Occasional Tales

Or, subject-specific drifting: the early adopter. I moved sideways yesterday. The plan is for us to be in offices by department next year. The English Department will be in the IB office and graciously hosting IT, Music, and some scientist. I can see the point of grouping subjects in particular offices because of the expansion in the programme, but I’ve enjoyed being in a mixed-subject office this year. Perhaps it isn’t so much the office as its liveliness. Sooner rather than later, we seem to end up in some fairly left-field conversations. Yesterday it was about the technical details of methane production, and how much poo would be needed to power a hotel; and the tuning of a guitar led to g-strings, but that was end-of-term hysteria making us behave like schoolboys. Or perhaps we are schoolboys at heart. The office to the south seems to have lacked that critical mass to be as vibrant as our office has been. Quite often the place has been deserted. I also note that no one w...

Loadsa 老外. My sources inform me that the programme's foreign backers have pulled out because they weren't getting kids from the programme, replete with the contents of mummy and daddy's capacious wallet, going to their fourth-rate institution. There's a surprise. Actually, the foreign backers were only in the programme because the institute in question was in financial difficulty a few years ago. They also never promoted themselves in the schools and since we no longer had anything to do with them, we weren't about to be doing that ourselves. In place of them, the school is getting some Cambridge-based programme (A-levels?) which is possibly like the one that they were getting at my school in Beijing just before I left. I assume that the teachers on this programme have to be accredited so that I couldn't switch from our programme to that one. Besides, if the salary I'm hearing is right, they're only being paid ¥20K (c. £1450) for the (academic) year whi...

Where's the lovin' gone? I was just getting back home at midday when I had a phone call from Central Command. It turns out that there isn't going to be any Senior 1 intake next term after all, and only three of us will be required – me, Glen and Row. Brian's been offered a place at another school somewhere. It means that the programme here will be coming to an end about a year from now. Moreover, my pay would remain unchanged because there will only be three of us here. Considering how long I've been with the programme, I'm not happy about this. I later heard from sources close to the Dowager Empress Cixi that the school would like to continue the programme because they make money from it. The decision to end it came from Central Command. I don't know why such a decision should've been made because this is one of the better schools in the programme. Possible reasons are politics and money. I also wonder what effect the new foreign partner might've ha...