Occasional Tales

Insightful guesses. I had hoped that we’d be seeing the last of Vlad and Dmitry this year, but it seems our hopes are to be dashed. The word is that Vlad got his promotion, but (and this is the guess) he has to complete the current IB review to get his feet under the desk in Shanghai. I’ve also been told that Dmitry isn’t going anywhere for another year. Here (we guess), he’ll be elevated at the end of that even though he’s not really that competent. As a consequence of the rumours, Shylock has definitely decided not to return, but I’m not sure about the Lone-Star Kid who (just between ourselves) wouldn’t be missed. There are others departing as well, some willingly (most recently, Mr Windbag) and some unwillingly. I wonder whether Vlad caused so many people to leave annually from his former domain. I suspect that there were a lot of sighs of relief when he did depart. The review itself is going to be a huge pain in the arse because frequent changes in management mean th

At least in the mind of a sheep. The sense I’ve had of headmasters for some time now is that they’ve lost sight of the difference between their staff and schoolchildren. To them, everyone is merely a pupil waiting to be chastised. Vlad had another tantrum at us on Monday, which was entirely unnecessary if he was half as competent as he likes to think he it. If he’d had the HODs to dispatch a few forget-ye-nots about things that we have to do on a regular basis, we might not be in a position of having scramble desperately to catch up. Better still, he might recall that we lost quite a few old lags last year, but he seems to think that a bunch of jet-lagged newbies will recall what they should be doing, having been told about it a single time. He also seems to forget that the notebooks are unwieldy things to have to deal with. The plastic covers are probably the worst part, but the size (A4), the spiral binding, and the weight don’t help. B5 (B4? Not quite sure about B-siz

Walk all over me. Beware of ambitious people. Vlad is apparently angling to be appointed to the Politburo, which may account for last week’s tantrum about his pet database on line, which had us all scrambling to find things to add to it to satisfy him. It may also account for all the extra work that’s hovering over us, which has the potential to cut into time for planning and preparation. I’d already started adding things slowly to the database, but I’ve also been keen to avoid a repeat of last year when whole months disappeared in an endless sea of marking. Unfortunately, it looks like that’s going to happen again or I won’t have time to finish one thing off before another surfaces. The latest initiatives have also come in the midst of marking, which is the worst possible time to be lumbering us with more to do. It was cooler here today. What did the Lone-Star Kid do? Switched on the fans and opened the window, and then opined how pleasant it was. Yesterday, Tonto d

But there are still stones in my sandals. It’s so much nicer to be in a giggles-free office this year. It can still be a bit noisy because of our North American friends, but there isn’t that underlying sense that one person has to be the centre of attention and that all business is her business as well. That’s not to say there aren’t issues. Dmitry still isn’t show any real leadership skills. We haven’t had a departmental meeting since the first or second week of term. It’s clear that the Americans aren’t interested in co-operating beyond occasionally asking me about how something is done. It’s clear that the Lone-Star Kid is doing his own thing, which appears to mean that he’s wasting time reinventing the English B wheel. When I told Dmitry that I was moving on, he said that he was doing presentations, although he didn’t elucidate. I get the impression that presentations are a.) a lazy way of teaching and b.) a veneer which is the vanguard to the delusion that is student-ce

Horrible to see you again. The conference really was a repeat of every other conference we’re had for the past five years with nothing memorable actually coming out of it. Or now, three weeks later, I can’t recall anything, which I take to mean that nothing meaningful was said. I do remember I had a very very bad Saturday headache which lasted at least 14 or 15 hours. My original timetable was a nightmare of six classes a day Monday to Wednesday, and a total of three on Thursday and Friday. The new version ended up being much like last year’s with all too many classes at the end of the day, although it is at least better spaced out. I got an extra IB2 class as expected, and an IB1 class I wasn’t expecting. No AS classes for the first time ever, but that’s not such a loss. It means that I’m more of an IB teacher than an A-level one even though I’m ostensibly employed as the latter. My original IB2 class has grown because I’ve inherited refugees from Ms Giggles. My new IB

Groundhog Conference. The dreaded mail message arrived this morning. The start-of-term conference is back. In fact, it’s so back, it’s the same as last year’s, which was the same as the year before, and so on. So much for the announcement last year that we wouldn’t be doing this again. These things are a complete waste of time apart from anything which keeps me up to date with the intentions of my money-splurging employer, and that could be passed on to us in a brief mail message. Oh the irony.

A few days ago. Term finally ended last Tuesday, but not until we were made to remain at school all day in one final vindictive gesture which appears to have come from the school. I had class first two periods and nothing to do after that. It wasn’t without incident. Lincoln Green, having had a few to many, had had an accident the night before, and although he turned up at school, he promptly turned round and went home. A hospital check pronounced him fit to travel, but he did have a nasty bump on the side of his head. There were also problems with contract abuse as the school tried to misinterpret the word “term” to deny departing teachers the rest of their housing allowance. The contract will change next year as a money-saving exercise which, in truth, makes sense, since most departing teachers leave as soon as possible and yet would still be getting money for nothing. Unlike previous years, we weren’t given next year’s timetable, although I believe Dmitry has seen it.

