Occasional Tales

No, no, it’s real enough. Probably. We’ve managed to get our full complement of teachers even though it seemed that we wouldn’t. Our original new English teacher never made it because she’d already signed another contract and seems to have been fishing. Colonel Blimp and I both suspect she would’ve been difficult. In her place, we have an Australian. I don’t wish to cast aspersions, but as their year is completely out of sync with ours (they have their finals in October), I have to wonder what our man’s motivation is. He has almost no EFL experience, and no IB or IGCSE experience. This may not matter too much, but IB is very philosophy driven. To wander off on a tangent, why is there not IB teacher training college where the drones can be trained to think the IB way? At the end of the process, neutered works emerge spouting the IB leaner profile, and approaches to teaching and learning by heart. The problem here is the lack of international mindedness. ¶ It must be great whe

Perhaps for all the right reasons. The results for English this were about the same as usual even though I predicted a decline. We got a couple of 4s, but at least it wasn’t more. One of the laziest little buggers in my class got a 6, which though I should be pleased, is annoying. I’ve run into this sort of thing before, where some revolting child could be inspiring the dunces to aspire, but instead, behaves like a dunce. With the A-level pupils, the disastrous HL~SL split of last year was reversed, thus providing some evidence that largely barring them from HL is beneficial (and besides, as we all know, they don’t need to do HL). And thus, this year’s A2s may not do too badly since almost none of them are doing HL. How­ever, I still think we’re likely to see a few more 4s unless, on the basis of their dreadful IGCSE results, we can see shed the worst performers. Curiously, I know next to nothing about this year’s IB1~AS classes. Normally, I hear names and get to know re

Hats are back in fashion. Too many months have passed since I last updated this blog, but in spite of the second term being short, it dragged more than Long John Silver after he lost his wooden leg. It continued to be busy with Colonel Blimp treating us as if we were a bunch of scattered-brained children who had decided that the start of exams marked the start of the hols. even though some of us still had classes to teach. The first obsession was hats. Everyone has to have a hat, although I already had three and they’re all important. The colonel wanted to take the EE away from me, but Sarasvati wasn’t having any of it, it’d make no sense, and my proposed heir refused the job. I’m also still the teacher-librarian for official purposes even though Mr Droopy was meant to be taking that over, but he doesn’t know what he’s doing and doesn’t understand the honorary nature of the role. Mrs Blimp got one of the other important hats, which attributes to her efficiency, but it could also

When you’re the last link to the past. Quite a number of people are leaving or attempting to leave. The Lone Star Kid is finally departing; Lincoln Green has been trying to depart, but is only interested if his wife lets him or the money is seriously good; the Leprechaun, who has annually declared that this year will be his last ever since he got here, is actually going to leave; Rasputin is also trying to find alternative employment; and Sarasvati is very much on the fence. In some ways Col. Blimp has been an improvement on Vlad, but in other ways, he’s more of the same as he flies off the handle at one pupil or another. He’ll be around another year and then we’ll have someone else who thinks they know what the answer to all our problems is. Blimp’s problem is his mania for a certain social messaging platform, which results in streams of messages being spewed forth on a daily basis via a medium I regard as utterly transitory. My term has been busy, wall-to-wall busy, and to