Technology and Silence

I suppose there is something to be said for the computer in education. 

The kiddiewinks are now all in front of their machines and tapping away with two, or sometimes daringly more fingers getting their thoughts down on paper.  I am not sure that there is any planning about what they are doing but they are relatively quiet and that, considering that we live in an imperfect world, is all that matters.  Especially on an overcast day when there is no gleam of healing sunshine to make things look positive.

The rain has now set in and Barcelona has disappeared under a soft white gauze of wetness.  The soft slap of water spilling from clogged pipes is surrounded by the pizzicato of falling raindrops splashing onto the tiled terrace – and I’m pissed off with it all!  We have had too much of this (perfectly seasonal) rain and I want it to stop and I want summer here now.  If not sooner.

How can I salvage something out of the wreckage of my Essay if I am constantly staring morosely out of the window and not seeing sun?  And the days are ticking down to the cut off time.  Still a week left, and I can concentrate a little more now that the sets of examination marking are out of the way.

The rain has continued relentlessly all day and we have been accompanied by gurgles and tricklings and splashes wherever we have gone.  Traipsing from building to building has been a very unpleasant experience hopping inexpertly from puddle to puddle and hoping that my recent assiduous polishing of my shoes has made them truly waterproof.

Today was the day of the start of the Credit of Synthesis in which various connected projects are loosed on the kids and they work in groups to get their various tasks done.  I was hurriedly drafted in to take the first lesson for one group mainly because they were using material that I had written last year.  This was from a unit of work on the concept of the Hero.

I have to say that I rather enjoyed the lesson and found revisiting the old stuff stimulating.  The kids had to research a list of names and then give them a mark for how heroic they thought they were – and most importantly be able to justify their judgements.

There were a few glitches.  Typing the name Jason into the computers did not lead with information about the Classical Jason, he of the Golden Fleece, but rather the Jason from a slasher horror movie!  Similarly Jesse James appears to be some sort of sports star rather than the infamous Western outlaw!

The project based learning will go on for the rest of the week and next and will end up with the kids giving presentations in their groups of what they have learned during the week.  All good clean fun which should take us up to the end of term and the start of the Easter holidays and a long awaited rest! 

January, when I came back after Christmas seems an awfully long way back in distant history and June seems equally distant in terms of the future!  But it will come round soon enough and I will be truly retired at last!  Hooray!

Meanwhile, I will do the referencing work on The Essay this evening and attempt some restructuring.

And try not to think about the rain.

At all.

Striving!

Much as I sort-of-enjoy watching a game of football, especially one as charged as the Barça/Milan confrontation - in which Barça have to score four (count ‘em) goals if they are to progress – I really don’t think that I can be expected to endure it without the comforter of a computer on my lap!

Even with my woefully unskilled eye I can tell that Barça has fielded a very strong squad and if any group of players can pull back the goal deficit this is it.  In fact, as I typed that Messi (who else) scored such a seemingly simple goal that you feel that anyone could have done it.  That is part of his genius, he really does make it seem easy: you just kick he ball into the net thing.  That’s all there is to it!

Barça had Milan rattled after that goal and there was a lot of wild kicking, but now the Italians are more settled – but there is plenty of time for them to crack up again.  Please.  And I still find it extraordinary that I care!

Although there is also Cardiff to worry about as well. 

They were, the last time I spoke to Paul 1, doing quite well and are setting themselves up nicely for another nail-bitingly tense end-of-season horror story as the bloody struggle for a place in the Premiership comes to a climax.  People from Cardiff are beginning to mutter a version of the devout Jewish prayer about the future, praying, “This year, without going to Wembley!”  We shall see – though I am not sure that Paul’s nerves will take another cliffhanger!

Today was an ultra-short day.  So short in fact that I actually stayed longer than I “should” have because I couldn’t believe that the glowing road to escape was stretched in front of me so invitingly!

The whole school is now in complete examination spasm: the kids are either cramming for an exam or sitting one, while the teachers are looking around wide-eyed as yet another set of exam papers thumps onto the table to be scrabbled up in their arthritic, pen-cramped fingers so that they can spread the red!

The wall-to-wall examinations have, however aided me as I was able to start marking my latest set in a “study” lesson (in which I demand silence and individual work) and get a fair way through because many of the questions have a single acceptable answer and can be marked by a reasonably educated marmoset.  With ADD.  Which is essential in a country in which silence is an almost physical impossibility and when a quietly refined individual such as myself is trying to get something which requires concentration done!

Lunch was in our normal restaurant in town and thoroughly pleasant.  It also gave me the opportunity to get more of my indispensible disposable Pilot fountain pens from a shop a few doors up from that much-patronized place. 

I have now taken to marking in blue. 

I could say that this is so that my corrections seem less intimidating and condemnatory to the pupils and encourage them to think that the corrections are done by someone on their side, a friend, and not an austere authority figure looking down at them in a callous sort of way.

But that would be a crappy lie of course. 

I just like writing with them.  Not the black or red versions you understand, just the blue.  There must be something in the composition of the ink that simply makes it flow more easily.  I recommend them without hesitation.  But only the blue ones, obviously.

