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Wednesday, November 25, 2009

It's all too much!


As if to compound the dread associated with the lurking horror of having to go into school on a Saturday (which I may have mentioned before) I now find that I have lost a free period.

It is always true in schools that the more you give the more they take. My kind acquiescence in accompanying the physical education teacher to the sailing classes in the Olympic Port in Barcelona with the loss of two free periods and a much later finish are now past history and are in no way taken into consideration when colleagues are absent and have to be covered. I think that they suppose that the ‘time off in lieu’ that I take every other Thursday when I have can actually take my free periods is compensation enough to load extra cover on me.

At the wage that I am given I resent every single second that I give to this school to nurture the privileged children of the very rich.

It is by the way that free periods are treated by an institution that you can tell its professional worth.

Our school makes little or no attempt to find supply teachers. I now see that my first employment by the school was a sign of total desperation to cope with a situation of chaotic proportions and not a perfectly normal response to a long term absence. It perhaps explains why my presence was regarded with shock when they found out that I was taking the place of an absent colleague!

Colleagues collude in the penny-pinching attitude of the school. We in the English department have collapsed classes and gone through a form of internal cover to compensate for a week’s absence known in advance. And then we were asked to cover for other colleagues as well during the time that we were trying to cope with a person missing in the department.

Don’t get me wrong: I was hardly surprised by this response on the part of the management of the school, but I was shocked by my colleagues’ attitude of helplessness to perceived injustice.

Change in this place does not come about because it should. There is a long period of time when ‘discussions’ with people who have been here some time take place in some undefined way. It puts me in mind of the old way in which the leader of the Conservative Party was elected when grandees made soundings and a leader ‘emerged’ by some sort of mystical process.

The lack of an effective union, not only in schools, but, as far as I can see in the whole of Spain means that workers’ opinions can be readily ignored. The fact that we are in a financial crisis which Spain’s membership of the EU and the Euro has managed to mask from the general public to a large extent also means that the element of fear is always present in the way that people deal with management.

As someone who has been in a union all his working life and regards union participation as a normal part of the working environment, working in Catalonia has been a largely frustrating experience. The ‘lone voice’ syndrome is a commonplace: if you as an individual say anything then there is every chance that it will get back to management and there is no real support (apart from pious resolutions from your colleagues) in a professional sense to strengthen your position.

The fundamental flaw, as I see it, in the way that unions are organized in this country is that they are determined on a workplace by workplace basis and representation is of all the workers in a site regardless of their professional status. A raft of representatives will be elected by the whole of the staff and for teachers that will include the office staff, the caretaking staff and the kitchen workers. My own union membership is with a Catalan union which has a section for teachers; I am not a member of a professional body which had negotiating rights for my job as a teacher specifically.

It is a deeply flawed system and one which limits the free communication within an institution.

I am lucky that I have made contact with an excellent official in the union and he has been invaluable in offering advice and support.

On top of losing the last free period of the day I also have a Spanish lesson later this evening. The two things are not really linked, but in my mind they have a similar value in that I end up doing something which is not my first choice of activity in my life.

I dread the sheer learning involved in getting to the standard that I need to achieve to allow me to carry on a worry-free conversation with any member of staff. Finally coming to terms with the two verbs for ‘to be’ in Spanish; actually using verbs rather than the Tarzan-like manner of communication I presently adopt using well chosen nouns; actually being able to read a newspaper without the feeling that a dictionary is an essential component of my reading experience.

Truly my cup runneth over!

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