Omens and portents are for the weak minded and credulous.
However . . .
Before the crack of dawn, in Stygian darkness I struggled out of bed and groped my way towards the car so that I would be early for a meeting in my new school. And the Tom-Tom refused to work.
My previous visit to the school had been in daylight and I looked more at the Little Lighted Screen of Guidance than at the passing landmarks for the next visit. The end of the journey on the first occasion had been more than usually tortuous with the progress of the car describing more of a spiral than a comforting straight line.
It was therefore with a sense of foreboding that I set out on my way to the school with only my deeply flawed sense of direction to guide me. Thoughts dark as the threatening sky accompanied my journey into deepest, highest Barcelona.
And I arrived at the school at about the same time as the caretaker opened the main gate for all the kids and teachers who hadn’t arrived yet.
I marched in unopposed and used a back entrance to get to my intended destination. I got to the reception office before the first secretary had arrived and was sitting behind the locked door of the foyer as she entered directly using her key. And she offered me a cup of coffee and stewarded me away from contact with parents into the inner sanctum of what I was to discover was one of many staff rooms.
The staff room has many flavoured tea making capabilities as well as offering instant and capsule coffee. Morning break also saw a selection of baguettes appear for staff. Lunch was in a spacious dining area and was more than acceptable: it has to be because they don’t allow you off the premises during the day!
Supply staff are always, even in the best prepared and organized of schools, thrown in at the deep end, but the Head of English accompanied me to all my classes and eventually weighed me down with a ludicrously large weight of text, work and teachers’ books.
I have now met all my classes and the impression is of a lively but generally attentive group of pupils who should be a pleasure to teach.
As I have not been in front of a collection of pupils for some time the poor buggers had the full force of my “this class is my class” teaching approach which leaves both class and teacher a little breathless. God alone knows what they have told their parents!
I wore my Munch ‘Scream’ tie which is a traditional first day of term (even if it is only for a week) tie for me and it has usually excited a variety of comments ranging from uppity kids who tell me that the image is from a famous painting (Gosh!) to those who ask bemusedly what it is supposed to represent. In this school: nothing. Nothing from kids. Nothing from staff. I do hope it was because they were too intimidated to venture an opinion.
I also think that it might have had something to do with the shirt. In laying out a shirt last night I failed to realise that it was a double cuff without buttons. By the time I had got the thing on I was in no mood to hunt around for another shirt so I added my cousin’s cufflinks to my final attire. So with a Norwegian expressionist hanging from my neck and two large diamonds glittering at my wrists I must have been at least arresting!
The school site is built into the side of a mountain and it comprises a number of vertiginously stacked buildings which are connected by a series of rustic steps, concrete steps, wooden steps, a bridge and a playground. Did I mention steps? Well, there are a lot of them and I seemed to spend all my time traipsing up and down them.
The authentication and authorization of my documents has taken a further step towards some sort of reality by my phoning Swansea University and asking them to provide some sort of Academic Transcript of my degree. This, I understand, is normal practice nowadays, but my degree is not from nowadays.
When I spoke to a lady in the Registry in Swansea and mentioned that my degree was in the seventies she groaned and thanked me for presenting her with such an interesting problem first thing on a Monday morning.
I did not do a nice little modular degree with neat little sets of code numbers and a percentage for each element in the course. I cannot wait to see what the University comes up with! I did mention that they could make it all up as far as I was concerned as long as what they eventually produced had the University crest at the top of it and an official signature at the bottom!
At the end of one lesson one boy came up to me and asked me where I was from. When I told him I was from Wales he said, “I thought so, I could hear your accent when you said the word ‘here.’”
It turned out that this budding Professor Higgins had been on a study holiday in Brecon (Christ College, of course) and had acquired his sensitivity to things Welsh there.
Bodes well!
Not that I believe in omens of course.
However . . .
Before the crack of dawn, in Stygian darkness I struggled out of bed and groped my way towards the car so that I would be early for a meeting in my new school. And the Tom-Tom refused to work.
My previous visit to the school had been in daylight and I looked more at the Little Lighted Screen of Guidance than at the passing landmarks for the next visit. The end of the journey on the first occasion had been more than usually tortuous with the progress of the car describing more of a spiral than a comforting straight line.
It was therefore with a sense of foreboding that I set out on my way to the school with only my deeply flawed sense of direction to guide me. Thoughts dark as the threatening sky accompanied my journey into deepest, highest Barcelona.
And I arrived at the school at about the same time as the caretaker opened the main gate for all the kids and teachers who hadn’t arrived yet.
I marched in unopposed and used a back entrance to get to my intended destination. I got to the reception office before the first secretary had arrived and was sitting behind the locked door of the foyer as she entered directly using her key. And she offered me a cup of coffee and stewarded me away from contact with parents into the inner sanctum of what I was to discover was one of many staff rooms.
The staff room has many flavoured tea making capabilities as well as offering instant and capsule coffee. Morning break also saw a selection of baguettes appear for staff. Lunch was in a spacious dining area and was more than acceptable: it has to be because they don’t allow you off the premises during the day!
Supply staff are always, even in the best prepared and organized of schools, thrown in at the deep end, but the Head of English accompanied me to all my classes and eventually weighed me down with a ludicrously large weight of text, work and teachers’ books.
I have now met all my classes and the impression is of a lively but generally attentive group of pupils who should be a pleasure to teach.
As I have not been in front of a collection of pupils for some time the poor buggers had the full force of my “this class is my class” teaching approach which leaves both class and teacher a little breathless. God alone knows what they have told their parents!
I wore my Munch ‘Scream’ tie which is a traditional first day of term (even if it is only for a week) tie for me and it has usually excited a variety of comments ranging from uppity kids who tell me that the image is from a famous painting (Gosh!) to those who ask bemusedly what it is supposed to represent. In this school: nothing. Nothing from kids. Nothing from staff. I do hope it was because they were too intimidated to venture an opinion.
I also think that it might have had something to do with the shirt. In laying out a shirt last night I failed to realise that it was a double cuff without buttons. By the time I had got the thing on I was in no mood to hunt around for another shirt so I added my cousin’s cufflinks to my final attire. So with a Norwegian expressionist hanging from my neck and two large diamonds glittering at my wrists I must have been at least arresting!
The school site is built into the side of a mountain and it comprises a number of vertiginously stacked buildings which are connected by a series of rustic steps, concrete steps, wooden steps, a bridge and a playground. Did I mention steps? Well, there are a lot of them and I seemed to spend all my time traipsing up and down them.
The authentication and authorization of my documents has taken a further step towards some sort of reality by my phoning Swansea University and asking them to provide some sort of Academic Transcript of my degree. This, I understand, is normal practice nowadays, but my degree is not from nowadays.
When I spoke to a lady in the Registry in Swansea and mentioned that my degree was in the seventies she groaned and thanked me for presenting her with such an interesting problem first thing on a Monday morning.
I did not do a nice little modular degree with neat little sets of code numbers and a percentage for each element in the course. I cannot wait to see what the University comes up with! I did mention that they could make it all up as far as I was concerned as long as what they eventually produced had the University crest at the top of it and an official signature at the bottom!
At the end of one lesson one boy came up to me and asked me where I was from. When I told him I was from Wales he said, “I thought so, I could hear your accent when you said the word ‘here.’”
It turned out that this budding Professor Higgins had been on a study holiday in Brecon (Christ College, of course) and had acquired his sensitivity to things Welsh there.
Bodes well!
Not that I believe in omens of course.
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