But perhaps not in fact. The merger of English and Humanities, which I reported in my previous post, isn’t going to happen, but Dmitry is allegedly going to be deputy Führer instead. Why? No other Führer has ever sat there saying, “Oh, I need a deputy.” This makes Vlad look lazy as he probably unloads all the trivial stuff onto Dmitry, and possibly incompetent if he can’t cope with the same job his predecessors have been doing. I suspect the post will largely be nominal. I don’t know, for example, whether deputy Führer is even a real job within the hierarchy. I don’t know whether Dmitry will get a pay increase. (He shouldn’t; another senior colleague is refusing to take on extra responsibilities unless he get paid more, which is apparently not going to happen.) The idea that we all have individual classrooms is still live, but like me, Sarasvati isn’t keen on the idea and is hoping that it can be killed off. I don’t know quite what might’ve been running through Vlad’s he

A classroom with a view. I’ve heard that we may be getting our own classrooms next year. It’s an idea that’s been touted before, but nothing has ever come of it probably because there have always been too many of us. Next year, though, there will be fewer teachers because of the decline in the number of students. We’ve always had specific rooms for IB subjects, and particular groups come to us, but the A-level students almost always remain in situ with exceptions such as labs or the other half of English B classes. But this isn’t just our own classrooms; it’s also the end of the staff rooms, which are, in turn, going to be converted into classrooms. That concerns me. I generally enjoy the social aspects of the staff room (all right, Ms. Giggles has been a pain for the past two years, but in the past, before she arrived, we’ve had a good deal of fun). I can also apprise myself of what my colleagues are doing (apart from Dmitry who still says nothing about what he’s doing; or

The heady days of the summer exams. It’s that time of the year again when the little darlings are sitting their exams, and apart from irksomely dull bouts of invigilating, we sit around the office with little to do… Sorry, that’s last year’s entry. While there are invigilations to be done (I have two left), I also have my IB1 class. That shouldn’t be such a lot of work (and it generally isn’t), but the downtime just hasn’t been there. I’ve been writing reference letters and doing a fair amount of marking, having just finished mark­ing the IB1s official unofficial (sic! Pay attention at the back) final exams, which have vacuumed up ¾ of my long weekend. The exams have been running quite well, although there’s been overkill. We had the IB inspectors in and got a gold star (they observed the Biology HL exam, which was all of five students in a classroom), but no one from Cambridge has turned up so far. In fact, no one from Cambridge has turned up in about three years. It might

Hotel China. The latest wheeze is that we may here almost to the middle of July. Why? Well, it seems that some muppet in the Local Education Authority possibly thinks that terms should be a certain number of weeks in length regardless of the fact that the year is still 365 days. The first term was ridiculously long, not ending till the 6th of February. Because the Spring Festival is based on the quirks of the lunar calendar, second terms can often be quite short, and this year the second term is even shorter than usual. Nonetheless, by the end of June we will still have done the same number of days that we always do. No time will have been lost, and quite why we’d still have to be here till the 10th of July, I can’t begin to say. There’s also a good chance that none of our pupils would even be here, or so few that classes would’ve become a monstrous joke. We’re hearing mixed reports from other centres. Teachers at two nearby schools would be departing in June, but at on

HL vs. SL, anyone? There will only be four of us teaching English next year. I don’t think it’ll affect the workload that much [08.06.15. I was right]. I may pick up a replacement for my A2s or, possibly, won’t get any new classes. It depends on whether there are HL and SL classes for the AS students. The intention is to allow only the most academically competent students to enter the IB programme, while the rest do A-levels. It’s possible that some clever, but lazy students will choose to do A-levels instead, but in theory, the A-level students mainly won’t have the brains to do HL. If this is the case, it’s possible the number of classes we have will increase to more usual numbers, but the actual number of classes won’t change. In addition to this, I’ve been told there’s going to be streaming and school exams. This means that there will be at least one class that is, in truth, remedial. Whether they’ll do some entirely different programme, I don’t know, but they’d have to

Next stop, the holidays. It’s now February and we’re still at school because Chinese New Year is probably the latest it’s ever been. Under normal circumstances, school would’ve finished a week or two ago. Thus, this term has been over five months long (with all the breaks at the start of term apart from a couple of extra days for Christmas and New Year). Next term will feel very short because we’ll have the individual orals and the mocks in March, a normalish sort of April, and then exams across May and June. A possible consequence of a short second term was its extension into July, but that threat seems to have vanished. Such a proposal seems to have been based on the notion that… I don’t know. Has the length of the year changed? No. Would the end of term at the end of June mean that we’d had less time at school? No. I can only assume that because of the rigid thinking which affects the Empire, the aims of the first and second terms are restricted to those terms and their b