One can have too
much of a good thing and that is rapidly becoming true of the rainless weather
that we are continuing to have in September.
Things wouldn’t of
course be so bad if there was a way of regulating the temperature in various
buildings and classrooms in the school, but, when you think of it, that is
simply not the way that educational establishments work.
You wander from an
artic room with full air conditioning to the torpid, enervating heat of some
small obscure and unfashionable African country well within the White Man’s
Graveyard in the corridor to the humid, stifling malodourous miasma of the
jungle in the next classroom.
My request for a
fan was greeted with mute astonishment and the only thing that I am likely to
get is one which unfolds in a semi-circle and is printed with landscapes of the
Costa Brava or worse the unfinished Gaudà masterpiece. At least I asked.
The trick today is
to slope off before the exact end of school.
Parents descend like ravenous vultures and snatch their children away as
if they are late for the boat to throw their progeny in for a good price in the
White Slave Trade.
I cannot leave too
early or “people” will talk; I cannot leave too late (in an early sense) or
there will be no point in my going as I will be stationary in the sad, slow
procession of cars down the one lane road.
It has to be timed just right.
One of the
problems is also the consideration (or lack of it) from parents in the parking
of their cars. They are quite prepared
to double park, leave their cars and go and wait for their kids – thereby
blocking in people who have calculated to a nicety the exact time that they
need to turn the ignition!
I am now biding my
time and waiting for the coast to be clear so that I can make good my escape.
Why I should be
clandestine about leaving in MY free period when we teach five periods more
than our colleagues in state schools and get paid a damn sight less with poorer
conditions of service, I don’t know. But
the oppression of niceness with which our school is laced makes any overt
flouting of the unwritten rules difficult.
The missing books
are still confusing everyone. A course
last year and the year before had, as one of its component parts, the reading
of a novel in English. These were all
collected in last term and stored in a room next to a small classroom. This term there are not there.
There was a great
clear out of old books which had been mouldering in seldom frequented cupboards
– but the 50 or so books that are in question were fairly new and did not look
like rubbish. But they are not there.
My initial feeling
was that it was all my fault in some way until, piecing together my memory of
the last days of last term I realised that my version of events bore some relation
to reality.
Corroboration of
my memory was afforded by a colleague who is now teaching in the primary sector
of the school and it was with a huge sigh of relief that I was able to expand
the general level of guilt to another human being.
Every likely and
unlikely place has been searched and nothing has been found. There are about 13 or so books with the other
stock that was salvaged from the general destruction, but these rogue copies
just make the non-appearance of the rest even more mysterious!
We have a horrible
suspicion that they must have been binned, but we can’t work out how. Ah well, as someone remarked, “You may as
well order them now because they will turn up as soon as the order is
filled!” True, and we can always use spares!
The Headteacher of
the School That Sacked Me (she had nothing to do with the sacking and
resolutely defended me against the attacks of The Owner who talked about “That
Man!” when referring to me) has decided to have a reunion of the shell-shocked
survivors of that hell-hole school and should be here in Castelldefels by the
end of the month!
Something else to
look forward to.
Tomorrow: the end
of the first week and therefore only x-1 weeks to go where x tends to infinity.
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