything to do with paranoia.

People communicate via email when they could take a few steps and talk to each other! This extraordinary behaviour stems (need you ask) from The Owner who feels that mere speech is liable to be twisted by evil educational practitioners, whereas the written word is immutable. The fact that the system has more faults than California and is more liable to inexplicable vagaries than share prices in mortgage companies does not alter the fact that the email and pen drive are the weapons of choice in the conveying of information.

As someone who much prefers to top and tail reports in pen the use of the computer is limiting. As we had no style sheet to work from I felt free to make executive decisions about certain details of presentation. Alas! My revolutionary zeal was quickly curbed and the thin end of the wedge towards Armageddon (i.e. writing the pupils names in block capitals) was sternly rebuked.

And the altering of reports which exist on my pen drive and on the hard drive of my laptop is where the problems accumulated. Resentfully I changed my aphoristic (and frequently gnomic) comments to something more in keeping with the potential audience for my bon mots whose linguistic abilities were being extended by their offspring rather by themselves. This meant delving into report after report; messing around with them, forgetting to save the changes; opening another report; remembering to save the changes; forgetting to change the report opened before the other one was saved; reopening the wrong report; missing out a report on the list; changing the name and . . . well, you get the general idea.

What would be simple in moving sheets of paper becomes a frustratingly oblique shuffle when you are forced to do things electronically.

My only comfort blanket was a red file with scraps of paper of various sizes which contained information which allowed the formation of the reports in the first place. When in doubt I returned to the red file and rummaged about for a while, relishing the real physical feel of paper on finger tips and knowing that if everything was lost in one electrical surge the edifice could be rebuilt by my little red file.

Having twenty open files on a computer is a life shortening experience in laborious navigation, while the equivalent in report books is human and containable.

I am no Luddite and the thought of life without my trusty laptop is something which I can only contemplate in the context of a particularly disturbing Hammer Horror film – but the complexities of using the computer in the way in which my school demands adds a dimension of human misery which should only live in the pages of an existential novel by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Teaching has, to all intents and purposes fizzled out. Sometimes the fizzle comes after a particularly hairy educational explosion.

Today was a case in point. After hours of vicious rehearsals with vindictive haranguing accompaniment by my good self, adding a hard edge to the more than reasonable approach of the music teacher, our summer concert was performed for the adoring parents.

This extended piece of exquisite aural torture has been filmed professionally so that the tone deaf parents can relive the chromatic harmonies that make Stockhausen sound like the song writer for Sesame Street.


Apart from the performance of Mama Mia where the kids resolutely stuck to their version of the song while the backing track was not on their rhythmic wavelength – things went quite well. Obviously the relationship between the kids’ singing and their target songs was roughly the same as a car crash to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but hey, they were only primary school kids having a good time while exponentially increasing the misery of their long suffering teachers. What’s wrong with that!

My little Drama Group did well, with the laconic clown having the desired effect. They were all good (in its high relativistic sense) and even when The Cat lost her words, she was so vulnerable and cute that they all cooed and applauded. No one actually said it, but this was the one time that one of them should have sobbed, “You’ve been a wonderful audience, thank you!”

A burden of responsibility has been magically lifted from our shoulders now that the dreaded concert has been consigned to DVD and we can concentrate on the fabled list of tasks that we have to fulfil before the end of term.


I take it that The Owner once read a simplified version of 1,001 Nights and has never managed to shake off the concept of The Trial Before Eventual Reward!

As far as I can understand it, everything has to be cleared out of our rooms. Everything. Where it is all going I know not. And there are some things which I will want to save for next year. If I am allowed a next year in the institution.

With out depleted numbers (three primary teachers missing) every day has the possibility of disaster.

It’s one reason to go in!

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