Yellow Dust and the Future

SUNDAY 1ST MAY

Like something out of 60s science fiction series we are now having to cope with the Yellow Dust.

 

Living in an area which is called after the pine tress which are a feature of this coast and which still exist in considerable number around us it was perhaps inevitable that during the pollen season we are engulfed by a tide of yellow particles which seem to be having a deleterious effect on me.  I took to my bed for a number of hours in the hope that whatever the pollen was doing it would stop. 

My uneasy slumbers were of course accompanied by the chorus of infernal canines with which this area is truly, deeply and irritatingly affected.  I eventually merged from my enforced rest with the uneasy feeling that sunny hours were passing me by without my lying prone soaking up the rays.  The sooner the trees stop their promiscuous sexual shenanigans the better!

Tomorrow, keeping up the time pressures from our absurdly long three day week and also keeping alive the strong sense of existential angst which fuels our school, we have an after school meeting.

These meetings, as I may have mentioned in passing before, are of monumental, terminal and life-denying boredom.  Only the most ascetic monks given to daily flagellation and the wearing of lice-infected hair shirts could see these meetings as anything other than what they actually are: direct works of the Evil One!

I know that I shouldn’t write this, but I will anyway.  This term is relatively short: we are already in May and we finish school at the end of June.  By my calculations that gives us 31+30 days making 61 days or 8 weeks 5 days.  Allowing 16 days for the weekends we are left with a total of 45 days of teaching time or 6 weeks 3 days.  You would never guess that I am looking forward to the summer holidays would you!

Let’s face it, it is by such computations that one preserves one’s sanity!


MONDAY 2ND MAY

At least two of my colleagues are in school when they should be at home: one of them has virtually no voice and the other was physically sick this morning after a weekend of illness.

Because of the total lack of supply staff during normal absence and even for those absences of more than three days known in advance, there is a moral imperative for teachers to come into school when they are not well because they know that the burden of their teaching will be foisted onto other colleagues, usually within their departments.  If British conditions were imposed on our school it would fall apart within a few months, unless radical and professional precautions were taken.  Fond hope!

Far better to think about the end of June and release!

Well, talk about hoist with my own petard of concern!  After having suggested to one of my colleagues that he go home, he has now taken my advice and I am lumped with his class.  Such is life!

All this, just before the Unending Meeting of Doom.  What a way to start the week!