Space!

Today was a test day.  I ran away from school at a time which was unprecedented in the history of the institution.  I was home before the lunching hour of one!  This pushes my inviolability to the limits. 

I thought that I had tested the tolerance of the school by brining out a chair and sitting on the patio and watching the kids during my so-called invigilation of the morning break, but my disappearance during the times that I am not teaching is pushing the school to the limits of its tolerance. 

I suppose that I can say that it is their choice; they accept my rules or I walk!

Today I have been able to utilize the day not only to complete my teaching requirements but also to complete a little academic work and go out for an enjoyable evening with the head of secondary in the local British school.  We were eventually joined by the head of pastoral and, for the first time in my experience of working in the school, I actually saw her sit down!

An excellent evening and I look forward to future evenings of the same kind!

Tomorrow will be a defining day when my departure today will either be an important feature or it will be treated as I want it to be: as unimportant.  And thus the rest of my time in the School on the Hill will be defined as acceptable!

Tomorrow the way of the school reinforces itself as we lurch into the examination season yet again.  The Mock Examinations (how apt that adjective is!) start tomorrow and I lapse back into my default position of marking Paper 1 with my tried-and-tested cut-out marking scheme.  I think that my offer to mark my traditional burden of Paper 1 was greeted with a certain degree of delighted acceptance and I think that I might have talked myself into that unwelcome burden when I might have been able to remain aloof!

But the year is rolling along and I have to play my part in it.  Yesterday in bed I tried to work out just how many weeks were left until the end of June, but it was simply too depressing to contemplate with any degree of equanimity!

Meanwhile the teaching has to go on and I have to be there to ensure its continuation!  Or something.

At least we seem to be clearer about when the Third Annual Chocolate Week is going to take place: the second week in February.  I will have to start rooting around for white chocolate recipes to ensure that Julie is contained within our celebrations!

And tomorrow is already the “tipping day” when we begin to work our way towards the weekend.  Such ways of thinking are the ways to get through the week.

Unfortunately there are lots of weeks left before I can feel the tension of educational responsibility drift away!

Long live differences!

Sometimes getting up at six-thirty in the morning is earlier than at other times.  This morning was one of those crack-of-dawn type experiences when the obscenity of early rising was more pronounced.  And the traffic was worse and there wasn’t even a decent sunrise to gladden the heart.

And you have to teach!

The hysteria connected with the distribution of iPads continues with a hierarchy of smugness directly proportional to the sveldtness and elegance and practicality of the “cover” rapidly emerging.  This was an obvious next step for a group of people who had all been given exactly the same machine.  I am thinking of writing a short monograph on “The sociological implications of technological innovation in a closed community.” 

My previously stated plan to shock people with an ultra-thin keyboard of satisfying expense (it has already been ordered) looks as though this will be plan of merely private satisfaction as the visible ownership of an iPad will mean automatic enrolment into the slave ranks of the feeders of the iPad who will, for the next number of months up to the advent of the new intake in September, be producing material as if there is no tomorrow.  Yet tomorrow will inexorably come and no matter that there will have been months to prepare, it will be as if nothing had been done and there will be howling and wailing and gnashing of teeth as the entire system collapses on Day 1.

When I arrived home the keyboard was waiting for me and, remarkably easily the thing clamped magnetically onto the iPad and worked its magic.  It does look elegant and, more importantly, it works.  Alas!  It looks so impressive and professional that it screams for academic work to be fed into it, so I fear that it must remain another of my guilty gadget secrets!

But I will be far away and the sounds of distress will be as distant echoes in a waking dream.  With any luck.

My teaching day was less than satisfactory and most of the negativity was my fault.  There is something infinitely depressing in analysing poor lessons and working out that the factor of failure was down to the practitioner, i.e. me!  At least with the drama lesson it means that the next one will be much better as I have to teach four parallel classes, so at least I get another chance to redeem my reputation.  As I keep encouraging myself, if you can tell that you are teaching badly and work out strategies for improvement then you are still capable of professional thought!

Tomorrow is an early start, but also, with any luck, a very early finish.  One of my drama lessons has been moved to another day and so (in theory) I can leave before lunch.  This approach is being tolerated at the moment and I am not bruiting it abroad basing my strategy on the notorious “Don’t ask; don’t tell” policy of the US armed forces with the only negative aspect being one of my colleagues who notices each time I am not there.  My habitual response of “I was lying low” is beginning to wear a little thin – and it’s going to be a damn sight thinner by June!

