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Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Moaning and groaning!


As usual this typing is displacement activity.

It is moving towards ten o’clock in the morning when I should have my first year sixth Current Affairs class.  Simple enough you might think.  Not so.  I have had no list for this class and there is no guarantee that it will exist at all.

Well, the influx of well over a dozen kids indicated that the class will definitely run and another class too.

The composition of my class is somewhat odd containing as it does high flyers in academic terms and a certain amount of dross.  This is not going to be an easy group to keep on track.  Even if I knew what the track was in this amorphous subject!

The booklet for The Making of Modern Art has now been produced – all I have to do now is think of a course which might fit it!

We have done three days and I am totally exhausted.  Although I have the same number of periods to teach the way that my teaching load is distributed it not going to make it any easier.  I seem to be traipsing from one building to another after every bloody period.  It’s not going to be pleasant when the balmy sun of autumn gives way to the harsher weather of winter.

On the first three days of the week I am teaching the last period which means that when I finish I join the stationary queue of parental waggons taking their kids home.  Not being able to slip away a few minutes early doubles the time it takes me to get back to the house.

Also, each day this term (well, all three so far) there have been traffic jams on the roads to and from school due to accidents.  This morning it was one involving a motorcycle.  Now I must be fair and say that there is a remote possibility that the two cars which were part of the crash scene also were to blame.  But in my experience the stupidity and criminal cupidity of most motorcyclists has to be seen to be believed.  So far, during the time that I have been in Spain, I have seen 22 motorcyclists who have obeyed the basic safety rules of the road; all the rest have been beyond a joke.

I firmly believe that in all crashes involving motorcyclists, the motorcyclist should be swept to the side of the road and left on the hard shoulder to be picked up by a late night rubbish truck.  Harsh perhaps, but any analysis of the financial cost that the absurd driving of the vast majority of motorcyclists would surely suggest that they have forfeited any right to the emergency services that they seem to want to monopolise.

When ever I am walking along the road and I come across a young man under 25 on crutches I have to struggle to stop a sneer of distain curling my lip as the overwhelming probability is that the injury is a direct result of mindless motorcycle driving!

In medical terms, Catalonia must be a bone setter’s idea of paradise as case after case appears for treatment!

Tomorrow and Friday an early start so, with luck, I will miss the turgid traffic which has made travel so far this week a real misery.  At least I am building up enough “credit” to take the last hour of Friday afternoon off.  Which is something.  Not much, but definitely something!

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