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!

Waiting!

That vague sense of dissatisfaction (as opposed to the normal sense of acute distaste) is something all teachers know well.  A disgruntled feeling that one could be doing something more productive elsewhere – like sleeping – makes every little action an effort.  It will wear off of course, but while it niggles away at the back of your mind it makes each moment sitting in the staff room like some form of indistinct torture.

Today is a full day by election as there is a departmental meeting which I am duty bound to attend “for shame’s sake” so that the rest of the department do not rise up in choler and smite me (hip and thigh) [possibly with the jaw bone of an ass] to express their irritation with my cavalier attitude towards education!         

Allegedly there is a (now traditional) meeting about pay in the offing which, no doubt, will be a little nearer the end of term so that the information about how much is going to be taken from the wages of hard working teachers to keep bloodsucking bloody bankers in this country afloat!

Meanwhile, I am still working on how to pay for the camera that I have decided will make a suitable retirement (again) present (again) for me (again) as the money has to be sent by bankers’ order and therefore I have to go to a bank physically and in person!  As the places do not accord with anyone’s working hours and availability there is a necessity to take time off school to get to the bank.  I am still working on it.  Working on it!  Roll on the month after next when such considerations will be irrelevant!

I am now sitting in front of yet another class, but this time they are studying for the examinations rather than sitting them – the end result is the same: I take out my computer and preserve my sanity by typing something.  Anything.  Next lesson is going to be similar when my ostensible free has been taken by invigilation, so more computer time, but this time I will use the on-line OU resources to further my studies.

On the plus side I have been given permission to skip a departmental meeting so I will be back home for a late lunch rather than having to stay over our lunchtime and go home late in the afternoon.  This is a definite result.  But I must remember to phone home and let the information be taken on board as I am expected some time after four and not two hours earlier.

It is getting nearer and nearer to the magic date when I can start doing a daily countdown to the end of my time in the School on the Hill.  There are times when I feel a sense of regret that I am going to be finishing here, but all I have to do is remind myself about the number of meetings that I have not gone to (and indeed the length of those meetings) to thank my lucky stars that I am soon to be out of the continuous frustration that is modern teaching!

As a result of fairly confused messages emanating from our OU tutor the Workshop scheduled for Saturday has been cancelled for Sunday – you see what I mean when I say confused!  This is probably a good thing because I have arranged to meet Suzanne on Saturday and coming straight from a discussion of Greek vases is not the idea frame of mind to enjoy yourself!

This Sunday will have to be the day when I break the back of the information that I need to start on my first assignment for this course.  As usual everyone on the Forums is getting worked up about the necessity or otherwise of in-text referencing and the way the bibliography should be set out.  I am more concerned about what to call the little decorate details on what we have to describe rather than the arid referencing which seems to be the most important aspect of some people’s lives.  Which probably explains why my last tutor made gentle suggestions about tightening up my academic housekeeping!

I don’t know whether it is a good or bad thing that our present tutor is not only an art history expert, but also she is also the chair of the MA in Art History in the OU.  I think.  I feel this is a person who would appreciate the use of the word “conceit” in a way in which my last tutor did not!  And that has its own built in tensions when submitting a piece of written work!

Roll on the weekend.

Work and War!

Different tutors, different approaches.  The OU tutorial the day before yesterday evening was markedly different from the ones that we had for the previous course.  This one was much more explanatory with a limited amount of student participation – even so yours truly had a disproportionate time expressing his opinions!

It was a good experience and, together with the exhaustive documentation that had been provided by our “real” tutor (we were guests in the tutorial yesterday) we have a considerable amount of information to take in for the first assignment.  There was part of a description to give us an idea of what was required and I must admit that I am more than somewhat daunted by what we have to produce.  I think that they are expecting virtually curatorial professionalism from we neophyte Greek vase connoisseurs!

The time of the first assignment coincides with a period of examinations (!) in our school – as when does anything not – so I will be marking and writing, learning and praying for that swift death beloved of all teachers caught in the soulless tedium of putting marks on the puerile ravings of our hapless charges!

