I simply don't have time!

 

 

How do you define a full week?

     When you are working the question is moot.  You have a job that takes up the bulk of your day.  Your week is already full.  And with some jobs, like teaching for example, you have to include marking, meetings, union work, preparation, and the myriad time demands that the profession is heir to, many of which occur outside your stated hours.

     I remember reading in some book about conscription that some highly qualified people, especially academics, welcomed the constraints of a military life because they didn’t have to think.  What to do, how to do it, and when to do it were all laid down.  Personal intellectual involvement: nil. In the same way I also read that the philosopher Wittgenstein enjoyed going to see trashy Westerns and sat in the front row almost up against the screen because the sound and the picture occupied the whole of the space and he didn’t have to think!

     In the vacations of my time in University, I had a wide variety of short-term jobs.  It was inevitable that given the short period that I was going to be employed there was little training needed or offered to do the fairly simple tasks with which I was charged.  The problem in all the jobs was weighing up the offer of the payment for the work and the sometimes mind numbingly tedious work that you had to do to earn the money.

     Sometimes the physicality of the job took over and then there was no time to be bored because exhaustion ensured that you embraced unconsciousness whenever the opportunity presented itself.  I can still recall ‘breaks’ in the plate-laying in the Steel Works where I plonked myself on a plank supported by a couple of bricks, put my back against the wall of our ‘hut’ and in seconds, I was asleep – only to be very rudely awakened when the break was over and work resumed.

     Then there is the sort of work that is mindless and repetitive, but that very mindlessness allows a large percentage of your mind to be elsewhere: your hands and 5% of your brain may have been applying themselves to the task in hand, but 95% of your personality was far, far away from the tedium of paid reality!

     One of the better jobs (though it was ridiculously badly paid) was when I was a Security Guard (!). I refused to wear the uniform, except when forced by management, and had a ‘regular’ placement in the office of a transport firm where my ‘job’ was basically to log the drivers as they returned to the depot, and to do timed rounds of the premises using a clock on a strap.  This had to be ‘keyed’ to show that you had been to the various locations around the place on your regular rounds, each of which had a key on a chain that was used in your machine to prove you had at least moved about a bit during your stint.  Much of the time there I read and sometimes made notes for future essays because I was usually alone.

     As opposed to the time I had a job in a vast open plan office where the work I had to do was soul-destroyingly uninteresting and repetitive, and I had an ‘experienced’ child watching me like a hawk, and each time I finished some god-awful task she provided me with another even worse.  I only lasted a few days before I asked for the agency that had placed me there to find me something (anything) else before I went made.  It was one of those jobs where, even knowing it would only be for a few weeks, was not tolerable.

     With some of the jobs I had there could have been little chance of any real sense of achievement or satisfaction from the work: you were there for the money and nothing else.  I remember in one of my placements that the people I worked with lived for the weekends, and talking about the weekend that had passed gave enough material for conversations during the week!

     I am sure that some of the jobs that I had in the past no longer exist.  More sophisticated automation has probably taken the place of fallible human operators, and AI will take care of more.

     No one should have a job where there is no opportunity for development.  Money cannot compensate for 30 years of mindlessness.  Can it?

     I remember one stop our security van made when we were delivering wage packets to a factory (that concept dates me!) and I was chatting to the girls who were working on a production line.  To make small talk I asked what they were making.  And they had no idea whatsoever.  They did their bits and didn’t think about anything connected with the actions.  I was horrified at the lack of interest in a major element of their lives, except of course that their jobs were not a major element in their lives in the way that I would have thought it should have been.  Their jobs were a mean to an end, and that end was companionship with the other girls, and a wage packet at the end of the week that allowed them to live their real lives divorced from what they were doing each day.

     This piece started with a question, my response would be that the week starting tomorrow is full, including such events as a dental appointment and culminating in a performance of the Emperor Concerto by Beethoven in the Palau de la Musica in Barcelona.  The week  takes in, along the way, an expensive (it should have been free) appointment with the police to renew my identity and residence card, and a meeting of a local Poetry Group.  Throughout the week I am also conducting long distance research using an almost defunct research project of mine from the 1970s into the novelist Aldous Huxley and his use of the arts in his work.  I have centred my research in the last couple of weeks on a footnote in his first novel.

     I know that to most that sounds absurdly, inward-looking-end-in-itself-academic-twaddle, but I have been able to convince myself that the problems and opportunities presented by this footnote will be illustrative of technique and intent of someone who was to become a world-famous novelist.  So there!

     And Chat has done a lot of the donkey work involved in checking sources and suggesting useful websites and libraries, any spare moment can be taken up with a passing thought of mine being translated into something with the trappings of academe by the indefatigable ‘intelligence’ at the tap of my computer keys.

     Most of what I am doing about Huxley is only possible because I am retired and because I have access to the Internet, but I am enjoying producing something that I think will be a valid addition to Huxley scholarship.  And that is worth making an effort about.

     So, a full week!

