We must include more of everything

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 had no concrete guidance as to how we might achieve that, and the gods alone know where the time might come from. I did try the other day, but class finished first, and I’ll… Actually, I won’t be doing anything just yet because the IB2s will be absent en masse next week for SATs, which means that by the time I next see them, there won’t be much of a connection to this week’s lessons and I’ll have to move on.

Of course, we are meant to have been incorporating CAS into class time all along, and possibly I have been doing that at times without knowing it. The guidance that we have had is a single piece of paper with some airy-fairy suggestions from the IBO without any recognition that the inclusion of good causes may not fit in with what we do in English B. It’s as if we suddenly and rather randomly start talking about the WWF, which would fit into Global Issues, but it has nothing to do with Drugs or Natural Disasters. I suppose we could, say, throw in MSF with regard to the latter.

But the issue remains that there are only four classes a week for SL, and though HL has two extra, they’re for the books. I’ve been teaching English B long enough now to know that what I have fills up classes with little room for anything else.

Five periods of my precious time are lost with babysitting and various other pointless and unnecessary activities which Vlad has inflicted on us. I can leave early one day a week, and my Fridays are utter crap yet again. This week, for instance, not counting our stolen Sunday last weekend, I’d already been at school for about thirty-two and a quarter hours to the end of Wednesday, but if you count the lot, I’ve just had a 61-hour week, and others have it worse.

We’ve already had seventeen different timetables this month.

There are likely to be several departures at the end of the year. Dmitry won’t be coming back, which means that being no longer so dependent on Vlad’s patronage, he’s been a little critical of his master of late. The Lone Star Kid is leaving teaching altogether, and I don’t know whether the new boy, Mr Blond, will remain for a second year. The Father of the House has had enough of being in a position of responsibility and wants to go back to being an ordinary teacher. Sarasvati will probably leave as well. I predict that most of the Science Department will also go because of Mr Balloon-Head’s overbearing behaviour. Father Ted may or may not go depending on whether Vlad stays or goes.

And there’s the rub. If Dmitry is leaving, it leaves the HOD post open. I don’t think Mr Blond is likely to be interested, but I know Vlad doesn’t want me doing the job. I’m not really sure whether I want the post myself. Part of me says that I should be running the show because I’ve been doing this longer than anyone else, and part of me says that I’m not temperamentally suited to being bossy, or to the rest of the grief that comes with the job. I wouldn’t want to have to put up with another hopeless HOD who has no experience of what we do here, especially English B.