Unobtrusive wins!

Febrile activity at the moment as the Lady with the List appears in the staff room spreading misery where’re she goes as the many substitutions are distributed to cope with the wholesale absence of staff who are succumbing right, left and centre to the ravages of colds and flu-like diseases.

I am sitting alone in the staff room as I am early and all the rest of my colleagues have rushed off to start their first lessons at the ungodly time of 8.15 am.  I am, as you will realise, totally vulnerable and as management rush around looking more and more frazzled I can’t help feeling that my free time is in a more than fragile state.  And there is nowhere to hide.  When teaching starts all available rooms are in use and therefore not available for hiding.

The lady has returned with sheaves of paper with the names of the condemned on them.  I shall go to the toilet in self-defence!

The comings and goings are continuing and I still have not had the courage to look at the list to see if I have been “taken”.  It is more stressful worrying about the possible loss of non-contact periods than actually losing them!

Lunch consisted of veggie-burgers of sawdust like texture and it certainly gave a clear indication of taste together with a plate of cooked, sliced vegetables with a sauce which was as gastronomically distant from the pseudo-burgers as Boris Johnston is from a Black Hole – although I realise that that last random conjunction of imagers is perhaps not as random (or as distant) as I first thought!  Anyway, the veg were excellent and made up for the rest.

Apart from my liking for meat, eggs, fish and the like I really think that I could become a vegetarian.

Not to be out of the diseased loop which seems to be claiming so many of the staff I too now feel slightly under the weather.  There is that vague tickle in the back of the throat, a slightly metallic feel to the back of the nose and a very distinct lethargy – if that is not a contradiction in words – which I know well.

These symptoms are not helped by the skittish attitude towards working temperature that the building I am in at present thinks is conducive to stable living.  As you progress from room to room via the corridor it is like going on a walking tour of the globe passing from Tundra to Tropical in a matter of seconds.  In a piece of idiocy that has to be experienced to be believed each room has its own complex temperature control.  Which doesn’t work.  It is either too hot (even for me!) or too cold. 

And you have to have experienced Catalan and Spanish children to realise just how pathetic they are capable of being when they encounter anything less than Atacama Desert heat in their teaching environment.  Their piteous cries for warmth would melt the heart of a Thatcher – but I remain coldly aloof and smile an icy smile of complete lack of sympathy at their plight, and urge them to think harder and faster to get the neurons heated up!

Our Second Annual Chocolate Week (incorporating cakes) is now scheduled to start on Monday 27^th of February and to stretch into March (even if this year is a Leap Year) and give us something to look forward to and something to think back on during the hard days leading up to the Easter Holidays.

As I promised a colleague during our First Annual Chocolate Week I will be making chocolate goldies this year – they are the same as chocolate brownies but made with white chocolate rather than dark or milk.  I also quite like taking over the St David’s Day spot and producing a triple chocolate Welsh flag topped cake.  But that might be a bake beyond!

Time will tell.

Well, at least Tuesday is over!

I know my place!

After all my moaning and groaning about the absurd timetable we have in this school I felt what I knew ought to be humility when a colleague told me that he had just lost his remaining free period and so was teaching eight (8! Count ‘em!) periods today!  Awful but true!

I checked through the substitutions list this morning, saw that I wasn’t on it and have sedulously avoided looking at it again.  Just in case.  Two, or even one, extra periods added to the six that I am scheduled to teach today would push me over the edge into that misty realm of the educational berserker from which blood-dimmed tide no reputation emerges unscathed!

I shall just meditate quietly and without rancour on the second and third lessons with the 3ESO that I am about to experience today, the first having been a collapsed class having to cope with yet another person being absent.

And just to make matters more than perfect I seem to have gouged a chunk out of a nail which has left a jagged edge which catches in everything and encourages a questing thumb to smooth its serrated edge with increasing irritation.  Don’t let anyone tell you that cutting a recalcitrant nail with stationery scissors is a way of getting the situation back to normal.  I am sure that The Case of the Catastrophic Cuticle is merely displacement activity to blank my mind to the two hours of eagerly receptive faces that will fill the long, hard stretch of the dwindling afternoon.

