Chocolate Week has arrived and was greeted
with admiration and smacking of lips as my calorie-stuffed chocolate brownies
had the colleague taste test. I had to
reiterate the absolute golden fact that what they were eating was so low in
calories to be virtually calorie free.
Tell people what they want to hear and they will follow you to the end
of the earth – or at least until the cakes have run out.
So a success. I now have to build up to my piece de
resistance (I can’t be bothered about the accents; if Word can’t correct far be
it from me to interfere) and in the desperate search for yet another Internet
web site to give me the simple recipe for fondant icing I chanced upon
something which may well be a solution to my difficulties. Marzipan!
Not only do I prefer it to icing but also it is easily rollable and can
(if I understood the instructions from our resident Catalan cake and biscuit
maker) take the necessary red food colouring to add the final note of horror to
the finished triple chocolate monstrosity I have created. I can hardly wait.
As I am going to the opera this evening to
have a good cry, I could perhaps precede the waterworks with a productive visit
to the market in which everything I can possibly want exists. God alone knows what these things are called
in Catalan or Spanish and I am far too indolent to look them up and have too
much of a laissez faire attitude to actually remember the words even if I
stumble across them. I rely, as always
on good luck and bad Spanish to get what I want. I can’t wait to see what I pull out of the
linguistic bag to try and mind mustard seeds for the Jamie Oliver lemon pickle
that I am still waiting to make when I finally get all the necessary
ingredients together.
The last period of the day is me stuck in
front of my recalcitrant class of Year 9 kids with a resentful few of an absent colleague’s kids there
as well. Although I don’t blame them
really as they have been being educated since 8.15 this morning they were
restless and unsettled and difficult to get into their appointed seats and get
down to the task of formal letter writing that they knew that they had to
complete this afternoon. Most of them
already have notes that they made last Friday and so this should be a
compilation exercise for them and a chore rather than something which needs
their active imagination.
How I used to hate things like that
myself! History questions like “Why did
Britain lose the American War of Independence?” and “Why was Mary Tudor
unpopular?” seemed to be set for us endlessly.
That was especially so with the latter question which followed me (in the
exact wording) from “O” Level through “A” Level to First Year University. What a paucity if imagination on the part of
the examiners that showed! Thank god!
This is the last tedious lesson of the day
and, although I sympathise with them for the length of their ridiculous time in
school I also have to think of myself and demand that their behaviour is
unnaturally good. I, after all, am a
much more expensive resource that they and consequently must be protected with
more care than a mere child. So they
work in silence – and it says something for the mark related work ethic of the
school that they are doing just that at the moment.
This will last until they have completed
the last word in their exercise when their pent up activity will express itself
in a barely containable chattiness.
Although not as vicious as their British counterparts, they are natural
chatterers and, as the day does not give them enough time for their natural
conversation they always talk over each other when they have the opportunity to
do so.
To a British teacher they never seem to
listen to each other, so intent are they on giving word to what ever fleeting
thought brushes their brains: no sooner a neural impulse than the vocal chords
are humming with activity in response. It
is a great pity that the ear drums of the pupils are not as sensitive!
It is impossible with these kids to get an
entire class to understand what they need to do by the simple “Triple
Repetition” rule. Repeating something
only three times merely ensures that you have the better students able to
understand what they have to do. The
underclass will merely look at you with touchingly innocent faces when you
enquire why they are not doing what you told them to do!
Tomorrow the Second Day of Chocolate Week
sees our absent colleague return from the UK bearing tasty gifts from
M&S.
That at least will take away some of the
pain of an over crowded day.
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