Occasional Tales

A few days ago. Term finally ended last Tuesday, but not until we were made to remain at school all day in one final vindictive gesture which appears to have come from the school. I had class first two periods and nothing to do after that. It wasn’t without incident. Lincoln Green, having had a few to many, had had an accident the night before, and although he turned up at school, he promptly turned round and went home. A hospital check pronounced him fit to travel, but he did have a nasty bump on the side of his head. There were also problems with contract abuse as the school tried to misinterpret the word “term” to deny departing teachers the rest of their housing allowance. The contract will change next year as a money-saving exercise which, in truth, makes sense, since most departing teachers leave as soon as possible and yet would still be getting money for nothing. Unlike previous years, we weren’t given next year’s timetable, although I believe Dmitry has seen it....

But perhaps not in fact. The merger of English and Humanities, which I reported in my previous post, isn’t going to happen, but Dmitry is allegedly going to be deputy Führer instead. Why? No other Führer has ever sat there saying, “Oh, I need a deputy.” This makes Vlad look lazy as he probably unloads all the trivial stuff onto Dmitry, and possibly incompetent if he can’t cope with the same job his predecessors have been doing. I suspect the post will largely be nominal. I don’t know, for example, whether deputy Führer is even a real job within the hierarchy. I don’t know whether Dmitry will get a pay increase. (He shouldn’t; another senior colleague is refusing to take on extra responsibilities unless he get paid more, which is apparently not going to happen.) The idea that we all have individual classrooms is still live, but like me, Sarasvati isn’t keen on the idea and is hoping that it can be killed off. I don’t know quite what might’ve been running through Vlad’s he...

A classroom with a view. I’ve heard that we may be getting our own classrooms next year. It’s an idea that’s been touted before, but nothing has ever come of it probably because there have always been too many of us. Next year, though, there will be fewer teachers because of the decline in the number of students. We’ve always had specific rooms for IB subjects, and particular groups come to us, but the A-level students almost always remain in situ with exceptions such as labs or the other half of English B classes. But this isn’t just our own classrooms; it’s also the end of the staff rooms, which are, in turn, going to be converted into classrooms. That concerns me. I generally enjoy the social aspects of the staff room (all right, Ms. Giggles has been a pain for the past two years, but in the past, before she arrived, we’ve had a good deal of fun). I can also apprise myself of what my colleagues are doing (apart from Dmitry who still says nothing about what he’s doing; or...

The heady days of the summer exams. It’s that time of the year again when the little darlings are sitting their exams, and apart from irksomely dull bouts of invigilating, we sit around the office with little to do… Sorry, that’s last year’s entry. While there are invigilations to be done (I have two left), I also have my IB1 class. That shouldn’t be such a lot of work (and it generally isn’t), but the downtime just hasn’t been there. I’ve been writing reference letters and doing a fair amount of marking, having just finished mark­ing the IB1s official unofficial (sic! Pay attention at the back) final exams, which have vacuumed up ¾ of my long weekend. The exams have been running quite well, although there’s been overkill. We had the IB inspectors in and got a gold star (they observed the Biology HL exam, which was all of five students in a classroom), but no one from Cambridge has turned up so far. In fact, no one from Cambridge has turned up in about three years. It might ...

Hotel China. The latest wheeze is that we may here almost to the middle of July. Why? Well, it seems that some muppet in the Local Education Authority possibly thinks that terms should be a certain number of weeks in length regardless of the fact that the year is still 365 days. The first term was ridiculously long, not ending till the 6th of February. Because the Spring Festival is based on the quirks of the lunar calendar, second terms can often be quite short, and this year the second term is even shorter than usual. Nonetheless, by the end of June we will still have done the same number of days that we always do. No time will have been lost, and quite why we’d still have to be here till the 10th of July, I can’t begin to say. There’s also a good chance that none of our pupils would even be here, or so few that classes would’ve become a monstrous joke. We’re hearing mixed reports from other centres. Teachers at two nearby schools would be departing in June, but at on...

HL vs. SL, anyone? There will only be four of us teaching English next year. I don’t think it’ll affect the workload that much [08.06.15. I was right]. I may pick up a replacement for my A2s or, possibly, won’t get any new classes. It depends on whether there are HL and SL classes for the AS students. The intention is to allow only the most academically competent students to enter the IB programme, while the rest do A-levels. It’s possible that some clever, but lazy students will choose to do A-levels instead, but in theory, the A-level students mainly won’t have the brains to do HL. If this is the case, it’s possible the number of classes we have will increase to more usual numbers, but the actual number of classes won’t change. In addition to this, I’ve been told there’s going to be streaming and school exams. This means that there will be at least one class that is, in truth, remedial. Whether they’ll do some entirely different programme, I don’t know, but they’d have to ...

Next stop, the holidays. It’s now February and we’re still at school because Chinese New Year is probably the latest it’s ever been. Under normal circumstances, school would’ve finished a week or two ago. Thus, this term has been over five months long (with all the breaks at the start of term apart from a couple of extra days for Christmas and New Year). Next term will feel very short because we’ll have the individual orals and the mocks in March, a normalish sort of April, and then exams across May and June. A possible consequence of a short second term was its extension into July, but that threat seems to have vanished. Such a proposal seems to have been based on the notion that… I don’t know. Has the length of the year changed? No. Would the end of term at the end of June mean that we’d had less time at school? No. I can only assume that because of the rigid thinking which affects the Empire, the aims of the first and second terms are restricted to those terms and their b...