Will this essay never get writ!

Yet again the demands of life transcend art, and I have omitted my daily writing task.  I can of course plead pressure of work and the demands of an OU course which has taken over my waking moments, but it would be false.  There is always time to write.

Anyway, I haven’t but am now trying to make up for it.

Part of the problem is my approach to the first assignment in the new course.  I have been hunting around for something new to say on an area that must be worked dry from the point of view of the poor marker!  I have read more about Greek Attic Vases in the past weeks than I have ever read in the whole of my previous life!

And very interesting it has been too, though I have been less than academically rigorous about saving my references so there is going to have to be a wholesale rewriting of the sites that I have visited before the piece of work can be thought to be finished.

I do at least have a rough draft, and I have crafted a fine ending but it’s the painstaking putting of it all together that takes up the real time.  I have two days left and, ideally, I would like to send the thing off today – but we shall see how far I am able to get through the nitty-gritty.  To say nothing of cutting down the words that I have used to ensure that I stay within the Draconian limits demanded by the OU!  I fear that some of my more interesting details will have to be sacrificed in the interest of brevity.

As a welcome change from sitting in front of a class doing an examination, I am now in front of a class preparing for one – with only one sainted child opting to complete the work on Billy Elliot that we have been doing over the past week or so.

I have also been informed (and it always comes as a complete shock) that this will probably be the last class that I take with this particular group as exams and the end of term will eat up the rest of the time!  Prepared as always!

It is rumoured that summer might have come at last.  Today is hot, especially in Building 1 where there is no air conditioning and we are threatened with a tomorrow which will be scorching.  As we are in the elevated purlieu of the rich in Barcelona we do not have the muggy closeness of the city, but even here it is on the verge of being unpleasantly hot.  At last!

This has been an odd build up to summer and not a very pleasant one; I trust that it does not bode ill for the rest of the sunny season.  Even though I will be hard at work on the course during the summer I do not want the weather to be so un-Catalan that I am forced to my books for solace!

I am also telling myself that it is time for me to finalize my decision about what I am going to study next year.  And, more importantly, pay the grossly inflated fees that we overseas students are expected to pay!  Still, that’s what the money is for: to be spent.  And it is hardly the action of a wastrel to follow a degree course!

When I leave school in quarter of an hour’s time, there will be eight (8) working days left.  The lack of belief in my going is shared by staff and pupils alike and they confidently expect me to be sitting in my usual place, typing quietly come September. 

The kids have reasoned that one or both of the ladies who will be teaching my timetable will get pregnant and therefore I will be called upon once more.  The calls, I regret to say, will go unheeded. 

The siren call of the Third Floor will prove stronger and, as incentive, I must remember that I will never have so agreeable a timetable as the one I am working out now!  With, as I might have mentioned, single digit, eight working days to go!

Now lunch with Toni and a final push to finish the OU work!

Sun and singing!

The calm before the storm. 

Yesterday was one of those days when there was too much to be done to make a start on anything and the amount of work didn’t really fit into the time available.  But it was at times like that that I remembered the wisdom of my colleague David whose soothing words in times of crisis came back to me, “Stephen, it will get done!” – and to be fair it always has got done and there was no reason to suppose that yesterday would have been any different from all the other chaos filled days. 

Chaos, I might add, self-inflicted by unreasonable demands on limited time by a self regulating school which could, if it chose to do so, arrange things very differently.  But they don’t.

And, sure enough, all the work did get done and with a frightening synchronicity the head of department turned up at the exact moment when I had put the last result into the computer! 

I don’t know whether to be flattered or annoyed at her assumption that I would get the marking done in double quick time – a function of getting the horrible stuff done with the efficiency of a machine when I have to!  Anyway, the marks (such a they were) are now safely with the powers that be and are still in their raw state before the computational and administrative magic has been applied to produce the final results – a process which I now regard with the same sort of weary resignation that I afford the system of politics in this country!

The pre opera time was taken up with a large (and very welcome) glass of G&T in a central street café near Suzanne’s place of recuperation and then on to the environs of the Liceu for a meal. 

I decided to “go vulgar” and went to an Irish Bar near part of the University where I had a club sandwich, a glass of Irish “red” beer as the next best thing to a pint of lager and a hot chocolate brownie.  The sandwich was virtually tasteless, the brownie calorie packed with ice cream and foamy cream and the pint alone being excellent.  That little lot came to €15!  An absurd amount of money for what I had and indeed could have got on the Ramblas itself.  Though I should remind myself that my foolish “small beer” in the interval of the opera taken on the Ramblas sitting outside and watching the foreigners go by cost €5.50!

Added to all the previous expense was the fact that I went to the “wrong” car park to use the cut price parking ticket that you buy in the Liceu to make your stay a little less painful – and so my ticket was useless and that is another €7.20 I will not see again!

