I fail to see how such a poor day as today follows from such a glorious day as yesterday. There is almost a Puritan sense of equilibrium about the weather nowadays: fine has to be compensated with cloudy, otherwise we sun worshippers will get above ourselves!
At least it isn’t raining and that is a big plus!
Today has seen the culmination of my literary vandalism as I taught the eviscerated text of “Sredni Vashtar” to my pupils. My ‘edited’ version of Saki’s story removes just about everything that makes the story ironic and interesting, but it does leave the essential narrative. I have been far too frightened to do a close comparison between the two texts as I fear it would reduce me to tears, but I am strengthened in my resolve by the reaction to even this pale reflection of what Saki’s style is really like.
In our working day we have seven teaching slots and today I am teaching in six of them. It must make a considerable difference when timetabling that you have teachers with a weekly total of 35 slots rather than the more customary 25 of British teachers: that is a 40% advantage over the ordinary British system. I teach in 23 slots and have an English Department Meeting in an extra one making a total of 24. In Britain there are usually 25 periods in a week so in British terms my timetable is 96% full! Of course, given that we have seven periods rather than five in the normal day (note that I say normal!) there is a free period (at least) on each day – but I would much rather go home than stay until 4.45 pm which is the offrical end of the day.
It means of course that a meeting this evening for the whole staff will start at 5.00 pm and probably not finish until at least 5.30 pm (with luck) and that means that I will be home by about 6.15 pm having started the school day at 8.45 am and having got up at 7.00 am. There must be an easier way to make money! Or to put it another way: Quit moaning, it pays the rent!
All wrong! It’s been raining and the meeting went on until after 6! The explanation of what was going to happen next year was conducted in frantic Spanish with incomprehensible slides to illustrate what nobody understood.
As far as I followed what was being said, the upshot is that I will have to be teaching four year olds for a few days in February or March during a week when every other school in the public sector is on holiday. The gain is that nothing of our holiday will be taken away in July. I think. I will have to wait for tomorrow to get an overview of what people think they understood!
I have finished reading “Mad Dogs and an English Girl – A stranger in Franco’s Spain” by Caroline Waterman. This is an account of a year spent in Spain in the 1950s when she was in Burgos teaching English to the natives.
This is an oddly unpretentious book where the concern is to tell a convincing narrative and leave out some interesting points which would clarify some of the action! Nevertheless it is a beguiling book with a view of a repressed soci8ety held by the grip of a fascist dictatorship with the suffocating assistance of the Roman Church.
Our Caroline is, in comparison with the Spanish girls, outward going and assertive, but her story is one of essential guilelessness and, for me, it lacked real bite. It’s style is descriptive without being over perceptive. Too tame for me!
By way of a change I impulsively selected a slim volume from the bookshelf nearest to my desk and reread “The Flower Beneath the Foot” by the endlessly fascinating Ronald Firbank. I am tempted to say that the introduction by John Mortimer in the Penguin Modern Classics edition was better than the writing it introduced, but that would be to deny the dark fascination with an imagination run riot and yet seemingly at home in the world of slapstick as well.
This novel reminds me of the poems of W B Yeats – not in terms of content or style but because Firbank and Yeats both make me wonder if they are not perhaps perpetrating gigantic jokes on a gullible literary public. And if they are, are they necessarily the worse for that!
The television channels are still full of Barça’s victory over the Old Enemy and I am amazed at how much mileage can be made from one very ordinary football match.
Even if the result was quite satisfactory.
At least it isn’t raining and that is a big plus!
Today has seen the culmination of my literary vandalism as I taught the eviscerated text of “Sredni Vashtar” to my pupils. My ‘edited’ version of Saki’s story removes just about everything that makes the story ironic and interesting, but it does leave the essential narrative. I have been far too frightened to do a close comparison between the two texts as I fear it would reduce me to tears, but I am strengthened in my resolve by the reaction to even this pale reflection of what Saki’s style is really like.
In our working day we have seven teaching slots and today I am teaching in six of them. It must make a considerable difference when timetabling that you have teachers with a weekly total of 35 slots rather than the more customary 25 of British teachers: that is a 40% advantage over the ordinary British system. I teach in 23 slots and have an English Department Meeting in an extra one making a total of 24. In Britain there are usually 25 periods in a week so in British terms my timetable is 96% full! Of course, given that we have seven periods rather than five in the normal day (note that I say normal!) there is a free period (at least) on each day – but I would much rather go home than stay until 4.45 pm which is the offrical end of the day.
It means of course that a meeting this evening for the whole staff will start at 5.00 pm and probably not finish until at least 5.30 pm (with luck) and that means that I will be home by about 6.15 pm having started the school day at 8.45 am and having got up at 7.00 am. There must be an easier way to make money! Or to put it another way: Quit moaning, it pays the rent!
All wrong! It’s been raining and the meeting went on until after 6! The explanation of what was going to happen next year was conducted in frantic Spanish with incomprehensible slides to illustrate what nobody understood.
As far as I followed what was being said, the upshot is that I will have to be teaching four year olds for a few days in February or March during a week when every other school in the public sector is on holiday. The gain is that nothing of our holiday will be taken away in July. I think. I will have to wait for tomorrow to get an overview of what people think they understood!
I have finished reading “Mad Dogs and an English Girl – A stranger in Franco’s Spain” by Caroline Waterman. This is an account of a year spent in Spain in the 1950s when she was in Burgos teaching English to the natives.
This is an oddly unpretentious book where the concern is to tell a convincing narrative and leave out some interesting points which would clarify some of the action! Nevertheless it is a beguiling book with a view of a repressed soci8ety held by the grip of a fascist dictatorship with the suffocating assistance of the Roman Church.
Our Caroline is, in comparison with the Spanish girls, outward going and assertive, but her story is one of essential guilelessness and, for me, it lacked real bite. It’s style is descriptive without being over perceptive. Too tame for me!
By way of a change I impulsively selected a slim volume from the bookshelf nearest to my desk and reread “The Flower Beneath the Foot” by the endlessly fascinating Ronald Firbank. I am tempted to say that the introduction by John Mortimer in the Penguin Modern Classics edition was better than the writing it introduced, but that would be to deny the dark fascination with an imagination run riot and yet seemingly at home in the world of slapstick as well.
This novel reminds me of the poems of W B Yeats – not in terms of content or style but because Firbank and Yeats both make me wonder if they are not perhaps perpetrating gigantic jokes on a gullible literary public. And if they are, are they necessarily the worse for that!
The television channels are still full of Barça’s victory over the Old Enemy and I am amazed at how much mileage can be made from one very ordinary football match.
Even if the result was quite satisfactory.
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