The rumour mill

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 that we haven’t really been doing things the right way, and we don’t have the paperwork. There are also the issues which I knew would be a problem five years ago such as the largely non-existent library.

On top of these depressing rumours, there’s another, that some future Monday will be a Friday because we’ll lose two Fridays over the next two weeks. Guess who that adversely affects. Yup, me. After the innumerable timetable changes, my Friday is now my worst day of the week.

And just to add another lay of turd icing to the turd cake, we’re once again going to get landed with all the supervision for self study because our diligent Chinese colleagues aren’t bothering to police pupils during that time. I’m predicting that my Thursday, which is mostly empty, is going to be ruined by such a period at the least appropriate time.

Anyway, I have another little mountain of things to mark and am about to start the process of building a couple more.