I do, of course, get a pang of guilt every time I throw away what looks like a perfectly functional pen, but I have had counselling and consequently I don’t lose any sleep over what looks like gratuitous spitting on the whole ethos of conservation.

I went through my Essay today and I think it is a disjointed, unconvincing and generally irrelevant piece of work.  Which is depressing as I started off full of interesting “takes” on the academically mined-out seams of interpretation of a Classic Novel.  My perception is going to have to be more securely linked to the concerns of the essay title before it is submitted.  I have nine days to make a bird of paradise out of the cracked and addled egg that I have at the moment!

I have now listened to the turgid church music of disc number 50 (though the last track was exceptionally good) and disc 49 lasted just two tracks before it was consigned to oblivion, and I am now on disc 48 ‘Virtuoso Violin’ - then 47 and backwards is a more conventional journey down the musical centuries.  The CD case I have in the car goes back to disc 11 which I think is Papa Haydn – a composer with whom I have a love/hate relationship.

More by accident than anything else I have also ordered a further box set of discs from Sony.  The word “accident” is a sop to a non-existent sense of guilt because you are perfectly able to cancel an order after you have sent it to Amazon as long as you do it within a few minutes or possibly longer.  I did cancel a whole range of versions of Sibelius’s symphonies that I had put in my “basket” for information rather than purchase – but you know what a few frenzied clicks can do on Amazon, and how much it can cost!

What should happen as I have paid vast sums of money to become a “Premium” customer of amazon is that my purchase should arrive in a “couple” of days.  The only major drawback is that Amazon’s “partner” delivery service in this area is MRW the well-known non-delivery delivery service.  To be absolutely fair they have been a bit better of late, not much, but better.  Though the last time I went to their office at their stated time of opening in the afternoon it was of course closed.  It was only the fact that I saw a driver disappearing into the murk of the back room and rapped at the glass door and he knew that he had been seen that I managed to gain entrance.

The discs should be here by Friday at the latest.  If they are not then I will ask why I have paid the “Prime” rate in the first place.  This will be a real test of the system – and then I can take the weekend loading the discs onto the ever-

receptive hard drive of the iMac!

And Barça have just won 4-0 which means that they go forward on aggregate after the sort of game that could make one into a real fan.  Almost, but not quite!  I will stay with pictures, books and music!

I now have well over a solid fortnight of music and the iMac will take my entire collection and more before the disc becomes a little crowded!  By the time I have loaded up the computer the cost of the music will be many times the cost of the highly expensive machine itself and then I can repeat the quotation that used to be in the Everyman Library books to the effect that if all else was destroyed and only my iMac survived there would be a remarkable selection of the finest music that the West has produced since the time of Monteverdi and beyond.

And I suppose that the most damming aspect of my collection is the almost total emphasis on Europe.  Indeed, I wonder just how many discs would remain if you took out the German/Austrian, Italian and French music that I have!  I suppose I have a disproportionate holding of Scandinavian music with a ridiculous number of versions of the symphonies of Sibelius and Nielsen and a fair collection of Grieg as well.  I am slowly discovering some of the other composers in Scandinavia and thoroughly enjoying the experience.  But I tend to think, in my Europhile and culturally blinkered way, that life is too short to indulge in too much so-called world music.  I prefer it to be mediated through solidly Western composers like Britten, Messiaen and the like!

The jaded pen!

Getting back into the swing of academic essay writing was not quite as easy as I didn’t expect it to be!  My essays were ever hewed from the living flesh of my imagination and the final sheets were always bloody with effort.  The best essays I wrote were always those fuelled with the adrenalin that courses round the blood stream when the writer realizes that the deadline is not only looming it is pushing him out of his chair and dragging fingers from computer keys. 

Except of course when I was in University it was the keys of a typewriter keys and not a computer.  There was room (with the ever useful Tippex) to correct a mistyped letter or even a whole word but what was typed was typed and it had to stand or redo the whole damn thing.

Now the writing of academic essays is a multidimensional, phantasmagorical journey using a whole range of media.  For this essay at one point in its (still unfinished) production I was using a Kindle version of the text, together with a paperback version and a hardback version; the OU course material; a mug of tea; my own notes; a live Word document; a printer; a fountain pen; a pencil; paper; assignment instructions; iTunes; access to the terrace on the Third Floor, and the Hand of God.  And it still doesn’t read well – but there is still time to make it better.  Or at least to make the references accurate because at the moment they are merely brackets with the word “ref” inside them!   The nit picking at the end of the production of an essay is both deeply satisfying and totally frustrating at one and the same time!  Would that I was at that stage!

This morning did not start well as I decided to put my “essay” on my pen drive so that should the opportunity arise I could do some revision.  Fond hope of course, but a sound one.  In the event my pen drive didn’t work and then to compound that failure I left the bloody thing in the computer as I rushed off to work.

Luckily (and I use the term advisedly) my car keys were on that ring so as soon as I reached the garden gate I had discovered my loss.  But the door was closed behind me.  And my house keys were on the key ring in the computer.