I have just had my lunch which consisted of a hardboiled egg on a piece of toast covered with something soft and whitish with a latticework of hardened cheese granules.  And chips.  With grated carrot.  As meals go, it went – and I am ready to depart.  But, alas – the smiling faces, the smiling faces!  Which sounds like an unfunny parody of Mr Kurtz’ final utterance.

Having got that out of my system I can now look forward to female stereotyping as found in multitudes of advertisements on the Internet.  My media studies class is becoming almost expert in the annotation of the most glaring denotations in the outpouring of the commercial visual arts and a few of the more lively intelligences hazard tentative conjectures around the most obvious connotations that they may contain!

Our task this week, following on from what we are going to do in the first period is construct a list of five different examples of male stereotypes used in advertising.  The five females types are The Beauty Bunny; The Alpha Female; The Fashionista; The Perfect Mum and The Granny.  It will be interesting to see what the kids come up with, as I am not sure that there are direct male equivalents – at least not as widely used in advertising.

One hour of the two hours that I have with the kids is taken up with them in the computer room.  Our kids are so needy that this is not as restful as you might think with my constantly being called on to validate or explain or evaluate.

Dinner this evening was delicious, simple but tasty and all lubricated with a mysterious bottle of Cava that someone must have given us at some time in the past but rather appropriately for the day it had a graphic of a red sketched heart as part of the label.  Happenstance. 

The useful part of having a new bottle of Cava is that I can save the metal top on the cork and pass it on to our school secretary whose sister-in-law collects these things.  She gains brownie points by donating to the growing collection.

This, in itself is of no importance to me, but as any experienced teacher will tell you, anything which makes the school secretary happy is worth encouraging – especially if you can be seen to be doing something positive yourself to increase this happiness.  We are blessed in our school with a secretary who is helpfulness itself – and with a sense of humour linked to a keen sense of irony.  Hard earned experience will tell any receptive teacher that this is something not to be treated lightly!

Barça are playing in the Champions League (which explains why we didn’t go out to El Elefant as I wanted to this evening) and I hope to god that they win as, in La Liga, Real Madrid are now ten points in front and, as far as I can see, unassailable in their ownership of the cup.  Barça’s possible silverware remains anchored to the Copa del Rey and the much, much more difficult to win Champions League.  I think that I will move to another country if Barça are forced out of both of those!

Tomorrow, Wednesday, is the “tipping point” of the week when we begin our downward slide into the weekend: we have to take our points of human warmth where we can find them.  And it is in this spirit of positive belief in something better than the drudgery in which we find ourselves that I have raised the idea of The Second Annual Chocolate Week.

This was inaugurated last year and was a great success.  Each day of the week a member of the English Department brought in a homemade chocolate confection for the delectation of the hard working members of the department.  I was very much in favour of an obvious exclusivity connected with this enterprise on the principle that it is not enough for people to be happy, it is necessary for other people to be seen to be unhappy.

Disappointingly, given the flaccid attitude of so-called professionals in the caring professions to hard-line selfishness, there was a general tendency towards sharing and this has been (in spite of a minority of one’s vociferous objections) elevated into some sort of moral imperative defining the activity of the proposed week.

Not only has this pinko-pseudo communistic attitude towards exclusivity lessened the delight of the week but also there are mutterings against the hard-line insistence on chocolate as the motivating factor in the energy giving productions.  It has been suggested that the chocolate appellation be extended to a more generic “cake” theme.

It has been proposed that the week be the bridging one between the tail end of February and the start of March.  Presumably I will have to create something in the form of the Welsh Flag to celebrate St David’s Day!  How would I do that, I wonder?

I will have to see tomorrow if the date meets with general acceptance and then we can get planning.

Something to look forward to!

Start, as I hope it doesn't go on!

There is nothing like starting the week with cold fury motivating you.

I arrived to find a chorus of disgruntled returnees from various trips crying aloud to whatever gods there be that they had gone on a school trip for the last time.  The details of the horrors were instructive and ranged from abuse of mobile phones to call parents at 3.00am to addiction to cough mixture.  There were the usual stories of mislaid passports and travel sickness and enough extraneous detail to make me very glad that I had elected to stay and hold the fort in Barcelona rather than go anywhere with kids.

What was les instructive was the realization that members of staff were absent.  We work on such a tight staffing ratio that a single member of staff absent causes chaos; when we have three or four absent then the chaos tends towards the cataclysmic: Thanatos stalks the corridors!