Surviving Time

 

 

 

During one University vacation, I was in my parents’ house and debating what to do about getting some extra cash.  In talking with my parents, I said that other students had suggested going to the Labour Exchange, (Job Centre) failing to find a job and then claiming some sort of social security money.  My father said that was tantamount to theft.  If there was a job I should take it and not try and “work the system”.

     So, off I went for the first time in my life and entered a Labour Exchange.  I cannot pretend that my reception was anything less than frosty, but one question they asked was revealing, “Do you actually want a job?”  Which suggested that they usually processed vacationing students with the minimum of delay, assuming all students were workshy and looking for a handout!  I protested that I did actually want a job.  They said that they would let me know.

     By the time that I got home, the Labour Exchange had phoned up, and my father told me that I would be working in a bakery, and that my shift started at 10 pm that night! 

     I had never previously worked in a bakery or in any sort of factory, and I had never done a night shift.  It was a baptism of fire.

     I was put on a bread production line, and I did the sort of mechanical job that one assumed would be better done by a machine: I picked up pre-cut slabs of dough and put them in tins.  That was it.  After a couple of minutes instruction, I was doing the ‘job’ as competently as someone who had worked there for twenty years.  It was intensely boring, but you couldn’t lose concentration because the convey belt production of dough was inexorable and you had to deal with it.

     The best part of my shift was towards the end of it (surprise!) when instead of dolloping dough I helped stack the bread tins and was able to talk to a young under-manager.  This was the highpoint of my work and the time I looked forward to!  Which is sad on a number of levels.

     However, we are taking of the days when low paid jobs were numerous and it was possible to leave one and go into another with no real fear of being jobless for an extended period of time – even for we students who were only looking for a few weeks’ employment.

     Because we were there for a relatively short time, it did mean that you could stand just about anything because you knew it was time limited: This Too Will Pass, was the every ready motto to keep frustrated students focussed on the pay-packet, and not the intellectual worth of what they were doing to get it.

     Only one vacation job was impossible to continue, and if I tell you that the most interesting and satisfying element of this open-office vicious tedium-inducing torture was going through thousands of receipts and taking out all the ones with a small asterisk in the right corner, it will perhaps give you a sense of the bone-crushing awfulness of the work.

     I can’t say that I enjoyed any of my vacation jobs, though there were sometimes episodes or moments that were good, and, after all, all experience is valuable – even if it’s negative.

     The job that paid the best (with paid overtime as well!) was when I was employed as a platelayer on the internal railway inside East Moors Steel Works, in Cardiff.  A job, I might add, for which I was almost entire unfitted, but did my best.

     This job came back to me because we are now in the early days of September and I have been watching the return of teachers who troop through the café next to the swimming pool to get their coffees before turning the corner and walking towards the school where they teach.

     It is the start of a new school year and there a spring in their steps and an unalloyed enthusiasm as they greet colleagues that they have not seen for the duration of the summer holidays, that will barely last a day before the reality of the hard slog to Christmas forces itself on the consciousness.

     There has been much talk in the news about the retirement age and how the number of years before a full pension is awarded seem to be creeping upward.  Figures like 65 – 66 – 67 are quoted before a pension is paid!  Being a classroom teacher until you are 67 or older!  That is tantamount to a death sentence!

     As has been said, “Teaching has the peculiar problem that the pupils stubbornly remain the same age while the teacher doesn’t.”  Raising pension ages makes actuarial sense when people live longer, but it doesn’t follow that every occupation remains equally sustainable at 65-67.

     The trouble with teaching is that classroom teaching is classroom teaching, with all the stresses and strains that dealing with large classes bring.  There is no real shortcut to being a professional teacher.

     But, it seems to me that making a teacher work until the age of 67 or, God forbid, even older is not fair either on the teacher, nor on the pupils.

    What are the possibilities for teachers outside the classroom?  Administration is allowed for with an extra allocation of free periods within a teaching timetable.  Pastoral Care, being a head of year or similar, again there may be more free periods, but most heads of year also have a teaching timetable as well.  Senior Management Team – apart from the headteacher, most have a teaching timetable.

     So, if you are a subject teacher, and you want to survive until you reach retirement age and enjoy some sort of life after the magic date, what can you do?  Your options are limited and there is no clear progression from a demanding teaching timetable in the classroom to something that allows you to remain in the profession but to thrive and develop outside the classroom.

     Back to my plate laying days in the steel works.  There was one guy who was well advanced in years, but he was still part of the team that laid track, transported it, used drills and hammers to do hard physical work, but there was an understanding that he would not be asked to do certain things and some of his duties involved oiling the points in the rails that meant that he carried a pot of oil and a long brush and make sure that things were lubricated properly.  From time to time, he did do physical work, but I noted that he used the minimum amount of effort in a masterclass of conservation of energy, in stark comparison to the younger and their more gung-ho physicality.  He bobbed along, playing his part, but not doing the hardest of graft, but justifying his position.

     In teaching we need the equivalent of “oiling the points” so that older colleagues can survive and thrive.