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Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Every day has an ending


One of the many pleasures in this country is going to a nondescript bar/restaurant in the centre of town on the Ramblas (well, our version in Castelldefels) and having a set meal where each one of the three courses was well cooked, delicious and well presented. An important factor in my enjoyment was the quality of the cutlery: chunky, modern, sinuous and clean. And a drink was included in the €9 cost. Excellent!

Traffic continues to be horrific on the way to work, in spite of the fact that I am leaving for school almost literally at the crack of dawn. The traffic was nothing like so intense in the last academic year and it adds a level of stress to the beginning of the day which I can do without. As I can the continuous noise of the aircraft which now seem to use the lights in the garden as an essential guide on their flight paths.

If this is what it is going to be like with the new terminal taking extra flights then the tranquillity of the area is going to be rudely shattered! Ah well, I’m buggered if I am going to move again for a few years at least!

I still have not found my pace in the new academic year and I (in common with my colleagues) am tired at the end of the day. Two colleagues today told me that they go home and plonk themselves in front of the telly and have a drink. And who can blame them? And us. And me!

My classes with older pupils are learning how to encourage me to regale them with the ‘unconsidered trifles’ from my rag bag mind. I do try and link everything I say to some salient grammatical or linguistic point though I have to admit that my connections are sometimes tenuous to say the least.

I find myself remembering a past deputy head who used to use the most amazing and wildly unsuitable topics in his morning assemblies (quite safely, I was always the only person in the hall actually listening to him!) and then suddenly lurch towards the inevitable moral at the end of his incomprehensible diatribe by saying something like, “And so don’t drop litter!” Sometimes I was literally open mouthed in amazement at the glorious non sequiters which he threw at an unheeding audience!

I truly fear that his example is coming back to haunt me and I sometimes frighten myself by how far I have deviated from teaching the tedious grammatical archaisms in which our text books seem to delight.

If any of our pupils actually went to Britain and started using in normal speech some of the convoluted constructions they are encouraged to form then people will back away from them in horror!

I do try to keep myself in check and stick to what I am supposed to be teaching, but with such uninteresting source material I do find that I have a Homer-like attention span when it comes to the text books.

Unfortunately, these are the Holy Texts on which a whole series of examinations are going to be based so I will have to knuckle down and get on with promulgating the silly lessons contained therein to give my pupils a chance of passing.

I think that the kids will remember my ties more clearly than the exciting aspects of grammar packaged so tediously in the books. I am open to the suggestion that it would therefore be my professional duty to find a more attractive way of presenting the information so that they could respond to it more easily.

To which of course the simple answer is that they do not pay me enough for that! And I have no confidence that they ever will.

Our Culture Club has now expanded its membership to three. I can’t help thinking that giving up a free Friday afternoon to culture is something of a stumbling block to most pupils.

We are still determined to try and get our programme for the Club offered to the kids in another way, but it will take some rethinking and a little more commitment from a generally unenthusiastic student body before our ideas for a thriving centre for cultural dissemination and discussion becomes a reality within the school.

Still, we do not despair and the preparations for our visit to La Caixa Forum to visit the major exhibition of the paintings of Vlaminck continue. We spent a period in the morning deciding on the most striking poster that we could to try and whip up a little support for this cultural jaunt – we will have to see if the wild beast aspect of this particular Fauve can still stimulate the jaded appetites of our pupils.

One more full teaching day and then off to see the kids mess about in boats. Oh for the pen of a Jerome K Jerome to describe their antics.

But I don’t know what to expect from this little weekly jaunt and I don’t particularly want to ask for details in case it is too prosaic.

As always I live in hope.

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