Thumping on the front door had no effect whatsoever in eliciting a response and I was eventually driven (such irony) to phone upstairs to get the door opened.

I was therefore “late” by my standards by the time that I changed the disc in the CD player because I am fed up with the offerings from the box set that I am grinding my way thought at the moment and have now replaced the sequence with the EMI Eminence collection which I am starting to listen to backwards – not, I hasten to add in a Satanic-hear-the-hidden-messages sort of way but merely from disc 50 downwards.  As they follow a roughly chronological pattern I will be working back from the twenty-first century to Bach and the Baroque.

My car system has only picked up the imbedded disc information on very few occasions so I am guessing that what I listened to on the High Tension Highway to work was Tavenner – the living not the dead one.  And a turgid work it was too.  I hope for better on the way back!

Today was one of my “full-ish” days but at least I got out before the parental hordes began their automobilic clustering behaviour precluding any easy egress from the School on the Hill.  There is a wonderful sense of freedom as you steer the car along a deserted, but car lined street as part of your escape!

No mention was made about my absence from the meeting on Saturday morning, though many and bitter were the comments from those who actually did attend.  Those teaching both years in the equivalent of the sixth form did not manage to tear themselves away until 1.00pm!  One shudders at the mere act of typing such foul information, what it must have been like to have been part of the reality of it defies speculation!

Unsurprisingly today was an Examination Day and I now have a wodge of marking to get out of the way before tomorrow when I have my second wodge of marking.  I am machine-like in my efficiency in getting through these interminable irrelevancies and I have already set out the names on the Excel program to record and calculate the final meaningless marks.  Which will then be added to other equally meaningless marks to produce a final comprehensively meaningless mark.  And everybody will be happy.  Or not.  Who cares! The clue is in the word “meaningless”!  At least it is for me!

So, off to the marking and the hope that I will have some time left over to start the overhaul of the draft of The Final Essay.  And then it is all plain sailing until the examination.

Upwards to the Third Floor!

Culture to eat!

Listening to Chopin played by Ashkenazy was soothing enough as death defying motorcyclists wove their way around me on the motorway this morning, but being accompanied by sunshine made the whole experience positively mellow – even when a car driver, who was obviously newly arrived at his vehicle having just graduated from his motorcycle, attempted a three lane motorcycle swerve in his car narrowly missing startled drivers – even then, the tinkling ivories through Ashkenazy’s stubby fingers (I know I heard him play in the Memorial Hall in Barry of all places) wafted my anger to another place and stability was restored.

It is clearly getting lighter in the mornings and that does its bit for the mood with which one sets off for school.  It is still not easy to get up at the ungodly hour that I do, especially as I was well into a very vivid dream about the appointment of a new headteacher in what appeared to be my old school in the UK, with my seemingly having some sort of authoritative overview of the tasks that the candidates were being asked to do. 

As I recognized most of the candidates, it probably says more about my subconscious that I made them fail so spectacularly, though just at the point of waking up, I was actually questioning why a particular task had been given to one of my colleagues when he obviously couldn’t even come near to completing it successfully.  Perhaps it was just as well that my mobile phone alarm clock interrupted this line of thought!

As is usual in a Protestant view of life, the sunshine has come at a price.  I was greeted in school with the news that one of our colleagues is not here so classes will have to be collapsed to accommodate this absence.  Today is a “short but full” day so the added irritation of double class sizes will make the end of my teaching time all the more welcome!

The concert yesterday was spectacular, but now I want to remember the misery of trying to find something to eat before the thing started.

As concerts in the Liceu start at 8.00 pm it usually means that the length of Operas mean that one is stumbling out onto the Ramblas after midnight into the welcoming hands of prostitutes, pimps and purveyors of illicit booze.  There is little there to tempt one to stay and find a bite to eat before the trip back.  It is therefore advisable to find something before the concert starts, but the timing is not good as “dinner” does not start until after seven and then one is rushing from the restaurant to the Liceu and one gets to one’s seat hot, bothered and with a touch of indigestion.

This time I found a little tapas bar in the Gothic quarter and found myself sitting down with a plateful of goodies before I thought of how much it was going to cost.  This was something which was only a momentary spasm before I thought of a way of justifying the expense.

I had previously tried to get a meal in the central Barcelona store of El Corte Ingles where the view from the top floor over the central square and the surrounding buildings is spectacular.  The service was, however appalling and I decided to leave as I had been comprehensively ignored by all the waiting staff who looked morose and resentful throughout my stay in the ignored seat.  The cost of the meal that I didn’t have would have been €18 (!) and that was just for the dish of the day, so when I was sitting in my little tapas bar I felt that I had a certain leeway as far as cost was concerned if I compared it with what I didn’t spend there.

Such twisted logic has kept me happy throughout my life!

And the tapas were exotic and poncey in exactly the way I like!

Tomorrow, as soon as I get home, preparations for the Essay Weekend must start.  I intend to have a rough draft of the thing done and dusted by Sunday evening.

Please.