Today I am teaching a mere five periods and doing a lunchtime duty but, given the absurd length of the school day we can squeeze in at least another two periods.  One of which I lost so I am doing what would be impossible in a normal British school with a five period day, which is to teach six periods and take my lunch in the last period available. 

During the short period after my duty I had to photocopy sheets for tomorrow when another member of staff is going to be absent (just to add to the general jollity) so that we can collapse classes to accommodate further strains on our teaching. 

I didn’t actually manage to get the photocopying done before the bell sounded for me to go to my extra class (the equivalent of Year 11) so I am feeling well disposed to the whole of creation when I consider that tomorrow is a “timetabled” six period day – though, as a charming treat I do not have to complete another lunchtime duty.  My next duty is not until Wednesday!

One of my o-so-helpful colleagues informed me that the next holiday is not for seven weeks and that is after five weeks of this present term have already passed.  At least I have had four days some something different and one day of holiday, whereas some of my colleagues did not get back from their trips until Saturday evening.  So they have had only the hollow rest of a teacher’s Sunday to draw breath before the long slog to Easter.

Another beautiful but cold day with low bands of indistinct cloud.  This morning was 2 degrees and my car started with the characteristic beeping which indicates “Danger of Ice”.  I have not seen any ice, but there was some frost on the window one day a couple of weeks ago.

Two years ago it was during early March that we had a bad snowstorm.  We can only hope for a repetition – but this time with the ludicrous panic that characterised the frenzied approach to twenty-seven snowflakes in the morning leading to the closure of the school by lunchtime in bright sunshine in snowless skies!  I certainly have no desire to repeat the two-and-a-half hour journey from school to home that marred the delight of the school closing!

The extra day!

After conquering my lurching fear that it was actually Monday – the day off on Friday having thrown my internal calendar into some sort of confusion – I relaxed and subsided back into the sort of uneasy doze which is my usual early morning mode and stayed in bed until after nine!  A three-hour lie in!  Luxury.

I continued the housekeeping theme today and in the general hysteria even included a few short spasms of hovering.  I am now in a state of mental and physical collapse and am looking forward to the start of the school week to get back to normality.

That was a joke.  


In fact I, along with all my colleagues, am dreading the reality of the distant, distant Easter holidays.  Though, by that time the weather should have improved and we should be getting a certain amount of heat with the sunshine that we are getting already today!

Apart from the reading of The Guardian electronically and a few snatched pages from “A Welsh Eye” by Gwyn Thomas that surfaced as I was moving things around during the previously mentioned, so-called housekeeping, I read nothing of any extent this holiday.  I do not count the few science fiction stories that I read on my phone during lunch on Saturday. 

That sort of self-indulgence is a dangerous possible addiction for me, as I have always had to deal with the swamping attraction of science fiction.  I limit myself in this particular genre and every time I read a short story (no matter how dire it is) I feel the pull to plunge in and lose myself as I have done in the past!  Teaching, the sheer physical presence I have to put in is my form of rehab!

At some point during this week I am determined to put in some time and get a few more sentences written for my Making Sense of Modern Art.  This does give me something to focus on which engages my interest and is an on-going project to take me to the end of the year.

At least it will take my mind off what is going to happen in the next few weeks with regard to finance in this country!

Frightening, but fascinating!

Domestic humiliation!

There are only two types of ironing: the committed and the reluctant.  I am very much of the latter party and only ever iron in extremis.  As the mountain of crumpled clothing threatened to make entry to my library impossible I succumbed to the necessity and (eventually) set up the ironing board.

It is at time like this that I thank whatever deities there may be for the steam version of that fat steel triangle of misery.  The cloth mountain was bone dry and curling at the edges and I forcibly reminded of the iron that my mother used to use which was as dry as the clothes.  As I recall she would either sprinkle the clothes with water or use a dampened tea cloth to ease the smoothing.  I find it quite difficult enough manoeuvring one piece of cloth on the board without the added horror of a further layer!

The steam iron is the only defence against manic depression and I felt quite unduly smug as I emptied the water reservoir from the tumble dryer into a jug for use in the iron, having been informed by a knowledgeable Catalonian of my acquaintance that this was a simple and cheap supply of ionised (or possibly unionised) water which was essential for use in the smoothing process.