I have begun my musical homework for the next opera “Les Contes de Hoffmann” and have used YouTube to provide an extraordinary Powell and Pressburger 1951 version which prompted me to view their Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) which was a much better film and one which I found engaging and emotionally charged with amazing performances from the two leading men and an overall impression of moral authority remarkable for the time.

Finding an entire film on YouTube will, I think encourage me to use YouTube to try and find some of the more obscure films that writers have enthused over and that I have long desired to view!  Even more opportunities for pretention beckon.

But an early start tomorrow so oblivion calls!

Keep the faith

Finding a parking space outside, or indeed anywhere near, the swimming pool this morning was incredibly difficult.  I ended up a fair walk away from the pool and made my way towards it with a growing depression as I imagined the number of kids and their parents that had to be cluttering up the pool, getting in the way of we dedicated swimmers.

It therefore came as something of a surprise when I finally got to the water to find the surface of the pool untroubled by any perturbations from other swimmers.  And indeed I was alone from almost the whole of my time ploughing through the water.

I think that the parking spaces had been used up by legions of jubilados who were playing boule with the sort of single minded dedication that makes the SAS look like casual Sunday School teachers!

I think that I made a mistake with my timing and I spent more than my allotted twenty minutes – or I have suddenly become less proficient in a single day.  Which is not impossible I suppose.

Yet again, as soon as I left the water a child appeared closely followed by another.  I think that I must have a built-in detection device to warm me about the proximity of neophyte humans!

Exercise taken (fairly) early in the afternoon meant that I could go out to lunch with Irene with a (fairly) easy conscience.

My first task was to explain and justify my apparent complete U-turn about the concept of retirement.  I am not sure that I managed to get my point of view across as she maintained an expression which could best be described as “sceptical” throughout our discussions!

One result of our calling in to a supermarket was my acquisition of a Lindt chocolate bar which comprises a shell of dark chocolate enclosing a filling of “extra creamy” tiramisu.  I haven’t yet eaten any, but simply holding the bar one registers a very satisfying weight suggesting a profundity of taste which will only be heightened by delay in gratification!

I am now eager to get my ultra-slim keyboard for my iPad as I am hoping that this will revitalize my use of a machine which seems to have fallen woefully down the pecking order with the advent of the iMac and Kindle Fire.  Let the battle for my attention commence.

I have now downloaded the marked TMA 01 which has been returned electronically by the tutor.  We were informed, in a vain attempt to make us feel better about the difficulties of working together as a geographically disparate group of relative strangers that the part we had to do as a group was usually the part which received a higher mark than the individual effort; not in my case – and I don’t know if that is good or bad.  I will assume the positive choice.  And I now have a few weeks to prepare for the next assignment.  And I am now working in the School on the Hill.  The best laid plans etc etc!

I will also have to start thinking about my next course as the conclusion of this one is rapidly gaining on me and I need to have a constant course content so that I can build up to the courses that I need to do if I am to gain a degree in Art History – which is the long term plan.

Long live learning!

How could you!

Through the vagaries of my approach to blogging this entry is of an earlier date to the one that follows even though they have both been posted on the same day.  The ways of things electronic are weird and wonderful.  Thank god!


Here we are again!  Siting in front of a class of students busily guessing their way through a multi-choice exam paper while I study my timetable for the day here in my local English language school and shudder at the thought of what looks like four straight periods with the same mixed history and chemistry year 13 class.

My continuing failed retirement takes a new turn at the start of this new term and New Year.  I was scheduled to spend the rest of this truncated week in my local school covering for a colleague who has left and has not yet been replaced.  However, mu old school has also contacted me (yesterday) and informed me that the colleague who was supposed to have come back rom an extended sick leave was doing no such thing and that my services (on a strictly time-limited basis, honestly) were required.

Cynical as I am, I can appreciate the quandary for the head of English who is looking to provide some degree of continuity for pupils who have had a pretty disrupted term during the major teaching period of the year.  And my appreciation was made more pointed by the fact that the head of department actually appealed to my past experience to increase the guilt element in her discourse that she felt could influence my teaching choices.

The end result of my conversation with her is still being worked out, but it could result in my returning to the School on the Hill.  Not for the first time since I ostensibly left!

There is also a cunning plan yeastily stirring in the recesses of my New Year brain, but I will have to wait until further into the day to find out if I can take my strategy to the next level.

I have to admit that it seems unlikely because not only the teacher for whom I am covering, but also another colleague failed to turn up today.  This means that there is even more pressure on the supply list and my suggestion is unlikely to be taken up by the head of secondary, in which case things are back to where they were before the head of English from the School on the Hill phoned me.

