Hurricane Giggles

Comings and goings.

It did not take long for Ms. Giggles to lose it. She is obviously one of those people who a.) thinks she must do everything and b.) that everything gets scheduled in advance and, therefore, will happen regardless of the amount of time available.

The evidence suggests that Ms. Giggles is a time waster because she’s trying to do everything within a limited schedule. I know she’s driven by the belief that the students may get the marks, but the results are her fault. If that was the case, I would almost certainly have to have done the honourable thing every year since 2003.

At the moment, Ms. Giggles is away on personal business, which means that the office is peaceful and relaxed. It won’t be when she gets back.

We also know that she keeps Them Upstairs in the loop by making sure they see her e-mail messages. Whether they care, I don’t know. Whether Ms. Giggles has any real influence with them, I don’t know; but someone who forwards e-mail messages to third parties about matters which are only germane to our centre is someone to be wary of.

The latest problem is that she wanted us to show her classes a film which her Ladyship has deemed to be unsuitable (even although I’d say there are no real problems). We don’t know why Ms. Giggles has chosen this film, and apart from one or two scenes, most of it has nothing to do with our current topic. (I also note that showing it will vacuum up a great deal of class time; Ms. Giggles remains behind the rest of us and showing DVDs will only make things worse.)

We’ve also had a bad week because not only has Ms. Giggles been away, but we’ve also been reduced to a department of two because of sickness. Thursday was exhausting because of extra classes, while we were spared a repeat on Friday because we found others to do the babysitting.

In other news, I find myself wondering once again whether any of what I do has any effect at all. Theoretically, my pupils should be wobbling steadily upwards. A good result in one test may be followed by a bad result in another, but they should be demonstrating inconsistent improvement. I suspect (although I have no evidence) that if we could give our charges a uniform test from one year to the next, they’d show little or no improvement at all.

I note that the grammar and vocabulary of the level 2 students is generally all right without being great. Their problems remain cohesion (and sometimes coherence) and the ability to write something that another human being would willingly want to read. The grammatical side of things is handled less incompetently than it used to be, but does that have anything to do with me? Have they been paying attention to the comments I’ve been making about their writing? Perhaps, but I think they hold their TOEFL and SAT classes in higher esteem.