Although the sun is shining here in almost flawlessly blue skies, it is not warm and I have taken to the wearing of jumpers.  They may be thin, but they are jumpers and I consider that I have therefore reached another stage in my ageing as I succumb (is that the second time that I have used that word?) to the febrile pleasure of the flesh and cling to residual warmth as I traipse from building to building in my day job.

This is not, remarkably, a digression from ironing.  Indeed not.  Jumpers, while retaining body heat also have another inestimable advantage: they hide my reluctant form of ironing.

I can do the collar and cuff bits; the shirt-tails and breast pockets; the button facings are easy – but the yoke and set-in sleeves are beyond me, as indeed are long sleeves.  My aim in ironing is to make the crumpling less.  There are areas of smoothness in my finished article but I rely heavily on body heat to do its bit in the ironing process and to aid that I feel that the jumper is an invaluable addition to the steam.

I sometimes think that one of the most important reasons for moving to Spain was the fact that it is possible to wear short-sleeved shirts for the greater proportion of the year.  After all, the hairs on the arm are programmed to erect themselves to aid heat retention when weather becomes a little brisk – and that little physiological atavistic heat conservation technique can take one bare-armed well into December in this country!

The Mountain has now been levelled and access to the books is an open invitation to get them into some sort of order.  An invitation I shall firmly resist until the more “open” days of the summer when I WILL visit the church on the hill above Sant Boi.  I shudder to think how many times I have said that.  But this year will be different.  And the shudders continue when I think how many times I have added that.  But I have promised to loan a book of Yeats poems in a parallel Spanish/English text to a colleague and I have no idea at all of where it might be.  Though I did find lots of interesting things (not merely books) in my last search!

My colleagues in the UK are gearing themselves down to enjoy the half term holiday.  We do not have this obviously necessary break during the term and so Monday sees the second half of term with most of my colleagues having had only a single day’s respite from the kids.  My colleagues who went to England last week will only have arrived back this weekend and so will have missed out on the single day holiday of Friday.  And they have a very long haul to the release of Easter.

As soon as we go back we will be preparing for the next set of examinations, in the strangely compulsive way that the system demands: pointless, counter-productive and addictive!  Give us a day or so and the hiatus (one can hardly call it anything more positive) of last week will be lost in the past and people will look as harassed and edgy as the default condition of work in our place. 

And that is without the ever-present threat of a pay reduction!  God alone knows what the Greeks are deciding or not deciding as I type, but whatever they decide it is not going to be good news for the Eurozone and for the EU generally.  Spain’s horrific levels of unemployment are not the cause of wholesale rioting because of the strength of the Black Economy in this country - which is vast and presumably increasing.  With a quarter of the total population out of work and half (!) of young people out of work something must be going on to prevent the total economic and social collapse that should be visible if these figures told the whole story.

In the next few weeks the mendacious and discredited government of PP (a party which includes creeps like Camps in their vile ranks and is mired in an on-going corruption scandal) are going to make announcements about their approach to El Crisis.  As the government has already done a U-turn and taken the two measures of increased taxation which they vowed that they would never do in the run up to their election, they can only do more of the same.  We confidently expect higher taxes and a cut in wages, and perhaps tinkering with the so-called “extra” pays that we have as an integral part of our salary.

In our school, because of our double pay-masters (government and private foundation) any percentage cut will be difficult to impose because of the complex proportions in our pay mix, so it is likely that a lower rate across the whole slew of teachers whether they are paid by the government or the foundation will be imposed.

And presumably we will be expected to work normally for lower wages.  This is a form of economics that doesn’t work in the so-called real world.  I cannot go into a shop having been paid less and tell the shopkeeper that I will only pay 95% of the prices that he charges because my wages have been cut by 5%.  No, I will have to buy less because I have less money.  It follows that if the school (for whatever reason) pays us less then we do less.  They cannot afford our full time services, and just like the shopkeepers who don’t lower their prices (indeed inflation has risen year on year since our wages have been frozen) they should expect to get less from the customers.  Which lessons would they like me to stop teaching?

