Well, it didn’t rain today in spite of the rather uninspiring weather forecast which assured us that it would. Broken cloud with intervals of brilliant sunshine was what we actually had and, gloomy periods ignored, a refreshing swim in the pool.
Today was Toni’s name day and the opportunity for him to rake in various presents from his family. My gift (the TV dongle for the computer) was slightly tarnished by the fact that the artistic construction which doubled as an aerial signally didn’t work. Still there should be hours of some sort of fun in looking at the myriad stations that are able to be picked up with the equipment supplied.
There are now 17 days left to the end of the month. If we take the last ‘working’ week in the month which is a week without the kids and the two days of the weekend that precede it and subtract those days from the total we are left with eleven days. San Juan on the 24th is a holiday so take another day off and we are left with 10 days. There is a weekend at the end of this week, so we are left with 8 working days. That is this week and a few days of next as the full extent of school time with pupils. That sounds doable.
Now, although my colleagues might not be actually writing down these calculations, they are certainly thinking them. One of my colleagues asked me weeks ago when we could start counting down the days. I was strict and told him that such an approach was unacceptable until the month of June had actually started. As soon as we started counting days he wanted to know when we could start counting hours. Again I was strict and told him that this was unacceptable in all professional educational institutions until the last week of term. One must have standards otherwise chaos looms!
Of course institutions have their own little ways of making sure that the summer holidays are fully appreciated. Tomorrow we have an endless meeting of almost unendurable vacuity when “colleagues” (we all know them, they are the same in all schools under the sun) feel the need to give their sixpence worth of gabble although nobody wants to hear them, or rather at this stage of term Nobody Wants To Hear Them At All. It means that I will reel out of the meeting at about 7.30 pm after a working day which stretches from 8.45 to 4.45. The meeting starting at 5.00 just about giving one time to snatch a glass of water and fix firmly in place the disinterested smile which indicates to all and sundry that one is present but not voting. This smile will stay fixed until the end of the “discussion” when, with what I like to think of as highly visible contempt I rush to my car and flee to Castelldefels trying to blot from my mind that when I finally arrive home, distrait, emotionally drained and extremely pissed off that this is only the first day of the week!
The one good thing of course is that I will be able to subtract it from the measly total of 8 working days with kids and perhaps I will allow a wan smile to cross my thin lips!
As the sole British male at the lunch today I felt the onus of alcoholic irresponsibility rest firmly on my shoulders and I am ashamed to admit that my total consumption was one glass of Tinto de Verano – a bottled mixture of red wine and lightly sugared pop! I have no real excuse for this unbecoming abstinence except to say that everyone else drank less than I did! It is very trying to be British and to attempt to fit in with the perverse aversion to excess by which I am surrounded! It is only in our “Wine Tastings” that I feel truly at home!
I know that school tomorrow is going to be chaos. Examination results have to be entered on a computer programme for the meeting tomorrow afternoon and there is an invariable crash which turns all teachers into nervous wrecks. At least this year I know that it is going to happen and so I can, oddly, be a little more relaxed about it. I have learned to feed off other peoples’ hysteria and I have used it like a sedative, so that as civilization is razed to the ground around me I assume my laurel wreath, take out my lyre and follow the music illuminated by the flames around me!
As far as I can work out, all our results are nothing more than smoke reflected in a series of cunningly placed mirrors that have the same relationship with reality as does Lewis Carroll’s world. When dealing with institutions it is always good to remember the wise words of Humpty Dumpty when he said, “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.”
I defy anyone who has worked in education for longer than a week to tell me that they haven’t experienced a situation in which they could have been talking to Humpty Dumpty. Alice, of course, spoke for all of use toilers in the field when she said, “The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.” God bless her! The voice of reason; a little plaintive and naïf, but with the ring of solid logic behind it. It puts Humpty Dumpty clearly in his place and reduces him to stunned silence.
Anyone who believes that in a scholastic context must have worked for less than the week that I talked about. Humpty Dumpty comes back with the unanswerable managerial question stopper, “The question is which is to be master -- that's all.”
At times like these I remember a younger version of myself speaking to Ivor Davies, Trade Union supported Labour MP for Gower when I was a student representative talking to the Council of my University. I used language that should have been common to us both but I was surprised and hurt (I was young) that this MP with a rock solid majority was a true Humpty Dumpty and he may as well have been speaking Serbo-Croat for all the sense that our dialogue held. I have, over time, come t see this exchange as, at best a learning experience, at worst . . . ah, I was always too sensitive and easily hurt to become a politician!