The opera itself was reasonably well done, L’elisir d’amore in a Gran Teatre del Liceu production designed by Mario Gas.  The set was functional and looked good with the overture being a time of the waking up of the town which was done with some style.

Musically, again, the orchestra under Daniele Callegari was excellent with the addition of a stage band which was a welcome part of the vitality of the production.  The chorus under José Luis Basso was as competent as usual and their stage movement was professional and assured.

I don’t know if I am getting more demanding, but, as with the last production that I saw, I felt that the roles were under sung.  Or I did until the second act when Nemorino (Roland Villazón) came into his own in “the” aria and had the sort of audience reception that opera singers dream of!  In fact all of the singers seemed to grow into the roles in the second act and the (extended) curtain call with an encore from Doctor Dulcamara (Ambrogio Maestri) nailed it as far as the audience was concerned!

Belcore (Joan Marin-Royo) left me fairly cold, but Adina (Aleksandra Kurzak) developed a voice which commanded attention.  Ciannetta (Cristina Obregón) was competent and pleasing.

All in all a satisfactory end to my opera season and also and end to my “high level” seat as next season I descend to the platea or stalls for my next cultural injection!

I really must do a fuller survey of the hostals in the area to get a more comprehensive view of what I can expect to pay for my stay-a-night-an-opera approach to my future musical outings when I am not frustrated by the necessity of going to school the next morning!  This calls for some intensive planning, alas!  So that ain’t going to happen!

The pressure to get going on my double part assignment for the OU is ever more pressing and HAS to be started this weekend if there is any reasonable likelihood of its being completed by the deadline.  As Toni has upped the ante by his totally unreasonable results I am duty bound to “make an effort” to emulate his achievement.  Damn him!

I am fairly confident about the first part of the assignment but the second part is more difficult as there are vast lacunae in the life of the vase that I am supposed to be talking about which will have to be filled in with informed speculation!  Informed speculation based on about ten days of Instant Connoisseur courtesy of the OU!  We shall see!

On the positive side I have just been told that my august presence is not needed in the Departmental meeting this afternoon as long as I contribute some “creative” ideas for the use of the iPad as soon as possible.  I suppose that I will have to fabricate some sort of creative mish-mash and pass it off as possible pedagogy.  This is one overriding feature of this work that should make my task just that little bit easier – I will not have to teach any of it!  I am therefore limited only by how lenient I want to be with my colleagues!

Lunch was in our usual place and was as good value as ever but not, alas very interesting either.

The sun however is appearing with some regularity and I am cooking nicely.  Toni, bless him, says that if I get any darker I will start being racially harassed!  I have checked my skin colour against that of a New Zealand teacher and I am only marginally darker at the moment and he will inevitably overtake me as the summer progresses – perhaps it is just as well that I only have eleven (count them) working days left in gainful employment and that limits the time that he has left to get a more convincing tan than me – even if he does have a native built in advantage!

Toni has now had a (brief) swim in the pool only five (count them) days after I entered the outdoor pool for the first time this year!  This is unheard of and just shows how debilitated I have become with the dictates of teaching full time again draining me of that hardy couldn’t care less attitude towards personal warmth in the water that used to be a characteristic of mine!

Perhaps when I am back in the land of reality and away from education perhaps I will return to more regular swimming than I am doing at the moment.  And I will re-subscribe to The Guardian again!

Count on!

An oddly unsatisfying day.  One of those unsubstantial days when nothing really goes well, but there are no disasters.  But achievement is minimal.  Also, I don’t really think that I am behaving as a true professional should.

In my mind I have already left.  Again. 

Although I tell myself that I am duty bound to, what was it that Boxford used to say, “Work until the very end of term please!” I am signally not doing that with the thoroughness that I should.

My colleagues are still producing little exam revision exercises and swapping methods of keeping kids on course and I am thinking that I have done all that so many times that surely I am allowed time off for good behaviour!  This time.  But the kids are unique and will not have this opportunity again.  As you can probably tell this is a kind of cathartic writing whose purpose is to allow me to wallow in a tepid puddle of self-criticism and then go on in exactly the same way as before.

In the thirteen working days that are left in my career!

I have now started my last exam with the 1BXT class that I take and my lessons with them are over.  That has not stopped management from taking those “free” times (and more) for invigilation.  But that is just like the teaching experience back in the UK when the fond dream of acres of free periods when Y11 and Y13 have done their exams never truly materialises!

Actually today was something of a crisis because, yet again, the school proved itself too mean to do something which is normal in all other schools in which I have worked, i.e. get in supply to cover absence known in advance.  Not with us.  So, today four of my colleagues were off on a trip to see the iPad in action.  And then another colleague was unexpectedly ill.  So five teachers out and no supply at all to cover them.  The usual approach is for departments to collapse classes or join them together or otherwise cope with the absent colleague.  It didn’t work.