When I put to a colleague that our timetable is over-long; our day is over-long; the curriculum is over-long and therefore there was room to cut it according to how much the school could afford to pay – he looked at me as though I was mad.  It seems like simple economics to me: if you can’t afford something you can’t have it.  The school can’t pay; it can’t have the same as before.  So cut.  Why should we be the only section of society that works according to fairy-tale economics rather than the economics that we encounter when we take our pay and spend it?

I know that I am going to be a lone voice crying in the wilderness as frightened workers scurry up to managers to show how committed they are in spite of the cuts so that they can keep their jobs.  The government has, by the way, lowered (by 50%) payments that have to be made to workers who are sacked.  And in Spain you can always be sacked.  Spanish labour law and unemployment payments are a complete mess and need to be sorted out, but the government using a crisis to pay back to their friends in business at the expense of ordinary workers is a more than repulsive (though sadly common) aspect of all right-wing parties in power.

It will only be a few weeks before we know the worst, or at least the beginning of the worst.  I am sure that we will be drip-fed cuts and increases in payments over the next year or so.  And of course, if Greece has a disorderly exit from the Euro god alone knows what will happen.

Happy days!

Partial Pleasure!

The Week Without Kids is finally beginning to get to me.  Not the “without kids” bit – what teacher worth his salt doesn’t rejoice when the clients are away!  But the relentless work that we who are left are doing.  I have had meetings and marked as though both had gone out of fashion and, let’s face it, when either of those two items is in short supply then teaching itself will have faded away.

The meetings have been productive (he admitted through gritted teeth) and, although they resulted in more work for me (I have yet to go to a meeting which didn’t) it was work that I enjoyed up to a point.

I have learned to smile and accept another part of the joyful adoption of IT that this school sees as an unending pageant of educational justification.  I am not sure that the previous sentence means anything, but I am sure that you can get the slightly jaundiced and more than grudging air with which it was written.

I have been busily selecting paintings for the test that the kids are going to have, to see if they can at least recognize the “-ism” that each neatly (or not so neatly) fits into.  This has been done on PowerPoint, which I do not use as much as I should do, and indeed, delving deeper into the artistic depths of PowerPoint was one of the aspects of my teaching that I was going to explore this term.

More visually stunning PowerPoint presentations was the first of my three or four areas of improvement.  Of the other three I have spent about 7 minutes on one and about 20 minutes on another and no time at all on the third.  This is not what I had hoped for from the “free” week which is ending this afternoon.  And, just in case you are wondering, this typing is being done in what should be my break time!

The rest of the day should enable me to complete yet more marking and I think that I will end up with (at last) some work on my Magnum Opus of Making Sense of Modern Art.  I only hope that I can remember the name of the file in which the few minutes’ work that I have done is safely lurking waiting for me to continue in my customary deathless prose.

Yet more marking has been done – which begs the questions of why it was all waiting for the space of the Trip Week to be completed!  But let it pass, let it pass!  I am now in the blessed state of being almost up to date.  No teacher is ever fully up to date.  This is a state of impossibility.  An educational Nirvana!  There is always something to be done – and that something to be done has a way of creeping up on one and biting tender parts when you least expect it.  Mainly because you have entirely forgotten about it until the space in front of you is filled with questioning faces!

So just time for another little break and a spot of work before a spot of lunch!

I have just cleaned out my pestilential mug with a Kleenex and spit and have thought of the incomparable Boundsie – the tea lady of all tea ladies in my last real school.  I hasten to add that she does not come to mind for use her use of Kleenex and spit (she must be revolving in her grave as she looks at my gross attempts to preserve the integrity of my mug!) but rather for her periodic disgust at the condition of my mug and her later vouchsafing the information that she had doused it liberally in Domestos to get rid of the ingrained tannin which was resistant to ordinary washing!  We shall not see her like again and no staff room that I have been in since has been complete without her!

I made an executive decision yesterday to go home early.  We ragged survivors, the left-overs from the Great Exodus as all the rest of the school has joined in the diaspora to other places in the name of education, have been working inordinately hard considering there was very little in the way of oversight of what we were or were not doing!

I have done a lot, but not what I really wanted to do.

I was beaten by Technological Aspirational Dysfunction.  Not on the part of the machine, oh no, my TAD comes from commercial greed.

