Shades of the Prison House!

 

 

 

 

 

Swimming in my lane, trying to get used to the cut-off fins (the ones that ‘real’ swimmers use in swimming pools for reasons that elude me) I hear a voice from the next lane chant out a soulful, “One week!”  This was a teacher friend of mine counting down the days before she has to return to school.

     In this part of the world, at the start of term, there is a period when teachers are in school, and the kids are not.  A golden opportunity you would think for harassed members of the profession to get themselves and their classrooms sorted out; to check through class lists and timetables; check room allocation, and generally prepare themselves for the forthcoming fray.

     You might think that.  But if you do then the chances are that you have not taught in the Catalan or Spanish school system.  The Powers That Be consider time without kids to be the opportune time for meetings.  And more meetings.  And more.

     In my experience, and I have been to thousands of meetings, literally thousands – political, cultural, and educational, and what my mother would have described in a catch-all term of which she was very fond, “sundry”.  And I can truthfully say that the most soul destroying and quintessentially useless meetings that I have attended have been here in Catalonia.  I must make an honourable exception for Departmental meetings, but ‘whole school’ affairs have been viciously pointless.  And long.  Very long.

     In some educational administrative minds, The Meeting is an end in itself, and the content and participants’ response is secondary.  Even as I type I can begin to resurrect my feelings of almost homicidal hatred of the agenda-less meanders that took away hours of my life, without compensating me with anything even remotely educationally positive.

     A signal low point was a meeting on a Saturday morning (!) during which I was wearing my most pointedly casual clothes and throughout which I didn’t smile once.  Not once from the beginning of the pointless charade to the eventual will-sapped end. I spoke only when I was directly addressed, and my answers were clipped to the point of being marginally rude.  Not one smile.  And I left at the earliest point I could and went home, smouldering because the meeting had been (surprise!) pointless.

     But you are retired, I hear no one say.  You no longer go to meetings.  True.  I no longer go to meetings that I have to go to; I go to the meetings I choose to go to.

     The last meeting I went to was in our local city hall and was a gathering of individuals from the foreign communities, who had been invited by a general email to consider taking part.

     We gathered at the appointed time outside the City Hall and were ushered into the Council Chamber where we were seated, shown a short film, and then joined by the alcaldesa (the mayor) and encouraged to give our opinions about our city.  We were not a large group and we had widely differing proficiency in Spanish or Catalan, but we were listened to with courtesy and our points were considered and responded to.  At least verbally.

     One of the points that I made was about the state of the roads and especially those roads in the immediate vicinity of my house.  Some of the road surfaces are composed of what seems to be rafts of concrete and there has been some movement of these plates.  Round the corner from where I live one concrete plate in the road has risen so that there is a ledge lifted above the surface of the surrounding road.  As the ridge is so pronounced, it means that a car driven at a normal speed feels as though it is encountering a substantial step in the road with consequent jarring.  I had even taken a photograph of the ridge and was able to illustrate my point that the road was not only uncomfortable to drive on but also potentially dangerous. 

     I await further developments, and hope that it will not be the breaking of the axel of some unsuspecting car.

     To be fair I have not attempted any follow up and anyone who expects anything to be done in the month of August must be a very green newcomer to the country!

     The important thing is that a channel of communication has been opened with members of the foreign community and it is up to the individuals concerned in the initial meeting to make something of the opportunity offered by the City.

     We were not, in any way a representative grouping.  We had no mandate apart from our own interests.  We had an opportunity, and we were speaking directly to the political power brokers in our own area.

     We were listened to, and a group photograph was taken!  An overture has been made and it is up to us to find out if it can be taken further.

     I started this writing by concentrating on futility: the system grinding on, pointless and empty actions limiting expression. 

     But I end this piece with a new determination to make the channel of communication with the movers and shakers in my adopted city one that works for me and one that even might Get Something Done! 

     There is no point in being near levers if you don’t pull one or two occasionally and see what happens.

 

Before the bell rings.

Unease by proxy. 

That’s what I call this weekend.  The holidays are almost over.  Today is Kings when Catalan kids will expect their second (or third) tranche of presents, sweeping together the loot from Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, the sweets from the procession of the Kings and parental presents for the day itself.  And Monday, reality hits.

As a SRP, (BBLE) that is, Smug Retired Person, Baby Boomer Leading Edge, I regard the end of the holidays and the reopening of the schools as the start of the time when we can reclaim streets, shops, supermarkets and open spaces as the noisy neophyte life forms are herded back into the rightful (if all too brief) seclusion of secure institutions.

As a retired teacher, however I cannot fail to feel that familiar frisson of dread that comes with the looming opening of a new, long, school term.  In Catalonia the new school terms also comes with the deadly threat of Staff Meetings.  However awful you think your experience of meetings might have been, you have not truly suffered until you have undergone the trail by frustration of a Spanish staff meeting in a school. 