I was supposed to be in two places at once at a time when I do not normally teach!  This is imposing on a person with only thirteen working days left.  I made a unilateral decision to go to the class which was having an examination and left behind me a class seething with untrammelled youth beginning to sense chaos and looking to exploit it!

My arrival in the other building was an added element of the frantic to a situation that appeared to be close to collapse.  I was told to sit down and wait (not difficult to do) and then was suddenly propelled into action by relieving Suzanne who was trapped in a class that was nothing to do with me.  I stayed with that class until well after my normal time of leaving and when that class had finished their examinations I had barely enough time to hand out the papers for my own when I was relieved by an IT teacher.  Never let it be said that I was of the generation that ignored the sage advice handed down from my great-grand-father, “Never refuse a good offer!”  So I didn’t and left.

And perhaps it was that “leaving” that left the bad taste in my mouth.  Perhaps I should have stayed and collected my papers and marked them this evening.  The meeting to consider the results is the day after tomorrow and I am going to the opera tomorrow evening.  This means that tomorrow during the school day I will be teaching, invigilating and marking so that I can subside into the froth of “The Elixir of Love” with a weary sigh of necessary work done!

My dissatisfaction did not prevent, indeed prompted our going out for lunch in a Galician restaurant where the menu del dia looked promising.  The meal itself was more than satisfactory, but what rankled was that the price outside the restaurant was €12 while inside and printed on the bottom of the menu was €15.  We were assured that the €12 was the right price, but when the bill came it was for €13.20!  Such deception (typical of Galicians I am informed by a certain Catalan of my acquaintance) is not to be tolerated and yet another restaurant is struck off our list of acceptable places.

Talking of expanding our list of places to eat, we attempted to get information at an information kiosk, set up for that purpose and funded by the local council to ensure that all visitors to our fair town get the information that they need to make their visits a delight.  The helpfully vacuous idiot in the information booth knew nothing and her attempts to furnish us with information were embarrassing.  It leads one (i.e. the Catalan of my acquaintance) to speculate about how such a signally inept person got her job in this PP dominated town.  I leave my intelligent reader to join the dots!

Day after day the television spews forth information (just like the idiot of the kiosk didn’t) about the flood of corruption of the governing party so that it is now only possible to see the grotesques who make up the government as an inept cast of some badly organized Reality TV show. 

Our Prime Minister (neither word of which title fits him in any way shape or form) has now perfected the Little Boy Lost look that he adopts as his cringing default position whenever he travels abroad and meets “real” politicians. 

And when you consider the quality of those “real” politicians who have merrily led us into the disaster that is modern Europe because their collective snouts have been rooting around in the trough for whatever morsels they can snatch from the electorate, then you really begin to appreciate how derisory a cypher our “leading” politician actually is!

Spain is almost alone in Europe in having no Freedom of Information Law or Transparency Law.  The politicians (see above!) talk about it and the TV regularly replays extracts of our leading politicians mouthing the necessity for “Transparencia” and then doing nothing about it and doing everything thing they can to make sure that the voters do not find out exactly what is going on with their money!  The irony of seeing the sheep-like ministers bleat the magic word has now been lessened through repetition and by the astonishingly arrogant way that our political masters seem determined to brazen out the storm of accusations and hope that everyone will forget about them in the balmy days of summer to come!

Perhaps I should keep my mind on the music to come tomorrow night and go with the flow!

Escatology!

The Last Day before Official Counting of the Days Left begins. 

Monday will see us well into the month of June and further along the road to the magic date of the 21^st of June when my contract finishes and I become poor but free!

Today at 1.00pm Toni gets his results from the examinations that he took last Saturday.  Results in a week!  Rather different from the more academically plodding pace of the OU where my results are more than two weeks away!  I do hope that they are worth waiting for!  Toni will be a gibbering wreck by the time the afternoon is in sight and, while I am sure that he has nothing to worry about, he will not be using that piece of logic to lessen his tension!

Yesterday was something of a nothing day in which everything almost worked out, but nothing was satisfactorily finished.  Even the weather (which has been little short of shameful recently) played up to the prevailing sense of dissatisfaction and produced a weary series of sunny intervals interspersed with irritatingly disruptive scraps of cloud.  This is not what I signed up for when I came to Catalonia!  Another letter to the Generalitat is called for!

There is a general sense of endings about the school at the moment.  Various classes have ended their courses and they are merely (!) waiting for the inevitable examinations to terminate their time in the place.  Other courses (like most of the bloody ones that I teach) go on to the bitter end – though these too are enlivened (!) by the inexorable demands of examinations.  But slowly, and surely we are working out way to the end of term. 

