It says much for our school that the news that the report format devised by a senior teacher for reporting the end of session progress of Year 6 was to be checked and assessed by a reception secretary barely raised an eyebrow!
This follows the extended meeting with The Owner by my colleagues in Years 3 & 4 to limit her absurd demands for reporting in miniscule detail things she does not understand. Luckily they were able to temper her excesses and we (few, we happy few) are able to contemplate filling in reports without the production of a novel sized communication with parents being the end result!
Bear in mind, if you can, the fact that the present teachers had no (nada, nothing, zilch) information handed onto them last September from the Lost Legion of primary teachers who left (or rather decamped) in the summer of 2007.
The Owner attempts to make it appear to be absolutely normal that this passing on of information from one year to another is nothing more than the ordinary process of education which has been the norm for the last umpteen years.
This is, of course, not even a glancing tangent at the truth.
As far as I can work out each generation of primary teachers has adopted the ‘scorched earth’ policy much beloved of the dispossessed and desperate and left the school taking with them all the relevant information and leaving the computers wiped as clean as a pampered baby’s bottom!
This follows the extended meeting with The Owner by my colleagues in Years 3 & 4 to limit her absurd demands for reporting in miniscule detail things she does not understand. Luckily they were able to temper her excesses and we (few, we happy few) are able to contemplate filling in reports without the production of a novel sized communication with parents being the end result!
Bear in mind, if you can, the fact that the present teachers had no (nada, nothing, zilch) information handed onto them last September from the Lost Legion of primary teachers who left (or rather decamped) in the summer of 2007.
The Owner attempts to make it appear to be absolutely normal that this passing on of information from one year to another is nothing more than the ordinary process of education which has been the norm for the last umpteen years.
This is, of course, not even a glancing tangent at the truth.
As far as I can work out each generation of primary teachers has adopted the ‘scorched earth’ policy much beloved of the dispossessed and desperate and left the school taking with them all the relevant information and leaving the computers wiped as clean as a pampered baby’s bottom!
Preparations for the school summer concert continue with a rather startling tunelessness marking the various classes’ contributions. My script for the characters linking all the pieces seems progressively more bizarre as the kids get to know their words. Their costumes will add that final touch of horror to the event.
Those parents so unfortunate as to have allowed their procreative impulses to give them a spread of progeny through all three sections of our school will find that their experience of the three consecutive concerts will be roughly on a par with the length of the Ring Cycle but without the tunes. And acting. And costumes. And direction. And coherence. God help them!
We await with some trepidation the final list of ‘tasks’ that we will be asked to complete before our contribution to the academic life of the school is deemed to be sufficient and we can slope off for the rest of the (damp!) summer.
We confidently expect one of the ‘tasks’ to be to construct a new cantilevered section of the school, while another might be to rewrite the text books which might be used next year. In our school anything, literally anything, is possible.
As if to confound expectations the saga of the repair of the dishwasher (now in its umpteenth month of frustration) took a new turn when the people who were supposed to turn up at 4.00 pm and take the bloody thing away to repair it their workshops actually turned up before 3.55 pm and were waiting for Toni when he made it back early from his work!
They have taken away the jerry built rubbish (never buy a Taurus) while leaving – rather poignantly – the dish rack type innards looking forlorn and skeletal. I wonder how long they will languish before their enclosing body returns. The men said that it would take about a week but, apart from today’s shocking promptness, there is nothing in the way that they have interpreted the word ‘service’ to expect anything but disappointment.
Talking of disappointment there are ten more calendar days before the kids finally go. Those ten days will encompass the arrival of a new head of primary; a summer concert; a parents’ evening in the afternoon; meetings about my contract; completion of my theatre project (don’t ask); a kids’ end of year party; recriminations, ruminations and revaluations.
The one thing about our school is that anything is possible.
It really is.
Even normality!
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