59p? 59 Fucking p? That’s how much you’re going to charge me
for a crème egg nowadays. Lets skip over the fact that it’s only January and I
can already see the checkout littered with eggs like a chicken brothel, I
refuse to ever pay 59p for a crème egg. They’re half the size they used to be
and double the price.... and with that line I am officially old. It’s also sad
that this is the biggest thing that has happened to me today. I have done
nothing all day. It’s always like this in January. The HE students are doing
their exams and the lack of lesson planning for them seems to infect my lesson
planning for the FE students as well until it becomes more appealing to have
dysentery. Last week I did manage to vomit rainbows. This is not a name for
some new computerised teaching system. It actually involved me eating skittles
until I vomited a rainbow. For the most part it also involved interactive
teaching with not a computer in sight. Well colour me rainbow, who would have
thought it was possible! The sad fact is that there has been a huge drive to
get computers into every single class room and make everything interactive and
online. I’m not saying technology doesn’t have its place but when that
beautifully sadistic error bar pops up you’re going to need to rely on being a
‘good teacher’ not a screencast. I have been lecturing both FE and HE students
for 3 years and even in that time I have wanted to drill through my eyeballs as
they started to add an IPad budget. Want to know why none of the young people
can actually write with a pen and paper, spell or doing any maths? It’s because
we give them computers that will do it all for them. I’m ranting I know but I
have a lot of energy to waste due to my highly unproductive day. The only thing
I really succeeded in doing (apart from becoming outraged by crème eggs) was
get spunked on by a rabbit. They say not to work with animals and children; I
do both. I have the joy of lecturing the post-16 age through the melancholy of
animal care, conservation and pretty much anything else you wanted to know
about animals. This has filled my brain with useless information like the
largest animal penis in relation to body size and what happens to sheep wool if
it walks through a river. This is unfortunately the things that students go
away with when they leave the college. Sod what it says on their wonderful
certificate about animal behaviour and welfare; they know that a ducks penis
looks like a corkscrew so they’re happy. This is one of the things that
actually gets me through the day; the multitude of stupid and insane questions
that students ask. If it wasn’t for that, I probably would have gone on a cull
by now, allowing only those I saw as worthy to live in an act of cleansing that
the world would both fear and worship me for. The post 16 age is a difficult
one to manoeuvre around. I have a lot of respect for teachers and their ability
to keep the students from killing themselves in acts that natural selection
would have seen to by now. However I refuse to let them take all the sympathy
of the job of teaching. They get a lot of support (well compared to slugs entering
your home through cracks that you will never find), however they have a few
things in their arsenal that just disappear once they leave the school grounds.
There is a certain amount of manipulation that goes with teaching an
adolescent. You can mould their character slightly and threaten them with a
terrible future that gets the work handed in and the exams completed.
Manipulating a post 16 student with a degrading future is pointless. They have
already messed up their future by achieving a G in English, the letter
representing both their greasy future in the fast food industry and how far
they made it through the alphabet before asking for help. They’re suddenly very
aware of their own short comings and this makes it very difficult to manipulate
them into any sort of work. We try to use fear of us instead. I had a student avoid me for 4 months last year for
fear of being hanged due to his failure to hand in his assignment. I heard some
students whispering about the castration set I keep in the office. I’m quite
happy to keep these rumours going and in fact actively encourage it. Not only
does it scare them into handing in their assignment for me before any other lecturer
but eventually it might help to extinguish this myth that the students have
that I’m a nice person who wants to hear about their problems. I’ll admit that
my sanity can cross the realm of questionable at times and this can give the
impression of being a happy person but in reality I just want to be left the
fuck alone!
Today I managed to avoid most students as I had no lessons
to teach. This seemed like a good opportunity to get some marking done, maybe
prepare some lectures, write up the new semester’s lessons for when my HE
students come back... and yet, nothing. I did read about a man who got
strangled by a reticulated python after putting it around his neck. This kept
me entertained for a good 20 minutes and I printed out copies to show my
students the next time they attempt to do the same thing with any of the snakes
at our site. I may edit it slightly to make it sound scarier, input their names
and change the date and say it arrived in an unmarked envelope. I also got the
absolute joy of it raining. Rain on its own doesn’t provide the most
entertainment but watching all the students run from one building to the other,
getting soaking wet because they’re ‘too cool’ to wear a coat is so good I
actually put down my coffee to watch. Then of course there was the rabbit
spunking. It was more a happy dribble. He’s been very horny of late and enjoyed
my stroking him a bit too much. It’s nice to know that I am appealing to rabbits
if no-one of my own species. You never know what reincarnation has in store. I
ended the day with some safeguarding training. Training where they basically
tell you not to touch kids. I never really felt like I needed to be told not to
touch kids but I suppose if you weren’t told you could claim ignorance. It’s a
depressing training session to be honest and about the 5th time I’ve
done it. However there seems to be a complete lack of ability to actually record
my attendance at these events, or some sadistic bastard is testing me to the
point of suicide. They really needn’t bother with the depressing child abuse;
they’d be better just locking me in a room with the level ones; our version of
Sloth from the goonies if he had violent outbursts and a fascination with
prostitutes. It’s the point they tell me I shouldn’t be sarcastic at work that
I decide there is nothing good that can ever come out of this repetition of
training. Maybe that’s why they keep sending me back, whilst I have never shown
negligence in child safety I’m clearly failing to learn some of the main
points. I’ll try to work on that......... nope not going to happen. Tomorrow
though I will at least try and do some actual work.
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