Even as I speak teachers are ransacking their filmic resources and finding anything of a moving picture nature that will keep their charges quiet or at least quiescent until they become someone else’s problem!

That was yesterday, but today, today we have counting of days!

Today is the first of the month and on the 21^st of this month (ah, savour the delight of that demonstrative pronoun – a grammatical term I now use with terrifying ease as a life-changingly traumatic result of teaching my language to Johnny foreigner) in just 21 days I will be released from durance vile in the chains of education!  Sing, indeed, to Jesus!

Of course the money will stop, but I suppose that is only fair, as I will not be doing the work – but the results of my travail will live on in the warped lives of those who have been touched by my Lessons of Wandering Digression - which is the only real way that I know how to teach. 

Rather like the Wife of Bath, kids with me learn through “wandering by the way” – and if their minds are not attuned to the acquisition of knowledge through inventive analogy then they must have had a hard time in my so called lessons!

I wonder what my last real class will be.  The last day of term is the official fiesta for the end of the course and normal lessons will be suspended and larks and other quasi-educational activities will be taking place.  On the day before the last day of term, my last lesson is a drama lesson with the 1ESO.  Perhaps that will be the last lesson that I teach.  I am sure that I can work out some meaning behind the last lesson of a career being related to acting and posing.  Though, there again, the analogy is too easy to be interesting!

Toni has had his results from his first examinations and has achieved a distinction!  This is a well-deserved result from the enormous amount of work that he has done and it has hopefully calmed him down for the rest of the units that he has to take.  The one downside that I can see from this success is the constant sniping which is now going to take place as I continue my courses in the OU!  Ah well, they do say that healthy competition is a stimulus to excellence!

Soon I am off to Barcelona to meet up with Suzanne at the Design Hub for culture and lunch.  What could be better!

The ostensible reason for our going to the Design Hub was to experience the space and see an exhibition.  We managed neither.

The whole place was well and truly closed so we were able to appreciate it from the outside and ponder upon what it might be like to be inside the vast interior which we could glimpse through the glass doors which were firmly locked.

The edifice itself is a cantilevered box like construction which reminded me of a ferry port terminal building.  The cantilever reaches out over the main road and towards and elevated road as if to bring the prosaic into the well designed tranquillity of an imposing building.  There is a section of lawn which has a wavy glass walkway through it and on the plaza side of building there are multi level canal-like water features with stunted fountains and much algae!  The articulation of the stairways reminded me of a building in Holland or Denmark but my responses are still in limbo and I am pondering the impression it made.

The flea market we went to was less than impressive, even if it was the last day of its existence and I was more than ready for lunch.

Which was in a restaurant that we had been to previously and was slightly worse than we remembered.  It was an Asian/Japanese establishment with a substantial buffet and a selection of fresh food that could be cooked for you.  The meal was reasonable value, but I am not sure that I want to revisit any time in the near future.

Before I made the trek home, Suzanne loaned me Devan Sudjic’s book, “The language of things” or How We Are Seduced by the Objects Around Us.  It reads like a novel, is full of anecdotal stories, it skips from topic to topic and is thoroughly interesting.  He really detests Philippe Stark and has virtually a whole chapter on the Anglepoise lamp!  Thoroughly enjoyable stuff.  Not sure that there is much there that I can use in my present course, but I will remember the book and call on Suzanne to lend it to me again if I am in want of a cheap quote!

I came home to an empty house - as I later discovered Toni was out with his mother and younger sister.  Alone, I decided to Take a Step.

The spirit of the Dead Dog Pool has now been well and truly exorcised by yours truly as I flung (gingerly) myself into the cool waters and even did a length of dog-paddle to placate whatever dog-god might be watching.

My swim was hardly hardy as I waited until the first day of June before I risked skin and quantities of unheated water.  The sun had done something of its job and the shock to the system was not as disturbing as some immersions in the past.  It was, however, bracing to put it mildly!

Now, Sunday is the time for me to do the part of the examination paper for 1ESO than I have said that I would do and to make a start on the first assignment for the present OU course.  I am mired in the contradictory evidence for the “worth” of ancient Greek vases at the moment and have come down stairs to cool off and have a rest from the fairly intense knowledge acquisition that has been going on for the past few days.

By the end of today I would expect to have made a start on the technical description of the vase and have read the appropriate chapters in the course book to be thinking about making a start on part 2 of the assignment as well.  I have only eleven days to get the thing done and, while that sounds like a great deal of time, school examinations will take up what spare time I can give them.  So the race is on, in which I can tell you know that when it comes to a choice the OU is going to win every time!

Onwards!  And backwards into Classical Times!