Having started at the crack of dawn on two days of this week I am entitled to an early departure on a day of my choice. Friday seemed the obvious candidate and so I was able to slip away unhindered by the fleet of cars that appear at the end of school to ferry away our privileged charges.
I used my early leave to call in to the medical centre to replenish my supply of drugs and to find out (if possible) why I have been sent a second medical card.
Amazingly there was no queue at the pharmacist in the medical centre and so was able to waltz in immediately and get my prescriptions. There is no explanation for the extra card, I was told to keep it safe and use it if I lost the other. It is ironic that getting the first one was so bureaucratically difficult and the second comes as a free gift!
As if in a form of compensation for ease of acquisition, it took three attempts to find a dispensing pharmacist that was open, but I was still home and sipping a well earned cup of tea before the time that I would have left school normally. Result!
I have now been at the school for a grand total of seven working days, but it feels as if I have been there for an absurdly longer period of time. The children are friendly to the point of caricature and I have begun to suspect that their attitude is one of ironic condescension. But it isn’t. Gosh.
The food is even more unreal, but I don’t say anything in case it all disappears in a puff of smoke!
The kids are NOT all angels, by no means! But they are the sort of pupils that most teachers would give important parts of their bodies to teach.
It will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that I have started a campaign in school to get a portable OHP machine. Many classrooms have been equipped with an interactive white board but . . . There is always a ‘but’ with the introduction of so-called hi-tec teaching equipment.
Teachers in this school do not have a teaching base. We move to the pupils. There are laptops, but these are not readily available and are not permanently linked up to the whiteboards. Use of one would necessitate setting up the equipment before each lesson in each of the individual teaching classes and . . . well; you know it just ain’t gonna happen. So a portable OHP seems like a sensible idea.
It will be a test of the school to see how it reacts to my request. We are surely inching our way towards a new financial year when such things can be considered. I shall speculate no more, but await events. I suppose I ought to push things forward a bit by finding the model that I want and presenting the powers that be with proof of its existence and an indication of expense. I declare this project open!
I took my tea out on to the balcony and watched the waves. This was the sort of sea that my father would have loved. The wind was whipping the tops of the crests into a misty spray which was catching the evening sun. For the first time here, the breaking waves out to sea did actually look as though there were ‘white horses’ galloping towards the shore! With the deep pounding and crashing of the walls of water on the wind raked sand it all combined to give a stunningly beautiful display.
A rough sea always stimulated my father and it is a continuing regret that he cannot (except in the imagination) sit next to me puffing contentedly on his pipe occasionally quoting some fragment of poetry learned from books taken from the library in Abergwinfi!
Or perhaps learned from his sister whom he fondly believed was the author of ‘Jerusalem’! I can well imagine his sister (my aunt) not telling him the truth too!
This weekend a bus tip to MNAC is called for as I have been deprived of interesting galleries for too long.
I wonder if they do a menu del dia on a Saturday there!
I used my early leave to call in to the medical centre to replenish my supply of drugs and to find out (if possible) why I have been sent a second medical card.
Amazingly there was no queue at the pharmacist in the medical centre and so was able to waltz in immediately and get my prescriptions. There is no explanation for the extra card, I was told to keep it safe and use it if I lost the other. It is ironic that getting the first one was so bureaucratically difficult and the second comes as a free gift!
As if in a form of compensation for ease of acquisition, it took three attempts to find a dispensing pharmacist that was open, but I was still home and sipping a well earned cup of tea before the time that I would have left school normally. Result!
I have now been at the school for a grand total of seven working days, but it feels as if I have been there for an absurdly longer period of time. The children are friendly to the point of caricature and I have begun to suspect that their attitude is one of ironic condescension. But it isn’t. Gosh.
The food is even more unreal, but I don’t say anything in case it all disappears in a puff of smoke!
The kids are NOT all angels, by no means! But they are the sort of pupils that most teachers would give important parts of their bodies to teach.
It will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that I have started a campaign in school to get a portable OHP machine. Many classrooms have been equipped with an interactive white board but . . . There is always a ‘but’ with the introduction of so-called hi-tec teaching equipment.
Teachers in this school do not have a teaching base. We move to the pupils. There are laptops, but these are not readily available and are not permanently linked up to the whiteboards. Use of one would necessitate setting up the equipment before each lesson in each of the individual teaching classes and . . . well; you know it just ain’t gonna happen. So a portable OHP seems like a sensible idea.
It will be a test of the school to see how it reacts to my request. We are surely inching our way towards a new financial year when such things can be considered. I shall speculate no more, but await events. I suppose I ought to push things forward a bit by finding the model that I want and presenting the powers that be with proof of its existence and an indication of expense. I declare this project open!
I took my tea out on to the balcony and watched the waves. This was the sort of sea that my father would have loved. The wind was whipping the tops of the crests into a misty spray which was catching the evening sun. For the first time here, the breaking waves out to sea did actually look as though there were ‘white horses’ galloping towards the shore! With the deep pounding and crashing of the walls of water on the wind raked sand it all combined to give a stunningly beautiful display.
A rough sea always stimulated my father and it is a continuing regret that he cannot (except in the imagination) sit next to me puffing contentedly on his pipe occasionally quoting some fragment of poetry learned from books taken from the library in Abergwinfi!
Or perhaps learned from his sister whom he fondly believed was the author of ‘Jerusalem’! I can well imagine his sister (my aunt) not telling him the truth too!
This weekend a bus tip to MNAC is called for as I have been deprived of interesting galleries for too long.
I wonder if they do a menu del dia on a Saturday there!
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