At the start of each new academic year in September the headteacher would give a pep talk to the staff and take the opportunity to welcome new colleagues. We Old Lags would look around to try and spot the fresh meat and give world weary smiles as the new staff member stood up and shyly smiled with the embarrassment that all teachers traditionally show when they are placed in the position of their pupils.
In our large staff in Llanishen you would sometimes miss the new faces as they shrank from this unwanted attention.
Now consider the situation in The School That Sacked Me: I have been informed that, as well as the entire primary section of the school, staff in the secondary section are voting for freedom and decency and shaking off the dust from their shoes as they turn away from the educational fiasco that is the school.
Term starts: no on knows anyone else. The only people shrinking from the limelight are those with the shameful knowledge that they have been quiescent enough to have escaped being sacked and they have come back, almost as recidivists, to the school that regularly sheds almost its entire staff! If you have been there for a couple of years what do you tell your new colleagues? What do you say when a new teacher asks about who took the class last?
Of course in the primary section this will not apply as there will be no one there to ask. All faces will be new. Only the pupils asking, again, where have all the teachers gone.
It turns out that The Owner insists on payment of annual fees in May for the following academic year, so the pupils returning are financially locked in to the school for another expensive twelve months.
The way that the organization of the new academic year is shaping up in The School That Sacked Me is rapidly approaching meltdown and makes ad hoc look like a carefully considered tried and tested approach. I can only hope that real chaos brings into play the institutions that are supposed to protect the interests of the pupils and staff before there is too much damage to the education of the pupils and the careers of the teachers. If ever there was a time for intervention, then that time is now!
I am finally beginning to read ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ by Betty Smith (first published in 1943)
this manages to create two distinct areas of guilt for me. The first is that I have had this book so long and have not made an effort to read it before today. The second is that it is Thora’s book and there is little hope of returning it unless Emma agrees to take it back. A third and subsidiary frisson of guilt is from the fact that Thora taught with and therefore knew my mother and I can sense a parental reprimand hovering on the edge of my consciousness!
I am only a hundred or so pages in so it is too soon to pontificate about its worth. This is unusually fair of me considering the seminar I went to on the Henry James novel ‘Wings of the Dove’.
My preparation for that event consisted in reading the first page of the book and the intelligent blurb that Penguin kindly provided on the back. It was one of those deadly seminars where no one spoke and the questions of the tutor became ever more simplistic. Eventually, to destroy one of those cringe making silences that seem to be some sort of physical threat I spoke.
My contribution was to offer the intellectual jewel that, in my opinion, the prose of Henry James was “quite difficult to read.”
My tutor’s reception of this amazing apercu was akin to the Israelites waking up and finding manna strewn about them. His face a picture of interested engagement he asked me the fatal question, “Can you give an example in the book to illustrate this difficulty?”
To my eternal shame I replied, “Well, take the opening page . . .” I have to tell you that the intellectual level of discussion went steadily downhill after that point!
The only positive point I can take from the experience is that I did at least feel shame. Walking back from the tutor’s house across Singleton Park I observed by the College Chaplain thumping myself on the thigh with the novel in question looking like a one person flagellant procession hoping to avoid the Black Death.
Happy Days!
The weather today has been capricious. It was blowing a gale in the morning (though without the rain) and overcast, but it soon settled down and the sun came out. The sky was streaked with stubborn vapour trails that you always fear will develop into sun denying clouds. What they actually did was texture the sea so that the appearance of the water was striated with alternating bands of dark grey and deep delicious blue.
To vary the monotony of sunshine we even had a mini whirlwind travel down the beach, this was especially good because we were able to observe it from the clam of the balcony while having lunch rather than having to eat the sand as it was forced into all those little cracks, crevices and orifices!
Back to Betty Smith I think.
In our large staff in Llanishen you would sometimes miss the new faces as they shrank from this unwanted attention.
Now consider the situation in The School That Sacked Me: I have been informed that, as well as the entire primary section of the school, staff in the secondary section are voting for freedom and decency and shaking off the dust from their shoes as they turn away from the educational fiasco that is the school.
Term starts: no on knows anyone else. The only people shrinking from the limelight are those with the shameful knowledge that they have been quiescent enough to have escaped being sacked and they have come back, almost as recidivists, to the school that regularly sheds almost its entire staff! If you have been there for a couple of years what do you tell your new colleagues? What do you say when a new teacher asks about who took the class last?
Of course in the primary section this will not apply as there will be no one there to ask. All faces will be new. Only the pupils asking, again, where have all the teachers gone.
It turns out that The Owner insists on payment of annual fees in May for the following academic year, so the pupils returning are financially locked in to the school for another expensive twelve months.
The way that the organization of the new academic year is shaping up in The School That Sacked Me is rapidly approaching meltdown and makes ad hoc look like a carefully considered tried and tested approach. I can only hope that real chaos brings into play the institutions that are supposed to protect the interests of the pupils and staff before there is too much damage to the education of the pupils and the careers of the teachers. If ever there was a time for intervention, then that time is now!
I am finally beginning to read ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ by Betty Smith (first published in 1943)
this manages to create two distinct areas of guilt for me. The first is that I have had this book so long and have not made an effort to read it before today. The second is that it is Thora’s book and there is little hope of returning it unless Emma agrees to take it back. A third and subsidiary frisson of guilt is from the fact that Thora taught with and therefore knew my mother and I can sense a parental reprimand hovering on the edge of my consciousness!I am only a hundred or so pages in so it is too soon to pontificate about its worth. This is unusually fair of me considering the seminar I went to on the Henry James novel ‘Wings of the Dove’.
My preparation for that event consisted in reading the first page of the book and the intelligent blurb that Penguin kindly provided on the back. It was one of those deadly seminars where no one spoke and the questions of the tutor became ever more simplistic. Eventually, to destroy one of those cringe making silences that seem to be some sort of physical threat I spoke.
My contribution was to offer the intellectual jewel that, in my opinion, the prose of Henry James was “quite difficult to read.”
My tutor’s reception of this amazing apercu was akin to the Israelites waking up and finding manna strewn about them. His face a picture of interested engagement he asked me the fatal question, “Can you give an example in the book to illustrate this difficulty?”
To my eternal shame I replied, “Well, take the opening page . . .” I have to tell you that the intellectual level of discussion went steadily downhill after that point!
The only positive point I can take from the experience is that I did at least feel shame. Walking back from the tutor’s house across Singleton Park I observed by the College Chaplain thumping myself on the thigh with the novel in question looking like a one person flagellant procession hoping to avoid the Black Death.
Happy Days!
The weather today has been capricious. It was blowing a gale in the morning (though without the rain) and overcast, but it soon settled down and the sun came out. The sky was streaked with stubborn vapour trails that you always fear will develop into sun denying clouds. What they actually did was texture the sea so that the appearance of the water was striated with alternating bands of dark grey and deep delicious blue.
To vary the monotony of sunshine we even had a mini whirlwind travel down the beach, this was especially good because we were able to observe it from the clam of the balcony while having lunch rather than having to eat the sand as it was forced into all those little cracks, crevices and orifices!
Back to Betty Smith I think.
No comments:
Post a Comment