Is this a new teacher I see before me? 'Tis but a phantom

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 when you’re in an international school to have multiple perspective because all the pupils come from various countries, but here, we teachers are the international part as every child brings that dull imperial uniformity to class. ¶ But to return to my theme, teachers come and go, and are seldom around long enough to see any point in becoming IB drones because next year, they might be teaching A-level or AP.

Anyway, at least we’re getting an extra English teacher. I had to rearrange things to accommodate everyone, which meant merging classes to release other teachers. In some cases, the size of the class is nothing worth commenting on, but Mr Blond has 36 in one class because I need Lincoln Green to be doing something else; and Lincoln Green has two IGCSE classes because Mr Blond needs to be doing something else. Once the new teacher arrives, everything will go back to the way it ought to be.

In truth, the number of new pupils this years is half what it ought to be. Colonel Blimp wants to go on a recruiting drive, but Vlad wanted to do that and seems to have been barred from doing so. We have more competition these days, and even our overlords aren’t making it any easier for us because they’ve opened an international school of their own.

It seems likely that because our re-accreditation got screwed over, we’re going to get a visit from the IBO. It does rather sound like the Gestapo, but they love money so much that there’s a lot of leeway in the whole process. It’s not as if we don’t have major issues, though. I have three hats and two jobs, one of which I don’t really do and don’t have the time or competence to do, and that’s one of the things that could sink us.

As I said above, we have more teachers than we ought to have, but there’s a difference between teachers and roles so that we really need at least one more person whose role it more administrative than pedagogical, but we’ll never get such a person. In reality, our IB centres should be run like international schools, it being recognised that we need certain specialists whose main job isn’t teaching. For example, ToK teachers shouldn’t come from some pool of people who don’t otherwise have enough teaching; ITGS teachers shouldn’t be random Maths or Science teachers; it should be accepted that teachers in some subjects will have very few pupils (e.g. Music and Visual Art). The teacher-librarian shouldn’t be some random ass like me.

I work in the teaching profession. I suppose you could call me a professional, but I also don’t forget that even after twenty years, I’m an academic at heart, not remotely interested in the pompous, self-important mantras and rites of the teaching profession. It baffles me as to why anyone would willingly become a schoolteacher when teacher training colleges seem to be schools or indoctrination and brainwashing.

It also seems to me that much of what we expect of our pupils (engaged, reflective learners) is naive. Here, the expectation among them remains that they will simply progress from one year to the next regardless of their results, and then go to university regardless of their merit. The universities need cash in their coffers … I mean, bums on seats.

Vast numbers of students from the Empire give it clout in foreign universities that it shouldn’t have, which does stifle freedom of expression. (Yes, I know; I call the place “the Empire” [which it is], avoiding naming it directly, thus reducing the size of my footprint on Nanny’s radar.)

The icy fingers of imperial malignity will spread around the globe even if, unlike Britain, it never has a physical empire. Foreign despots love the Empire because of all that lovely, ethically free money that merely leads to debt slavery. The agents of the Empire have no interest in helping anyone but themselves, but too many countries of dubious repute hear “Money” and fail to read the fine print. Meanwhile, the imperial government was almost certainly dishing out dosh for projects from which it knew it’d ultimately benefit. Why bother with wars and conquest when you can buy an empire by splurging cash on countries with dubious ethics and doubtful scruples.

But that’s enough straying from one topic to another.