Reflections

My time in my present school has come to an end with the return to health of the teacher whose place I took short term.

An early blood test and a two hour Spanish lesson replaced my classes this morning, but even this excitement does not compensate for the loss of what could be a lucrative and satisfying job.

I will wait with barely concealed impatience to see what the future holds. After all, when I first went to the school, it only took two days before they called me back to replace a teacher. I therefore expect a phone call by Thursday at the latest!

I was told that the teacher was returning at the start of my last lesson on Monday afternoon by the head of the secondary section of the school and the directora and, after many gratifying expressions of their satisfaction with my time with them I went back to complete my final lesson.

The pupils in the class were a little suspicious and, as they have done virtually every time that I have taken them asked if I would be teaching them the next day. The reaction when I told them that it was the last time that I would take them provoked an outcry.

I had to tread a perilously thin professional line in dealing with the storm of questions and unprompted comments which the situation provoked and it was only with real difficulty that we got back to the work that we should have been doing.

In a previous class when we were looking at a letter of application for a job in a Summer Camp when one of the pupils wittily suggested that I write one to the school for a permanent job. When I pointed out that there was no job another pupils said, “We can get rid of her. We got rid of a maths teacher.” It was a chilling moment which I passed over with a laugh and got back to the task in hand.

The pupils in the school are clever and articulate, they also have a very real sense of what they want and most of them are convinced that what they want will be translated into reality with very little trouble. One is tempted to say that they represent a youthful embodiment of the expectation of privilege which comes when you are paying large sums of money for a private education. Not only do they know what they want, but they also expect it.

Although I have not gone out of my way to create it, the permanent teacher is going to have a negative welcome when she returns to work. I do not envy her having to cope with class after class filled with sullen resentment at best and articulate dismissal at worst.

I suppose that I should also remember the remarkable resilience or pupils and their even more remarkable ability to forget. What appears to be major at the beginning of the week is very old news by the end of it!

A rather more pressing problem concerns verbs.

My Spanish class this morning was almost entirely incomprehensible to me as we (apparently) ranged our way through tenses as exotic as ‘pretérito perfecto simple’ to ‘pretérito pluscuamperfecto’ - and don’t get me started on the Spanish predilection for the ‘modo subjuntivo.’

I suppose it would be a help if I was anything approaching confident in description and use of these tenses in English before I embarked on the stormy waters of complex utterances in a foreign tongue. But that sort of logical preparation would be breaking the habit of a lifetime in far too many areas of experience to enumerate to try a new approach this late in my bumbling approach to life!

I can only hope that by Thursday our teacher will fall back on something a little easier, though a cursory glance at the page which she has indicated as our next foray into Spanish looks, to put it mildly, verb heavy. The topic is the ‘kitchen’ and if I understood her correctly she is expecting us to write a description of how we would prepare a typical national dish. I somehow don’t think that my suggestion of “Buy a ready meal from Tesco’s” translated into Spanish is quite what she has in mind!

I must officially record my thanks to The Teaching Council of Wales and the University of Wales Swansea for providing (within a week) the documentation necessary for my teaching qualifications to be recognized by the Spanish Government. I am particularly impressed with Swansea for producing an Academic Transcript of my degree. It is impressive to think that my precise marks from my degree papers are still somewhere in the system thirty-five years after gaining the qualification!

It is instructive to learn that my highest mark was in the History of Art in my first year and in my final papers my lowest mark was in Chaucer. I should explain. Our Chaucer paper was not just on Chaucer but also on a number of his ‘contemporaries’ who produced such shudderingly awful Early Middle English poems as ‘The Pearl’ and (in spite of what others may say) the equally dreadful ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.’ I think I speak for a number of my fellow students when I say that while we gave Chaucer his due and read many of the stories in ‘The Canterbury Tales’ his ‘contemporaries’ did not receive equal treatment. I may have bought the books, but I cannot say with hand on heart that I read them all the way to the end! Life, I reasoned, was not long enough to worry my way through a poem whose first line (of two and a half thousand lines) starts:

“Sißen ße sege and ße assaut / watz sesed at Troye”

and to be frank doesn’t get much better.

We had to sit the Chaucer paper on a Saturday afternoon just before ‘Doctor Who’ and, while I was writing my answers I had the constant fear that I was going to miss the latest episode of the not to be missed series. I had spent Friday night building sandcastles on Swansea beach with friends in a state of hysterical horror at my sheer unpreparedness for the coming ordeal which I reiterated to my unresponsive colleagues who were not sitting the exam the next day.

The paper itself was of legendary and absurd awfulness comprising ‘translation’ questions drawn from obscure ‘unseen’ pre fourteenth century documents; set texts and the Works of Chaucer. Then, to finish there were three academic essays on various texts that we had to complete. Only the students who were taking this period as their ‘special’ paper ever completed the exam – the rest of us staggered out of the examination hall in various states of shell shock. It took me virtually the whole of the episode of Doctor Who before I had regained my equanimity!

It is also gratifying to discover that my best papers were my special option paper on Modern Literature (don’t get the wrong idea - we started with Dostoyevsky, so not that sort of ‘Modern’) and Drama.

I am particularly pleased about the mark in Drama paper because it provoked a conversation with one of my tutors that I still don’t really understand. Before the results came out I was stopped by Doctor Worthen and the following exchange took place:

Dr W: You answered a question on Brecht didn’t you?
Me: Yes.
Dr W: You quoted from ‘Baal’ didn’t you?
Me: Yes.
Dr W: No one else did. That just about sums up your answer.
Me: !

I still maintain the ambiguity of Dr W’s comments was a cruel impetus to self doubt in the trying times before the degree results have came out. As the results day drew nearer I spent most of my time trying to think of a form of words to soften the blow when I had to tell my parents that I had failed or been awarded a ‘pass’ degree instead of the ‘honours’ degree that I had been attempting to get!

It was oddly ironic that, when the results were finally posted (and I was more than happy with my results) the only person who actually did fail honours and get a ‘pass’ degree actually received an honour!

In the degree ceremony (conducted in a mixture of Welsh and Latin with random English so no one knew what was going on) the graduates in each class of degree were ‘done’ together. So, in English the two firsts in my year were ‘done’ first; then the dozen two ones; the forty two twos and then, finally, in splendid isolation and looking as though he were receiving a signal honour, the single ‘pass’ graduate!

Happy Days!