Occasional Tales

Substitute sons. I’ve heard from my sources that Rasputin is not staying, which means that Vlad is losing his two chief henchmen. This got me thinking about why he’s created this artificial extra layer; or less about that than the people who make up the layer. It can’t be that Vlad is looking for son(s) that he never had since he already has a son, which sent me in search of some other explanation – that he’s looking for the son he wanted. His actual son is, by all accounts, a talented athlete, which has reduced Vlad to the role of being little more than a taxi driver with an inferiority complex. My conclusion is that he wants a son in whose life he can play a traditional paternal role, passing on his allegedly superior knowledge and wisdom; but in his son’s life he has neither because the boy isn’t following in his father’s footsteps. Vlad has now turned his attention to the Lone Star Kid as our next HoD as he seeks replacement substitute sons. Am I in contention for th

Boo, boo, Rasputin. I knew that sooner or later we’d get the usual dressing down about the state of marks (or lack of them) in the on-line mark book. I came down with a migraine on the day of that meeting, which was almost certainly triggered by the prospect of some annoying rant and the resulting pressure from it. Vlad used the same excuse as last year, viz. he’d had complaints from “parents”. In fact, it was Rasputin sticking his nose in where no one asked him to stick it. As a result we scrambled to add some entries, although as I’d already started the process in anticipation of this, and I’m still slowly working on it. I’m fairly certain that almost none of the parents even bother looking at the mark book. I’m fairly certain that it has no effect on the chances of any child. It’s a pointless exercise if we’re simply dishing out marks for the sake of making it appear active (e.g. everyone gets the same for classwork regardless of how indolent they might have been) to keep

Even though we don’t have the time to do it. With the re-accreditation in progress, there are even more demands on us than before. Our long days are even longer on Mondays and Wednesdays because of the meetings we have to have after school dealing with the IBO’s interminable paperwork. The one thing that will probably be all right is the paperwork, but the other things such as the library and the website have gone nowhere. The order for books seems to have got no further than some useless Chinese supplier, who either marked our choices as not available (which I take to mean, banned in the inGlorious Motherland), not checked, or, well, nothing. Why couldn’t we have gone to Amazon? (Simple answer, the people in charge are probably looking for cheap copies of the books and pocketing the difference.) The main school killed off the idea of a website for our programme, although I think permission has now been granted. We’re meant to be incorporating CAS into class time, but have h

If you sail on it, you own it – apparently. No one is making a surprised face about Beijing’s immature reaction to the Hague ruling that the Nationalist government’s nine-dash line is nine dashes of spuriousness. Wait, Nationalist? Yes, because that was made up in 1944 (I believe) by the previous regime, which lingers on in Taiwan; and yet the present imperial government has resurrected a claim made by a discredited regime that still has a claim to the mainland, but no power or legitimacy there. What a confusing place the world is. I’ve also read that the alleged archaeological evidence which establishes the Empire’s flimsy claims to the South China Sea was planted there about a century ago. I’d assume that Chinese vessels have sailed across the seas for centuries, but if that’s the basis for a claim, then every maritime nation could claim every bit of sea one of their ships has ever traversed. And if the logic of the Empire’s claim is applied, it’s perfectly legitimate to claim

The winning combination. Unless you’re 18-24, comparatively well off, and educated. It seems a bit pointless to say something about the referendum, but why not? The country seems to have shot itself in the foot – with a howitzer. My prediction was for us to remain in Europe, but not by much of a margin, but it was clear, even from the early results, that the Leave campaign had won the match. I also predicted that some people would simply see this as a protest vote, deciding that if David Cameron said one thing, they should do the other. Mind you, when I found myself aligned with him or that ghastly squit, George Osborne, I almost felt compelled to switch sides. The problem is that by using this as a protest, people really have blasted both feet off because they’re not going to wake up some day soon and find their lives have improved because Brussels is no longer allegedly interfering in their lives, or because the Tories give any more of a damn than they did in the first

Out with the old; in with the new. I decided to change the name and address of the blog because < insert your reason here >. The exams have arrived, but so far I’ve been spared anything too long, dreary and onerous. Paper 1 seemed to be fairly benign this year. I note that the true-false justification questions were scattered instead of being concentrated in a single section. The options in Paper 2 also seemed to be better than last year’s choices. We finished the unit planning last week, although I suspect we’re meant to do it per subtopic, which is just reinventing the wheel with the copious quantities of box-filling bollocks this exercise requires. In truth, I don’t think this is at all helpful, and is even less helpful when you have inexperienced people doing it. The basic issue is that I don’t think you can actually construct a workable unit from this so long as there are copious quantities of bullshit getting in the way. It’s also a bit of a waste of time bec

Examinations Law. It’s true. I finished the second-year options some time ago and have been trying to find ways of filling in time. So far this term, that hasn’t been difficult because we’ve had various interruptions. The mocks, for example, were stretched out to over a week, and then there was Qingming, but that leaves three weeks of time filling. I used this week on a deliberately long quiz about the text types because they’re the thing that needs the most revision. I’m going to do a text type-of-the-week kind of thing, focusing on the more common ones. The biggest bother is the HL class because that has two extra periods a week. They’re already a group of pupils who will rapidly be consigned to the dustbin of history as one of the generally more obnoxious and pointless classes that I’ve ever had the misery to deal with. In one period last week, I tried to get the feeling that they weren’t such a bad lot, but failed to produce any such sense. Some of them are smug, some of

Or perhaps we just spoon feed you instead. It’s only the second week of the second term, and I already feel like I’ve been here for several weeks. It’s that time of the year when various assessments in ToK, music, and English start coming due. I’ve been spending inordinate amounts of time on written assignments. There have only been a few instances of copying, and a few where turnitin gets a bit too excited. A lot of it is formatting such as page breaks, font faces, and the bibliography. House style here (well, my house style) is to put the rationale on the first page and start the task on the second. In spite of showing my classes how to do this by inserting a page break, it’s amazing how many of them belong to the school of Bash the Enter Key. Sigh. Centring or right aligning text? Bash the Space Bar. Sigh. Then bibliography has also been a fraught business, especially for the A2s. Even some of the HL class, whose bibliography is a single item, whose bibliography I

As long as it lasts. It’s no secret that Dmitry wants to be his own petty tyrant, and with posts for local despots having been announced, he’ll be applying for at least one of them. But what’s Vlad going to do if his favourite lapdog departs? You’d think this might be the moment I should’ve taken about three years ago when I was offered the HOD post, but declined it (didn’t want the stress, and was sure the High King of the Petty Despots would never allow it; still think this is the case), but I’ve been told Vlad doesn’t want me to be HOD. That’s probably because I’m too academic and not sufficiently shouty for Vlad’s liking. Assuming Dmitry gets promoted (which I doubt, but you never know), that’d mean we’d have to have a new HOD. That buggers up my plans because I was thinking that I might throw my hat in the ring once Vlad and Dmitry have gone. If the latter does leave, that’d put an end to my plans for at least another two years. I could only hope we had a proper HOD, wh