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Wednesday, June 22, 2011

I see the light!



TUESDAY 21st JUNE 2011

A glorious day – made even better by the lack of certain of our more problematic classes who have been taken or are going to be taken to the beach for a wonderful day out!  O Joy!

Unfortunately there are still classes left here in school so that my day is again going to be taken up with arid supervision of kids who are more than 90% on holiday and are certainly not orientated towards things academic.

The remaining teachers are wandering ghost-like around the place with vacant expressions and a more than vague feeling of unease.  This is, in part, explicable when you consider that the day after tomorrow we have one of our marathon courses which this year is going to be about self-evaluation.

This course is going to be led by an outside expert (you will have noticed that I didn’t even put inverted commas around that word, I am not as cynical as you might think) in a foreign tongue, so I will have to do my best to remember all the guff I was told when I last went through all this years ago!

If you spend more than ten years in education you get used to seeing old ideas repackaged and thrown your way, as the “latest thing”.  This inevitably will blunt your professional enthusiasm – the cyclical nature of innovation in education is one of the more depressing aspects of the whole experience. 

Please note that I said “one of” not, emphatically not, “the” most depressing aspect.  I always recall the observation of my father (inter alia) that “Teaching is 25% satisfaction and 75% degradation” and, while one can always quarrel over percentages, its truth will be universally acknowledged!

I have just been interrupted by one of my upper sixth pupils, an able but lazy student, who has taken an arm-huggingly, sentimentally eye-moistened leave of his teachers. 
 
I wish him well and will miss him but he, like so many others who have passed through the school, will come back to visit. 

Remember some of the kids here have spent up to sixteen (16) years in this place!  Starting school here at the age of three and leaving only to go to university! 

The idea of having spent 16 years in my school (any of them) is more horrific than I can contemplate with any degree of equanimity.

Because the dynamics of the school have been unsettled by the unsettled sequence of events that mark the end of term and year, I have got the day wrong and have been confidently planning my day as a Thursday when it is, stubbornly a Tuesday. 

The good news is that it should mean that after the next lesson I should be free for the rest of the day.

I realize that such a remark is a two-fingered snook at fortune and I await with weary resignation the collapse of all my plans for indolent ease.

The basic problem with this place is that there are no convincingly secure hiding places to avoid the almost intolerable peer pressure which demands that all teachers should be seen to be working when sitting in either staff room.

Surprisingly I have now lost a “gained” free and look well placed to lose a second.  Life is never as you expect.

I have just come from an impromptu showing of one of the X-Men films out of which one boy walked brushing past the teacher in charge and saying to me, en passant,  that he wasn’t going to waste hours of his life watching it.  I suppose that he has a point, but it is also a fact that one can dissect any crappy film and gain some sense of intellectual satisfaction from it or at least from the process of analysing it. 

After all, quite apart from the technical aspects of the film itself which are endlessly interesting such as editing, camera shots, colour, lens choice etc. there are the locations, costumes, props, music, lighting and we haven’t even got to the acting and the story line. The political, social and increasingly economic concerns are always interesting not only as elements within the film itself, but also in its shooting, production, advertising and distribution.

If archaeologists can go into raptures over a single human tooth or fragment of jaw or some mundane domestic artefact, then any student of film should find more than enough to talk or think about in any film ever made!  

Take the whole series of “X-Men” films, you do not have to strain too far to see them as part of the continuing discussion of science in evolution; of the outsider in society; of the concept of the übermensch; of the conflict of god-given versus man-created; of the fear of the unknown – and so on ad infinitum.

The Father figure of Charles Xavier is merely a variation on the character in “Trilby” mixed with the inevitable dash of “Jekyll and Hyde” combining to create yet another variant on yet another re-working of the “Frankenstein” myth.

Each of the “characters” in the films can be traced through myth and tale as well as through the rather more recent genealogy of Marvel Comics!

The action of the films is a basic Boys’ Own Story with a superficial overlay of popcorn social concern and politics – just enough edge to cause no concern whatsoever to the establishment.

There is always something to think about which is better than the rubbish that you are watching!

Which doesn’t justify the arrogant walking out by a disturbing student.  When his action was reported to the head of studies he audibly groaned and visibly shrugged his shoulders in disgusted exasperation.

At present I am supervising the 4ESO which is our last class before they enter the equivalent of the sixth form.  I have to say they do not bode well for our senior school next year!

So, from looking towards a pupil free day I have now lost the equivalent of three periods sitting with pupils who have lost the will to study. 