And then there is the “workshop” with our RT (real tutor) on Saturday on the First of the Month of Leaving for which we have had copious information to prepare ourselves for the intellectual onslaught.  And then, still reeling from the unaccustomed early morning academic endeavour, I will propel myself into Barcelona for lunch with Suzanne!

God I hate cats!  Nasty creatures with those tiny, ugly, vicious looking teeth!  Disgusting!  And the slob-like cat from the menagerie next door has dragged its carcass over the intervening roof element and scratched open the cloth on the sun bed which I inadvertently left out.

This little piece of destruction is probably a direct reprisal for my actions a few days ago when I caught the thing in our garden and threw a plastic container of water over its revolting length.  It tried, and failed frantically to claw its way up the wall, but avoirdupois and gravity combined to drag it crashing to the ground.  As I rushed back to the outside tap to refill the container the cat rushed past me and attempted to climb the back garden wall – and failed there too. 

Having refilled the container I merrily slopped more water on the unwelcome piece of filth and, in total desperation the creature managed to squeeze its way through a hole far too small for it to get through – in the way that these unnatural beasts have, showing their direct association with the Black Arts and all things inimical to normality!

I sincerely hope that the thing is totally traumatized and will not attempt any appearance when I am around, though its wonton destruction of my sun bed shows its sneaky vindictiveness!  I will be further revenged on it!  By god I will!

To a certain extent I am getting money under false pretences as very little of my mind is on schoolwork.  I feel as if I have already left and I resent the time that I am not spending on the OU assignment.  Although, to be fair, virtually everybody else on the course is having to cope with working full time and doing their academic work at the same time.  I remember my last brush with the OU all those years ago when, admittedly I was doing a higher-level course, but the time constraints and the information I had to take in were almost impossible given the job that I was doing.  This time round it is more feasible, but the approach is more demanding and the academic standard is higher.  There is more tension because you do not feel as isolated as you did when there were only those early morning BBC2 broadcasts and the course material!  Now with the Forums and the greater use of the Internet there is more pressure on you to respond to the course as an all-consuming part of your life rather than a mere part of it!

The next few weeks are going to be tight with what I have to do in work and what I need to do for a decent mark in the course.  I am no longer in my comfort zone and there is a great amount of simple learning to do and a whole new vocabulary to learn and more importantly, use!

The stimulus (and fright) that the tutor has given us demands a far more polished form of writing than I had realized was necessary and it is something towards which to strive!

So why am I writing this and not getting down to the learning that I need to do?  Good point!

Another day, another examination.  With me sitting at the front looking sternly at pupils who only need the slightest encouragement (or rather distraction) on the part of the teacher to indulge in the Spanish national habit of cheating.  It is only because I can touch type that I can do anything at all in front of a full class of putative deceptionistas!

In a startling break with what I have come to accept as tradition, the powers that be have actually had the temerity to put me down for a substitution for a colleague who is in Madrid attending a conference!  This is a very disturbing deviation from what I thought I had established as my sacrosanct free time approach!

As the examination season reaches its examinational frenzy at the end of the year, I fear that even more of my supposed free time will be claimed by unscrupulous management!  I will have to strive to ensure that this is not so.

Meanwhile: cameras!

A colleague has had the misfortune to experience the mind-of-its-own telephoto lens syndrome and has been truly daunted by the amount that the camera company has said that it would charge merely to think about doing something to repair the camera, let alone actually taking some form of physical action to make it better!  And she has the incentive of a husband who has offered to buy her a new one as a present.

As is usual with all things cameroid, I am the first port of call for a chat, as my acquisitive proclivities in the lensial area are widely remarked.  As I feared, she has done her research and has come up with a number of alternatives one of which she rejected out of hand, and which consequently attracted me with all the force of an expletive in the Convent of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence!

The USP of this particular camera is its x50 optical zoom.  Once seen, once smitten.  The “falling” was the easy part; the real difficulty only arises when you try and pay for the damn thing.

