My little poisoned seeds of discontent are beginning to sprout. The shoots are tentative; shyly seeking the light – but they are there.
Our school day has seven lessons in it. Some teachers start at 8.15 in the morning and the day ends at 4.45 in the afternoon. It therefore follows that there are seven periods in the day with a possible total of 35 periods in the week as opposed to the normal 25 in real schools. This means that timetabling is an absolute breeze and people are grateful (!) that they have at least one free period in their artificially extended day!
Having been in a school that taught in a 40 period week - which was converted in 20 double periods of subjects like English, Maths and Science. A proposal was to convert our timetable to a 25 period week with, it was stressed, ‘exactly the same teaching time’. In spite of my protestations that this conversion was actually a 25% increase in teaching opportunities, such qualifications fell on deaf ears and everyone thought that I was making a fuss over nothing until they had their new timetables and saw that they were actually seeing more pupils . . . Ah, well, they learned their lesson – a little too late but they are a little wiser now.
Except of course they are not. All things that were major outrages pale into tradition or normality in the course of time. And in the case of teachers a very short time indeed. It has always astonished me how quickly things are accepted. For example, I was very quickly the only person in school who persisted in writing in BAKER DAY when we had INSET in memory of the bastard who took days off our holidays in order to push forward his agenda and force teachers to come in and enjoy in-house entertainment in the name of education.
There is a weary acceptance on the part of my colleagues that things are not right, but they do not seem to have any idea about how things might be made better. My conversations about unionism have received mixed responses, but again the overwhelming impression is one of dogged acceptance that things cannot be better than they are.
We shall see. My teaching materials are so intensely boring and the type of English that I am teaching barely touches my imagination that I must have another ‘interest’ to keep my mind alive!
We are building up to another completely arbitrary period of testing in our school. The rote learning has started and all ‘knowledge’ stuffed into brains for the examination period will be jettisoned immediately after the papers have been sat.
It is my responsibility to write a test paper for one group of older kids and the head of English has kindly sent me some past papers to get me started! But the second volume in the Millennium series is waiting for me to crack its spine and that is a much more tempting proposition than printing out fairly pointless English grammar and vocabulary questions. Still, needs must when the devil drives.
I have recently discovered that the mythical ‘two extra pays’ are going to stay in the realms of myth for me until another year has passed. The logic behind these ‘bonus’ (!) payments is based on the length of time that you have been in the school. So, by December I will have worked in the school (according to my new contract) for four months. My bonus will be four times my monthly salary divided by 12. By June my summer bonus will be ten times my monthly salary divided by 10. By a year next Christmas my bonus will be an extra month’s pay. Such is the simple ‘system’ by which we work!
This does however mean that the extra sum of money that I was expecting for the Christmas season will not be there, or at least not quite in the quantity I was hoping for! But in the immortal words of Mehitabel brought to us by Don Marquis http://www.donmarquis.com/index.html:
Our school day has seven lessons in it. Some teachers start at 8.15 in the morning and the day ends at 4.45 in the afternoon. It therefore follows that there are seven periods in the day with a possible total of 35 periods in the week as opposed to the normal 25 in real schools. This means that timetabling is an absolute breeze and people are grateful (!) that they have at least one free period in their artificially extended day!
Having been in a school that taught in a 40 period week - which was converted in 20 double periods of subjects like English, Maths and Science. A proposal was to convert our timetable to a 25 period week with, it was stressed, ‘exactly the same teaching time’. In spite of my protestations that this conversion was actually a 25% increase in teaching opportunities, such qualifications fell on deaf ears and everyone thought that I was making a fuss over nothing until they had their new timetables and saw that they were actually seeing more pupils . . . Ah, well, they learned their lesson – a little too late but they are a little wiser now.
Except of course they are not. All things that were major outrages pale into tradition or normality in the course of time. And in the case of teachers a very short time indeed. It has always astonished me how quickly things are accepted. For example, I was very quickly the only person in school who persisted in writing in BAKER DAY when we had INSET in memory of the bastard who took days off our holidays in order to push forward his agenda and force teachers to come in and enjoy in-house entertainment in the name of education.
There is a weary acceptance on the part of my colleagues that things are not right, but they do not seem to have any idea about how things might be made better. My conversations about unionism have received mixed responses, but again the overwhelming impression is one of dogged acceptance that things cannot be better than they are.
We shall see. My teaching materials are so intensely boring and the type of English that I am teaching barely touches my imagination that I must have another ‘interest’ to keep my mind alive!
We are building up to another completely arbitrary period of testing in our school. The rote learning has started and all ‘knowledge’ stuffed into brains for the examination period will be jettisoned immediately after the papers have been sat.
It is my responsibility to write a test paper for one group of older kids and the head of English has kindly sent me some past papers to get me started! But the second volume in the Millennium series is waiting for me to crack its spine and that is a much more tempting proposition than printing out fairly pointless English grammar and vocabulary questions. Still, needs must when the devil drives.
I have recently discovered that the mythical ‘two extra pays’ are going to stay in the realms of myth for me until another year has passed. The logic behind these ‘bonus’ (!) payments is based on the length of time that you have been in the school. So, by December I will have worked in the school (according to my new contract) for four months. My bonus will be four times my monthly salary divided by 12. By June my summer bonus will be ten times my monthly salary divided by 10. By a year next Christmas my bonus will be an extra month’s pay. Such is the simple ‘system’ by which we work!
This does however mean that the extra sum of money that I was expecting for the Christmas season will not be there, or at least not quite in the quantity I was hoping for! But in the immortal words of Mehitabel brought to us by Don Marquis http://www.donmarquis.com/index.html:
wotthehell wotthehell
cage me and i d go frantic
my life is so romantic
capricious and corybantic
and i m toujours gai toujours gai
Always worth having a little jolt of reality from a regal cat!
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