Writing all this has neatly ensured that I didn’t actually do any of the school work that I only half heartedly planned to do this weekend.
C’est la vie!
Today was Toni’s name day and the opportunity for him to rake in various presents from his family. My gift (the TV dongle for the computer) was slightly tarnished by the fact that the artistic construction which doubled as an aerial signally didn’t work. Still there should be hours of some sort of fun in looking at the myriad stations that are able to be picked up with the equipment supplied.
There are now 17 days left to the end of the month. If we take the last ‘working’ week in the month which is a week without the kids and the two days of the weekend that precede it and subtract those days from the total we are left with eleven days. San Juan on the 24th is a holiday so take another day off and we are left with 10 days. There is a weekend at the end of this week, so we are left with 8 working days. That is this week and a few days of next as the full extent of school time with pupils. That sounds doable.
Now, although my colleagues might not be actually writing down these calculations, they are certainly thinking them. One of my colleagues asked me weeks ago when we could start counting down the days. I was strict and told him that such an approach was unacceptable until the month of June had actually started. As soon as we started counting days he wanted to know when we could start counting hours. Again I was strict and told him that this was unacceptable in all professional educational institutions until the last week of term. One must have standards otherwise chaos looms!
Of course institutions have their own little ways of making sure that the summer holidays are fully appreciated. Tomorrow we have an endless meeting of almost unendurable vacuity when “colleagues” (we all know them, they are the same in all schools under the sun) feel the need to give their sixpence worth of gabble although nobody wants to hear them, or rather at this stage of term Nobody Wants To Hear Them At All. It means that I will reel out of the meeting at about 7.30 pm after a working day which stretches from 8.45 to 4.45. The meeting starting at 5.00 just about giving one time to snatch a glass of water and fix firmly in place the disinterested smile which indicates to all and sundry that one is present but not voting. This smile will stay fixed until the end of the “discussion” when, with what I like to think of as highly visible contempt I rush to my car and flee to Castelldefels trying to blot from my mind that when I finally arrive home, distrait, emotionally drained and extremely pissed off that this is only the first day of the week!
The one good thing of course is that I will be able to subtract it from the measly total of 8 working days with kids and perhaps I will allow a wan smile to cross my thin lips!
As the sole British male at the lunch today I felt the onus of alcoholic irresponsibility rest firmly on my shoulders and I am ashamed to admit that my total consumption was one glass of Tinto de Verano – a bottled mixture of red wine and lightly sugared pop! I have no real excuse for this unbecoming abstinence except to say that everyone else drank less than I did! It is very trying to be British and to attempt to fit in with the perverse aversion to excess by which I am surrounded! It is only in our “Wine Tastings” that I feel truly at home!
I know that school tomorrow is going to be chaos. Examination results have to be entered on a computer programme for the meeting tomorrow afternoon and there is an invariable crash which turns all teachers into nervous wrecks. At least this year I know that it is going to happen and so I can, oddly, be a little more relaxed about it. I have learned to feed off other peoples’ hysteria and I have used it like a sedative, so that as civilization is razed to the ground around me I assume my laurel wreath, take out my lyre and follow the music illuminated by the flames around me!
As far as I can work out, all our results are nothing more than smoke reflected in a series of cunningly placed mirrors that have the same relationship with reality as does Lewis Carroll’s world. When dealing with institutions it is always good to remember the wise words of Humpty Dumpty when he said, “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.”
I defy anyone who has worked in education for longer than a week to tell me that they haven’t experienced a situation in which they could have been talking to Humpty Dumpty. Alice, of course, spoke for all of use toilers in the field when she said, “The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.” God bless her! The voice of reason; a little plaintive and naïf, but with the ring of solid logic behind it. It puts Humpty Dumpty clearly in his place and reduces him to stunned silence.
Anyone who believes that in a scholastic context must have worked for less than the week that I talked about. Humpty Dumpty comes back with the unanswerable managerial question stopper, “The question is which is to be master -- that's all.”
At times like these I remember a younger version of myself speaking to Ivor Davies, Trade Union supported Labour MP for Gower when I was a student representative talking to the Council of my University. I used language that should have been common to us both but I was surprised and hurt (I was young) that this MP with a rock solid majority was a true Humpty Dumpty and he may as well have been speaking Serbo-Croat for all the sense that our dialogue held. I have, over time, come t see this exchange as, at best a learning experience, at worst . . . ah, I was always too sensitive and easily hurt to become a politician!
Writing all this has neatly ensured that I didn’t actually do any of the school work that I only half heartedly planned to do this weekend.
C’est la vie!
No comments:
Post a Comment