To justify the expense, I made a real effort to find the best price – checking web sites here and in the UK.  At one point I actually phoned what I think may have been Hong Kong, only to find out that the firm did not deliver to Spain – only the UK and Australasia!  After much hunting and converting pounds to euros and vice versa (and getting thoroughly confused in the process) I finally found a firm that seems to be based in Spain and which gave a price (a very reasonable price) in euros.

They wanted to be paid by invoice and the money by Pay Pal.  Everything seemed to be going swimmingly when an abortive attempt to get a Pay Pal account in 2010 rose from the archives to stymie me.  Whatever I tried (in two languages) came back to my finding the exact details of a small transaction three years ago.  And nothing I did worked!

Phoning the company again led to a further suggestion that I buy the camera on the web site.  But there was no stock left when I attempted that.  Back to the company (using the school phone) and in a complicated arrangement involving cancelling one transaction and transferring the camera from one account to another I can pay by Bank Order.

I have a hazy memory of attempting to do this some time in the past and the crucial element in my frustration was actually getting myself to an open bank when I was available to be there.  I am hoping that with my more flexible approach to attendance in school that this may not be as difficult as it was in the past.  Time and intention will tell!

Why am I typing?  Why, because I am sitting in front of a class who are busily typing away with various degrees of competence at their machines.  The one good thing about the computers being used next year is that they are all iPads and the students will not be able to lift up the lid of their machine and hide the “work” they are doing from the teacher.

Actually one boy, a notoriously naughty boy and therefore placed directly in front of the teacher, rather engagingly tried to hide his lack of effort on his appointed task by placing his book on end and crouching away behind it.  The inevitable happened, of course, and the book fell over revealing his crimes for a totally uninterested teacher to see.  It was punishment enough to observe the comical horror etched on his podgy face and all it needed was gentle admonishment to get him back in line!

This lesson is a supervision taken from a bone fide free period.  Never mind that I slope off on every available occasion – how dare they stoop to take a free period from me, especially as my “gained” free from not teaching the 1BXT was taken up by supervision of a previously mentioned examination class.  And I have yet a further class after this one!  Just one damn thing after another!

Still, Wednesday is my last “full” day (actually it is the only “full” day in the sense that I am in school when the final bell goes) and I will not have to put up with the double-parking inconsideration of parents.

My attempts to get to a bank when it is actually open continue with tomorrow being ruled out because all my teaching time is taken up and what isn’t teaching time is invigilation time!  And all that time added together ensures that I cannot get out of the school before the two o’clock deadline for banks being open.  It is now summer time and the banks feel even less inclination to show any thanks towards the poor bloody taxpayers who bailed them out after their insane bout of gambling with other people’s money and the general dragging down of the economy of the entire world than at any other time.

God rot them all!

To a point!

I think I will claim pressure of living to excuse my dilatory approach to this writing.  Late night operas can hardly excuse a three or four day lapse in my efforts to keep the small world of my writing up to date!

The weekend which has now passed was notable for Toni taking his double exam on Saturday.  His first was at eight in the morning and the second at six in the evening.  A whole day given over to the misery of nerves and sick expectation.  Some of it transferred to me and I felt thoroughly unsettled as well.  Given the number of examinations that I have taken it only takes the slightest stimulus to reawaken all the old horror of a printed sheet of paper next to a blank one!

My next exam is in September, I think, though my first assignment is due in the middle of next month and the next I the hitherto sacrosanct month of August! 

I reminded myself that the previous crime committed in the name of examinations was the Chaucer And His Contemporaries paper in my finals which was on a Saturday afternoon!  I feared it might clash with my watching of Doctor Who and I feel that tension appreciably lowered my mark.  Together with the fact that many of the early Middle English texts were far too boring to read.  I still shudder with inexpressible disgust whenever I think of anything other than page one of Sir Gawaine and the Green Pig or whatever it was called!

To celebrate the end of Toni’s exams we went to La Fusta and sat at our usual table and had our usual tapas.  The pinchos were rather dry and a disappointment but the rest (patatas bravas and tomato bread and Sangria) were excellent.