I have been to thousands of meetings during my working life and indeed before and after, and the range, complexity and variety of those meetings and the different sorts of people who managed them and participated has been exhilaratingly different.  I was just thinking about the range of ‘meetings’ that I have experienced and the proportion of time that must have been spent on them.  At every stage of my life committees and meetings have been a constant.  In school: clubs, societies, sports, library, Prefects, magazine, orchestra, brass band, charity, hobbies - all have demanded some sort of committee work.  In university: clubs and societies again, but this time with a more formal structure of committee work; student politics; senate sub committees; subject work; trade union activity.  Work: departmental meetings, faculty meetings, union meetings at school, local, regional and national level, educational meetings of all sorts, Heads of Department Meetings, Staff meetings and on and on and on.

And throughout my long and generally soul destroying experience of committee and meeting I have never, ever experienced meetings of such vicious vacuity as those that I have experienced in Spain.  Ever.

For me, the Patron Saint of Meetings is Girolamo Savonarola, (1542-1498) the Italian Dominican friar and Renaissance Florence troublemaker.  He was one of those historical characters where there was much to admire (his hatred of clerical corruption, his rejection of tyrannical government and the exploitation of the poor and his championing of Republicanism) while, equally there was much to be disturbed about (his ‘prophecies’, his iconoclasm, his extreme puritanism and intolerance).  However the element in his life that both appeals and appals is the concept of The Bonfire of the Vanities. 

This bonfire was literal and the flames were fed by the population, responding to Savonarola’s urging, throwing luxuries into the conflagration to show their rejection of the ‘vanities’ of the world.

I am no great supporter of iconoclasm, but the idea of a Bonfire of the Vanities is a powerful one.  Especially when you are sitting listening to people waffling on about nothing in particular in a meeting that is taking up hours of your life.

I am reminded of a Robert Heinlein story in which the ultimate authority in the known universe was a powerful female figure.  She was respected throughout the galaxy etc. and delegations came to her for advice that would be followed strictly.  I remember one example of her advice being that members of the delegation that came to see her be executed as the solution to their problems!

How many times in my life have I imagined a Bonfire of the Loquacious in various meetings that I have attended where selective burnings would have concentrated the minds and shortened the meetings (and all future meetings) considerably.  As well as giving real satisfaction at seeing the guilty burn.

As I’ve mentioned before, some colleagues were only able to survive the more infuriating meetings by watching me as the supressed fury that I radiated in the more boring sessions could (my colleagues hoped) suddenly burst forth in a glorious display of justified ire that would make attendance justified.

I never did ‘break’, but I came close on a number of occasions. 

The truly and unbearably awful meetings in Spain were only made tolerable by a stratagem that I devised for survival.  I took my MacBook Air into the meetings with me and wrote personal, unexpurgated and real minutes in which my true feelings found full expression through my touch-typing.  There is nothing more satisfying while looking and listening to some idiot waffle on while your eloquent fingers say exactly what you are thinking as you stare at the guilty!

Each piece of idiocy was loving described by my tapping fingers and each fragment of fatuousness was highlighted by venom infused description.  This literary scorched earth assassination made the meeting just about bearable, but there were dangers in such an approach. 

In one meeting, a member of the English Department was sitting next to me and she began reading what I was typing and laughing.  Each time something stupid was said she looked over at the screen to read my assessment: in this way we both managed to survive the meeting relatively unscathed.

The real moment of tension occurred at the end of the meeting when the person who was chairing (I use the term because I can think of no other, but what she did bore no relation to what I would understand even a marginally competent chair might do) the meeting said that she had seen me making notes and would it be possible for her to have a copy!  I explained, with a straight face, that the notes were personal and not for general consumption and were in English that she didn’t speak.  While I was convincing and composed, my colleague was convulsed by what might have happened if she had read (and understood) what I had written!

God knows, teaching is a demanding enough profession in the day-to-day interaction of teacher and pupil, without making the whole thing so much worse by having cruelly pointless meetings.

And we had one meeting on a Saturday morning!  Though that criminal occasion was years ago, I feel I cannot write about it, as the wounds are still too fresh to cope with!  Saturday morning!  I can neither believe that it actually happened, or that I actually attended!  The Horror!  The Horror!

So, I feel for my colleagues.  Today is Saturday and the real stomach churning will not get into gear (does that mixed metaphor work, I wonder?) until Sunday evening and the realization, as the bedclothes are pulled up to the chin, that the morrow brings work!  In a school.

The nearest I will get to a school on Monday is the pool where I take my daily swim.  Two schools are next to the centre and I have to admit that there is something deeply satisfying as I sip my tea, to hear young voices in the distance and know that I will not be teaching them and I will be paid for not doing so!


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