Today, disturbingly enough, even without dramatic lighting the hills of Sant Boi looked pleasingly dramatic as I zoomed past them on a generally clearish motorway.
I think I must be over working! My perceptions are being knocked out of kilter by the unnecessarily early hour at which I have to throw myself onto the mad motorways of the morning.
I shall try and take a more measured view of Sant Boi over the weekend and try and restore normality to my evaluative apparatus!
My progress around the school is punctuated by shrill cries of my name, presumably in a form of greeting from small people to whom I have not knowingly been introduced. I smile and mutter “Hello, there!” in what I take to be a dismissively disturbing way and scurry along my way. I know that these homunculi are from the primary (and even lower) school which is on the same campus as the secondary school but I want to be seen as a remote and slightly frightening character, disturbing enough to feature in their dreams as they make their way towards the educational heights of secondary. I would hate to think that I am turning, against every atom of my essential being, into some sort of avuncular character whose cheery face lightens the pupils’ downtrodden plight. Mr Chips, for me, is a character from the darkest reaches of educational psychological hell and on a par with The Joker and the gone but not forgiven Kenneth Baker – the politician not the other one.
I think the school dislocates me from my true responses because I find it very difficult to believe that I am actually there. It is difficult to explain the essential unreality of the experience, but the setting, the curriculum, my colleagues and the kids all combine to create a seething cauldron of wealth, privilege, oddness, underpayment, overwork and genuine psychosis that is difficult to match in my experience.
I flatter or delude myself that I can walk away from the job at any time and settle down to an easy existence of reading on the third floor and sipping Rioja. This ‘escape pod’ of power is enough to nourish my sense of the ridiculous and sustain me through the torrid, examination fuelled hysteria of a normal week in the place. I have to admit that my colleagues are a supportive and interesting bunch and they show real concern and it would, therefore, obviously be wrong to let them down by departing post haste.
All of this I’m-offism has been brought on by the fact that I have a set of papers to mark over the weekend: and this will be the first of many as class after class enters the maw of our evaluation system. Normally this would be a time to dread, but the disconcerting nature of the experience has been given a twist of horror by the fact that next weekend The Guests arrive and their holiday is my prime concern. (God that sentence sounds pompous and it merely masks my own dislike of the whole process of examination and the necessary expenditure of red ink on paper after paper!) Therefore the marking of the papers has to be started almost as soon as the kids have put pen to paper.
When I bleated last term that there wasn’t time to get things done, a colleague agreed with me and then said, “But they will get done, because they have to be done. So relax!” Twisted logic but, as it turned out, accurate!
Tomorrow I hope to go to Barcelona to visit the latest exhibition in La Caixa. More effort called for and I still haven’t marked the single Friday evening symbolic answer paper yet to ensure that I get the whole load of marking done by the end of the weekend.
Where’s my red pen?
I think I must be over working! My perceptions are being knocked out of kilter by the unnecessarily early hour at which I have to throw myself onto the mad motorways of the morning.
I shall try and take a more measured view of Sant Boi over the weekend and try and restore normality to my evaluative apparatus!
My progress around the school is punctuated by shrill cries of my name, presumably in a form of greeting from small people to whom I have not knowingly been introduced. I smile and mutter “Hello, there!” in what I take to be a dismissively disturbing way and scurry along my way. I know that these homunculi are from the primary (and even lower) school which is on the same campus as the secondary school but I want to be seen as a remote and slightly frightening character, disturbing enough to feature in their dreams as they make their way towards the educational heights of secondary. I would hate to think that I am turning, against every atom of my essential being, into some sort of avuncular character whose cheery face lightens the pupils’ downtrodden plight. Mr Chips, for me, is a character from the darkest reaches of educational psychological hell and on a par with The Joker and the gone but not forgiven Kenneth Baker – the politician not the other one.
I think the school dislocates me from my true responses because I find it very difficult to believe that I am actually there. It is difficult to explain the essential unreality of the experience, but the setting, the curriculum, my colleagues and the kids all combine to create a seething cauldron of wealth, privilege, oddness, underpayment, overwork and genuine psychosis that is difficult to match in my experience.
I flatter or delude myself that I can walk away from the job at any time and settle down to an easy existence of reading on the third floor and sipping Rioja. This ‘escape pod’ of power is enough to nourish my sense of the ridiculous and sustain me through the torrid, examination fuelled hysteria of a normal week in the place. I have to admit that my colleagues are a supportive and interesting bunch and they show real concern and it would, therefore, obviously be wrong to let them down by departing post haste.
All of this I’m-offism has been brought on by the fact that I have a set of papers to mark over the weekend: and this will be the first of many as class after class enters the maw of our evaluation system. Normally this would be a time to dread, but the disconcerting nature of the experience has been given a twist of horror by the fact that next weekend The Guests arrive and their holiday is my prime concern. (God that sentence sounds pompous and it merely masks my own dislike of the whole process of examination and the necessary expenditure of red ink on paper after paper!) Therefore the marking of the papers has to be started almost as soon as the kids have put pen to paper.
When I bleated last term that there wasn’t time to get things done, a colleague agreed with me and then said, “But they will get done, because they have to be done. So relax!” Twisted logic but, as it turned out, accurate!
Tomorrow I hope to go to Barcelona to visit the latest exhibition in La Caixa. More effort called for and I still haven’t marked the single Friday evening symbolic answer paper yet to ensure that I get the whole load of marking done by the end of the weekend.
Where’s my red pen?
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