It was while I was there that the interesting behaviour of people waiting to sit down at their table was observed.

Generally speaking a table of four or five or six settles seating almost immediately, it is when there is a group consisting of seven or more that the “Pre-Seating Cluster Behaviour” can be observed.

A long table of twenty people causes all sorts of problems in seating and so people who arrive first daren’t take the first step of sitting (if you see what I mean) in an undesignated place.  Usually there is one person who is tutelary in charge and who Has A List.  This list will be referred to in a haphazard way to ensure that everyone is actually there.  At no point will the Person in Charge actually look the part, but the piece of paper is a comfort!

Seating: the Cluster will mill around until the VIP arrives.  This is sometimes a very old person who is the great-grand-mother or something of that sort and will usually arrived escorted by a great-grand-daughter, thus resulting in a clash of generations and a difficulty in the seating pattern as the two do not usually sit together.

The VIP being seated the rest fall into their places with difficulty.  As sitting next to the VIP may actually mean doing more than chatting (one thinks of cutting up food and taking to the toilet) there is a ripple effect of people trying to create a cordon sanitaire around themselves so that they are not in the immediate chore range of the VIP.  Parents meanwhile are trying to distance themselves from their children (especially if very young) by palming them off (i.e. sitting them next to) grandparents or doting aunts.

People will be sitting down by this point with the VIP looking confused and people near him/her looking resentful, while the rest of the seating pattern can be upset in a moment by the pre-emptory demands of some spoilt three year old demanding to sit next to someone else.  This is Spain; such small people wield immense power!

Then comes the meal.  This is the signal for yet more chaos as The List Person has already asked each person what they want to eat from the menu and has it All Written Down.  The food starts arriving and each dish is announced and remains unclaimed.  The List Person looks, with increasing dementia, at the list and is unable to find anyone who ordered the Catalan Salad.  The dish is placed on an adjacent table and will later be claimed by someone demanding to know where the Catalan Salad that he ordered is.

The drinks are, of course, a free-for-all and the real danger is not in the water or the wine (both of which are present in abundance, even if not drunk with English enthusiasm) it is the fizzy drinks that are the problem.  Quite apart from the Coke/Pepsi divide there is now the decisional crisis that can arise from the various forms of specious “liteness” that the drinks claim.

By the time the fizzy nexus has been resolved Conversation with a capital “C” has begun and will not cease until the people have left the table – a process which demands a monograph in itself!

Conversation in Spain is not the to-and-fro of comment and response that one expects in, for example, the UK.  In the UK you have the off chance of someone actually listening to what you say and then responding appropriately to your initial comment.  In Spain there is no chance of that happening.  Conversation in Spain is simply talking.  Talking, all at the same time.  At high volume.  That’s it.  Even if you try and make a speech, there is absolutely no guarantee that anyone is either listening to you or not talking!

Sunday was a time for relaxation, especially for Toni who was exhausted after his strenuous efforts on Saturday – but he decided to install the security cameras that he had for his birthday.  Don’t ask. 

We now have the ability to watch our house using mobile phones and computers.  Don’t ask me how as I have been given only the sketchiest version of access, but we were able to watch the departure of the Scumbags via the computer and their going was greeted with heartfelt cheers.  We have to be gleeful while we can as they are soon going to descend for the duration of the summer and stay into the month of September.

And so to Monday and a late-ish start for me on a morning where it is trying its best to rain and is therefore yet another of the brightly-dull days which are characteristic of Catalonia.  But it is not actually raining, and for that I give thanks.

This evening there is an Elluminate session with my extended tutor group for the OU with a tutor who is not our own.  Never mind, I have done the preparatory work; the only fly in the ointment is the difficulty that I have had with actually joining the session.  I hope that things have been sorted our by the time that I come to the keyboard, but I will have the portable ready in case there are problems with the iMac as there were the last time.

How many days are there left?  Perhaps I should only do a daily count when we have reached the Month of Leaving which is, praise be, on Saturday – when there is a Workshop with out tutor in the OU.

It’s all go!