It all comes down to a timeline.  For my MSOMA (Making Sense of Modern Art) course I wanted to construct a timeline showing when each of the eight “–isms” we look at is placed in the twentieth century.  Having at last learned to trust the computer to tell me about the computer I ventured onto the Internet to find out if there was a ready-made template for me to use.

They exist – but not quite as I want them to.  I delved deeper and discovered that timeless could be created using Excel and Word.  More delving brought me face to face with a step-by-step video.  Things appeared to be getting better and better!  But (isn’t there always a “but” when you deal with computers) each of the programs that I was considering was of a slightly different vintage to the one that I am actually using.  Added to this is the fact that I am using Microsoft programs which have been designed for use on the Mac.  It was as if I had been magically transported back to my first “real” computer, a Macintosh which supposedly worked with specially adapted Microsoft programs - and it never quite did.  And now in 2012 we are back where I began, trying to use programs which are “almost” the same as the ones that everyone else is using with their machines and finding the inevitable problems.  It is at times like this that one sees very clearly how Microsoft has made its money.  And built up a level of hatred in their imprisoned users that beggars belief.

Perhaps I have been a little hasty.  I was trying to form my timeline at the end of school yesterday and that was not the best time to be concentrating with full attention.

Today, Friday, a day I should be in school but this is an occasional day, a day of freedom – and the last day of joy until the Easter holidays – we went to Terrassa and I had an excellent lunch provided by Toni’s Mum.  I had planned to go to Barcelona and see an exhibition but returning on the motorways was threatening, with the amount of traffic building up nicely to intolerable proportions so I returned home.

And did housework.  I think I made a false call somewhere along the line!

Garzon has been stripped of his position of Judge for 11 years.  For those who cheered when this enterprising Judge tried to get the loathsome Pinochet extradited to Spain to face charges for the various crimes that he had committed, it is a time of considerable sadness that this crusading (whoops, sorry, that word is very much off limits nowadays!) this resourceful legal force has had his activities limited by what appears to be a well orchestrated and politically motivated campaign to stop him.

The fact that he was investigating a massive case of alleged corruption which implicates the ruling PP party and that the judges who have ruled against him have links to the party as well makes for a truly depressing assessment of the state of the judiciary in Spain at the moment.

The slimy ex-president of Valencia has been found not guilty of corruption by the resounding margin of 5 to 4 by the popular jury while the most enterprising judge of modern times in Spain has been stripped of his authority (and there are two other cases against him pending) is enough to make one weep.

And with that sad thought I will go to bed!

And music shall untune the sky!

It is impractical and illegal to have a shot of strong, black coffee while motoring in the rush hour on the northern ring road of Barcelona, but you can have the aural equivalent.

This morning, after setting off for work a delicious half hour later than usual, I played the first of the discs that form part of the Mercury Living Presence box set that I collected (again!) from the non-delivering deliverers.

The first disc in the collection was a performance of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” (and the answer to the Trivial Pursuit question is Hartmann) played by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Kubelik. 

The Mercury sound is highlighted in this recording and the sharpness of the instrumentation is something which wakes you up in an instant!  Subtle it is not - but thoroughly enjoyable. 

The piece was not complete by the time I pulled into my usual parking space - nearest to home!  I therefore have “The Great Gate of Kiev” to come and given the rest of the performance that should match my mood of exultation as I head downwards to the shores of Castelldefels at the end of the day!  Having failed to play the trombone very well in a number of orchestras in my school days I vividly remember the triplets (of impossible height above the stave) in The Great Gate (triplets which do not occur in the original piano version I might add) which we in the brass section generally failed to play.  Ah memories!

The Great Gate was as exhilarating as I expected with the crisp sound vibrating through the car frame!  The next piece of music on the disc, however, reminded me of the bad old days as I heard the gentle hiss of extraneous noise that I had almost forgotten from even the most basic DDD CDs.  How Proustian!

An exhausting day today with another set of exam papers marked; a meeting in the morning; a written account of the rats of Hamlyn from the Piper’s point of view (with rat illustrations) and not a single moment spent on what I want to do.  It is amazing what you can do when your working environment is cleared of clients!  Two more days and then a day off.  The high point of the day was the morning break when we had croissants with dark chocolate and ginger.  As it happened I had decided to bring some of my vastly expensive Earl Grey tea.  


Most satisfactory – and with Mozart playing through my computer almost civilized!