We are not dealing with the crème-de-la-crème here, but rather with the people who are taking recuperation exams to allow them to continue their studies next year. 

They show little concern because they know full well that they will have to do appallingly badly not to be allowed to come back next year.

We do have pupils retaking a year and this means that some of our pupils may have been in this school for up to 18 years before they finally leave.  I believe there was one person who was here for almost 20 years!  Even convicted murderers manage to get out of prison before then!

Two hours supervising the 4ESO is not my idea of fun.  And it was followed by another hour of supervision.  Disaster!  As I prophesised at the beginning of the day, my life of ease was nothing but an illusion, rudely shattered on the shards of young voices!

At least the swim was good when I got home – though the beautiful day had subsided into a humid slightly overcast afternoon.  And there were two people who had the sheer effrontery to be in the pool when I made my way to the shower before my immersion.  What is more they stayed in the pool, chatting in the shallow end as I made my way up and down!  Some people have no manner of breeding at all!

With myopia and earplugs you can enclose yourself in a watery world in the swimming pool and Others become vague shapes more noticeable for blocking the tracery of light from the rippling surface on the tessellations under the water than anything else.  And I out-swam their stay and claimed the pool for mine own!

Tomorrow is fin de course – the end of the academic term and year for the students –we “celebrate” by having “fun and games” with the students and then get rid of them at lunchtime and have a seafood spectacular for staff.

Last time I was in charge of skipping – I kid you not.  Lengths of rope were strewn around a part of the playground and, in spite of other more productive uses springing unaided and immediately to mind, pupils, teachers and parents were encouraged to show their prowess and dexterity by avoiding the swinging rope.  Needless to say I sat immobile in my proprietorial chair and spent my time encouraging others to shocking displays of cringe-making ineptitude.

By the time we were finished we seemed to have acquired more rope than when we had started.  One of those little conundrums which enliven one’s life.

WEDNESDAY 22nd JUNE 2011

Where do you put the emphasis on tombola: surely on the “bo”?  Not in this part of the world where the word is mangled with the emphasis on the “tom” – and what is more it isn’t even a tombola.  There is an element of luck in my version of the thing: you pays your money and you takes your chance, your ticket might get you anything from a bottle of ketchup to a doll.

Here the first thing that parents see when they come to sample the delights of our institution in fiesta is a string of trestle tables, paper covered and laden with the unwanted jumble from our kids.

Everything is priced in tickets that are purchased in specific strategic locations and then spent in various “fun” places around the campus.

On our tombola stall the potential punters merely asked the ticket price and then decided to pay or not.  A simple system insuring that real money was only handed over in designated places.

We actually sold out thanks in no small measure to my paranoid insistence that we get rid of as much junk as possible as soon as possible.  I instituted “special offers” which galvanized the punters into accepting rubbish as if it had a real value!

Most of the stuff we sold was of questionable value with the highlights being bags and clothing from a major international store one of whose owners sends a child to our school and is generous at occasions like this.

The most offensive item on sale was a glass version of the Eiffel Tower with which I managed to stab my thumb and decorate the white paper covering of the table with a dash of crimson!  You really can’t make such things up!

We finished half an hour before time and I got the kids to clear up and stack the trestles and the tabletops and I was back inside the staffroom with time to relax and look forward to our special meal.

Which was composed of seafood and which was delicious.  The crustaceans were washed down with Cava and orange juice and even the inevitable speeches didn’t take away the warm glow of satisfaction from such an excellent repast.

A little later than I expected I returned home and found that Toni has constructed a mosquito screen for one of the windows and was busily at work on another.  As we had to go to a hardware supermarket for some essential supplies I was able to look around for essential elements to make my illuminated peacock a little more startling.

Thanks to Toni’s suggestion I was able to find a plinth and base which now is laden with peacock, lights and high expectations for a startling display tonight when the solar lights do their stuff and catch the jewelled glass of the bird in their rays!  It makes a statement of sorts at any rate.

Today the children left.  School is now bereft of pupils and all is well with the world.  To compensate for the excess of joy that such an absence brings we have a course to enable us to complete a personal evaluation of our professional competence blah blah blah.  Or am I being too cynical.  I am certainly too old and too experience to go through this palaver all over again.  But I will and I will try and contain my evil thoughts and not let them show in my smallest gesture either facial or body.  This won’t of course work, but it will be fun trying!

Meanwhile I shall consider the fact that this week and next are four-day weeks and that I am so close I can almost touch the start of the holidays!




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