Occasional Tales

Horrible to see you again. The conference really was a repeat of every other conference we’re had for the past five years with nothing memorable actually coming out of it. Or now, three weeks later, I can’t recall anything, which I take to mean that nothing meaningful was said. I do remember I had a very very bad Saturday headache which lasted at least 14 or 15 hours. My original timetable was a nightmare of six classes a day Monday to Wednesday, and a total of three on Thursday and Friday. The new version ended up being much like last year’s with all too many classes at the end of the day, although it is at least better spaced out. I got an extra IB2 class as expected, and an IB1 class I wasn’t expecting. No AS classes for the first time ever, but that’s not such a loss. It means that I’m more of an IB teacher than an A-level one even though I’m ostensibly employed as the latter. My original IB2 class has grown because I’ve inherited refugees from Ms Giggles. My new IB ...

Groundhog Conference. The dreaded mail message arrived this morning. The start-of-term conference is back. In fact, it’s so back, it’s the same as last year’s, which was the same as the year before, and so on. So much for the announcement last year that we wouldn’t be doing this again. These things are a complete waste of time apart from anything which keeps me up to date with the intentions of my money-splurging employer, and that could be passed on to us in a brief mail message. Oh the irony.

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...