For the first time I was awoken (well, that is not strictly true, I was wide awake well before the time that the alarm was supposed to go off, so it might be more strictly true to say that “I was prompted to action”) by the alarm of the new iPhone.  The rising melodic harp-like notes were less instantly hateful than the single alarm that I could find on the other phone.  Though it is probably true that I will come to hate this melody in the same way and to the same extent as the other as soon as it drags me from comfortable dreams!

It may be purely psychological, but I am responding far better to this new phone than I ever did to the other.  This is obviously partially psychological because some of the disadvantages of the new machine are patently obvious – the most glaring being the way that information is inputted.  The Android machine used the sweep finger approach to typing which I found frighteningly accurate.  My fingers are rather too spatulate for the small “keys” on the iPhone screen and turning the thing sideways does not seem to increase the size of the keyboard.

I am using iTunes to transfer the music and amazingly the Apple earphones seem to be an appreciable step forward in technology and easy of use.  They actually work well and are comfortable to wear – certainly compared with the previous versions.

The saddest thing about the iPhone is that the unique power plug’s reversibility is an actual selling point!  And had a round of applause at the launch!

It is light and slim and all the other features seem to work in very much the same way as on the Android phone.  My texts and emails do work more easily on the iPhone and the quality of the screen is excellent in the way it reproduces pictures.  But is it worth the money?  Almost certainly not.  Am I resentful of the amount of money I paid for it?  Probably.  Am I happy?  Yes.  I am one of the saddos who think that being fully Mac-ed or Appl-ed is a good and wholesome thing.

I have just had a History lesson where the kids had just started work on William I or William the Bastard and the way in which he was attempting to wrest control from the English (whoever they were at this time) and establish his dynasty.  It was a delight to talk about something about which I knew at least something.  Solubility product KSp is only going to get me so far in Chemistry at year 13 level!

And now I am back in the School on the Hill.  Reasons too complex and guilt complexes too deep have ensured this transition and now I am back in harness and all things are as they were.  Some people have taken my continuing presence in the place so much for granted that they have not even realized that I shouldn’t be here!  Taken for granted – and at my age too!  Such is life! 

I am not sure if I have done the right thing.  From the point of view of the pupils then I am certainly to be credited with putting their concerns within the outer limit of my ambit of thought, but to commit myself to staying here until June is perhaps beyond the call of duty.  Though, as one should never forget, I am, after all, paid for my selfless devotion.  Not enough, but still, paid.

My colleagues have greeted my reappearance with weary disbelief and they put down my presence to a lack in my own motivation towards a life free of school.  There might be an element of reality in their dismissive evaluation!

For example, I took a “Drama” class this morning and broached the topic of script writing with them.  A few simple exercises and they were writing with a fluency and delight which showed that the few basic tips that I gave them were fully assimilated and had become part of their writing strategies!  Such observable progress in a matter of minutes is one of the great delights of teaching.  Perhaps that sort of thing is more akin to a drug than to professionalism – or perhaps one produces the other!

I should remind myself that I have been here for less than one day and I am looking forward to staying here for the next six months.  God, that has a sobering ring to it!

Meanwhile I am looking forward to my final lesson of the day which is also the last period of the day.  This is very poor planning and gives me no opportunity to slope off.  A process which I fully intend to make a characteristic of my remaining time in this school!

The non-delivering delivery service allegedly made an abortive attempt to get my goods to me in the morning which means that I had to go into town to reclaim my stuff: a new (old) set of Sibelius symphonies with bits and pieces and an amazing EMI set of Twentieth Century Music comprising 16 discs of music in roughly chronological order which I am busily feeding into the iMac so that I can listen while I work on my OU stuff.  Disappointingly the upload rate for iTunes is not great and it takes an inordinate time to get the music electronically available.  But I am sure that it will be worth the effort.  Eventually.  I have only listened to part of the set, but at least with EMI you can relax about recording quality.

The Berglund Sibelius seems to be an idiosyncratic view of the pieces, at least from a listening to two of the symphonies with his tempos being on the slow side, though it does bring out different textures from the orchestra than I am used to hearing – whether I like his view of the pieces I have not yet decided, but they are certainly food for thought and it will be interesting to compare in a more immediate way when the whole of my collection of Sibelius is on the computer and only a click away from hearing.

I am now in my second day of the rest of the school year.  And still thinking about what I have said that I will do.  The sense of my actions will perhaps be clearer when I have yet another leaving party in the summer. 

It’s something to look forward to!