Occasional Tales

Mutual exclusivity. I know why Vlad suddenly upped sticks and went, and he didn’t depart with his child bride. We got a replacement fairly promptly, but Colonel Blimp was rarely around this term because he was still wearing his original hat as well as his new one. I’m very much on the fence about him. He loves using social media for announcements, but I think this is the wrong platform on which to do that because I regard such messages as trivial even when they’re important. He’s started forcing AP methods on us even though that’s nothing to do with us, and we have our own way of doing things. In fact, he’s forcing us to reduplicate systems we already have in place. I’m probably going to be HoD by default rather than by design. As I said in my previous post, this is not that important a role, but it seems to be regarded as only fit for the fittest and finest. An HoD is merely a teacher with a few extra duties. Frankly, I don’t want another Dmitry; I don’t want to have to dea...

What? Really? Vlad bailed out. He turned up one Monday morning, and while I was otherwise occupied announced his sudden and precipitous departure. We have no idea why, and no one who might know has ever said, which suggests that the only person who knows is Vlad himself. Did he take his mistress with him? That’s a moot point, but, I think, he’d be cold-hearted enough to dispense with her. We were certainly expecting him to last to the end of term, and it’s possible that some personal business affected his decision. He also left leaving various threats in his wake, but like the story last year, it may not be till sometime in the 2020s that the story emerges. No time was wasted in dispatching his replacement, who may not have scrapped all the mandatory extras we’ve been lumbered with, but who has got rid of some of them. He also listens to people (or does a good job of feigning it) where Vlad merely seemed to be waiting for you to stop talking and made you feel that everyt...

Rasputin dithers. Vlad is out; Dmitry is departing for tropical climes; Rasputin is… dithering. Yes, Vlad got the boot for the very reason suspected some time ago – he irritated the locals. Dmitry will be back to being one of the rank-and-file. I wonder how he’ll cope with not being part of the inner circle, and how long it’ll be before he’s in it again. Vlad let him down in the end, and Sarasvati had to supply him with a reference. As for Rasputin, his departure has been an open secret, but the latest news is that he’s allegedly had an offer, but needs to make his mind up by Monday. Our fear is that he remains and will “Squat like a Toad, close at the eare of EVE”. Some good news; some potentially bad. 20.01.17. And the news ends up being bad, with the toad deciding to irritate everyone for another year.

The rupturing of the triumvirate. This week, Dmitry has been off having a nice holiday… sorry, enhancing his employment pro­spects. I’ve now heard from a fairly reliable source that Rasputin really is leaving, and I have first-hand evidence that far from being Vlad’s keen and eager lackey, he would appear to be somewhat contemptuous of him. I’ve also heard that Vlad is looking elsewhere, which may be partly motivated by his dislike of the place and by the departure of his two substitute sons. I imagine that he doesn’t want to find himself without that extra, contrived layer of management. So far, the only certainty is Dmitry’s departure, but officially, there has been no word about Ras­putin. Sarasvati tells me that he wants to do the introduction to the new EE to the IB1s, but I can’t think why someone who’s never been involved in the process would want to muscle in on my turf. I do, however, suspect that he’s possibly doing this so that he can claim to have been an...

Substitute sons. I’ve heard from my sources that Rasputin is not staying, which means that Vlad is losing his two chief henchmen. This got me thinking about why he’s created this artificial extra layer; or less about that than the people who make up the layer. It can’t be that Vlad is looking for son(s) that he never had since he already has a son, which sent me in search of some other explanation – that he’s looking for the son he wanted. His actual son is, by all accounts, a talented athlete, which has reduced Vlad to the role of being little more than a taxi driver with an inferiority complex. My conclusion is that he wants a son in whose life he can play a traditional paternal role, passing on his allegedly superior knowledge and wisdom; but in his son’s life he has neither because the boy isn’t following in his father’s footsteps. Vlad has now turned his attention to the Lone Star Kid as our next HoD as he seeks replacement substitute sons. Am I in contention for th...

Boo, boo, Rasputin. I knew that sooner or later we’d get the usual dressing down about the state of marks (or lack of them) in the on-line mark book. I came down with a migraine on the day of that meeting, which was almost certainly triggered by the prospect of some annoying rant and the resulting pressure from it. Vlad used the same excuse as last year, viz. he’d had complaints from “parents”. In fact, it was Rasputin sticking his nose in where no one asked him to stick it. As a result we scrambled to add some entries, although as I’d already started the process in anticipation of this, and I’m still slowly working on it. I’m fairly certain that almost none of the parents even bother looking at the mark book. I’m fairly certain that it has no effect on the chances of any child. It’s a pointless exercise if we’re simply dishing out marks for the sake of making it appear active (e.g. everyone gets the same for classwork regardless of how indolent they might have been) to keep...

Even though we don’t have the time to do it. With the re-accreditation in progress, there are even more demands on us than before. Our long days are even longer on Mondays and Wednesdays because of the meetings we have to have after school dealing with the IBO’s interminable paperwork. The one thing that will probably be all right is the paperwork, but the other things such as the library and the website have gone nowhere. The order for books seems to have got no further than some useless Chinese supplier, who either marked our choices as not available (which I take to mean, banned in the inGlorious Motherland), not checked, or, well, nothing. Why couldn’t we have gone to Amazon? (Simple answer, the people in charge are probably looking for cheap copies of the books and pocketing the difference.) The main school killed off the idea of a website for our programme, although I think permission has now been granted. We’re meant to be incorporating CAS into class time, but have h...