Occasional Tales

The end of the term is nigh. Not nigh enough, though. The term has been dragging painfully to a conclusion. The one bright spot is that we don’t have to come in on Monday. Yeah, Monday is the actual last day of term. Could this Empire be more stupid? What has term been like this year? Short for one thing. With the Spring Festival being so early, term is ending nearly two weeks before it usually finishes, but that means the second term will drag on even longer. Even so, in spite of a shorter first term, I’m feeling knackered. It may be an age thing, but getting up at 6.00am while it could still be any time during the hours of darkness has had a worse effect on me than previous years. There’s a reason why I hate alarm clocks: I inevitably wake up before they go off, and that might mean anything up to an hour. I did it twenty years ago and I still do the same today. But, as I said, it’s felt worse this term to be getting up so early and to be arriving at school just as the su...

No, it’s yours. Oh, bugger. Fred asked me where tomorrow’s English exam paper was. I thought he was dealing with it. Turns out he was taking care of the mock exam for March this year; and thus, we don’t have an exam for tomorrow. Actually, make that “didn’t have”. I’ve thrown something together this afternoon, but it’ll be a close-run thing with the paper being printed this afternoon. No one reminded me or asked me about the exam, which is why this didn’t come to light sooner. The confusion which led to this problem is a consequence of the AQM setting end-of-term exams in the past, which is why I thought that’s what Fred was doing. It’s also another argument for having Adobe Acrobat here at school so that I could pluck pages from this exam and that, and plonk them in a single file, which I could then have sent to Iris so that they could be dispatched directly to Mr Photocopy. To add insult to injury, I have Friday off because of certain teachers being absent last Sa...

The things kids bring to school. One of my esteemed colleagues came into the office yesterday morning with a bottle of concentrated nitric acid, which he’d taken off one of the nitwit students who’d brought it to school for reasons which I still can’t fathom. This is the stuff that would be found in research labs, and was a mostly full bottle. In a civilised country, this would be a rather serious incident, but in the great imperial chicken coop, the concepts of health and safety are the subject of meaningless banners displayed on building sites. The cretinous student in question wandered into my class the following period without the slightest hint of contrition (or an apology for being late) and then seemed to be narrating the entire aftermath for the entertainment of his classmates. No serious consequences will arise from this, of course. My colleagues in the English Department, whose Chinese is way better than mine, were talking about the concept of common sense in Chin...

But no one will’ve learnt anything. I was on my way to Yamazaki to buy something for lunch when I found that the intersection at Jiefang Lu was a little blocked because some clown on an electric scooter had had an encounter with a car. I don’t have to scratch my head to guess who was more at fault although the rider of the electric bike doesn’t seem to be injured. As for the injury I sustained a week ago, the bruise which appeared on my left wrist has turned yellow although the bruise at the base of my thumb is still a dark bluish black. My hand has somewhat greater functionality, but I still get twinges when I try using it the wrong way. We have tomorrow off, but before that, we must suffer another student concert. I’m tired for the usual reasons and perhaps as a side effect of the antihistamines that I’ve been taking for the allergy/cold/whatever (delete inapplicable answer) which hit me a couple of days ago. My initial diagnosis was an allergy caused by the air con, but ...

I’m the emperor. Red lights apply to other people. I’m almost across Jiefang Lu yesterday afternoon when some f_cking plonker on an electric scooter comes out of nowhere from my left and cuts across my bows just as I’m accelerating. I slam my brakes on and end up tumbling off my bike, coming down hard on my left hand at the base of the thumb and severely bruising it. When I get up, I find that my bike is upside down, sitting on the seat and handlebars, and the culprit has run off like the snivelling cur that he probably is. My thumb has been feeling a little better today, but my left hand has minimal functionality. Above wiggling my fingers, there’s not much I can do with my left hand. For example, I can’t grasp things [ Mentally? –ed.] or pick things up where some bending of the wrist is involved; and mastur… I mean, reading spiritually uplifting volumes is rather difficult. The base of my thumb is swollen and my fingers feel puffy as well, and I’m back on the diclofenac ...

I have no desire to go to the (icy) barren wastes. I wanted to switch to the IB programme for a couple of reasons. One is the lack of intellectual depth in EFL programmes. Another is the lack of motivation among students. A third reason is the opportunity to teach some real English (or to put it another way, teach English as an academic subject). But that’s not going to happen because I was wondering whether one of my esteemed colleagues would be making the switch to teach business or English. Since another of my esteemed colleagues has been approached to teach business, Colleague 1 would be teaching English. I can’t compete with Colleague 1 because he has a wife, family and home here. I cannot imagine that I’d be appointed ahead of him even although moving is such an enormous pain i’ th’ arse for me. (Possibly, though I don’t know for certain, I’d have to pay for the move myself.) There is an added complication because one of the centres in the programme is leaving it, and...

Plan? What plan? I’m a writing genius! I started marking the AS writing this morning, but I’m not putting much effort into it because their writing, which is definitely more sophisticated than that of the PAL students, is typically annoyingly inane. They’ve been taught to write vacuous waffle at New Oriental or English First using words and phrases for every occasion, which sound impressive, but say little or nothing as they waste ink and consume space. Actually, that, in my experience, also suits undergraduates quite well. I know lots of them like writing blah, blah, blah. Anyway, we’re not interested in undergrads today. We gave the little darlings the opportunity to produce a plan, but because they’re ever so good at writing, they don’t need to plan. Some of them have enough focus to be able to maintain a discussion about an idea for a paragraph although the internal mechanics won’t necessarily be that good. Coherence is usually all right (or sufficient; sentences are rarel...