Half Term and Pigeons

My violent tendencies are flowing over to the point where I no longer need weapons. I can quite happily imagine skewering people’s eyes with my own fingers. This was the eventuality of this week. Yes I did say this week. There seems to be some sort of delusion among the non education folk that we get 15 weeks of a year off. Well actually no. We do have to work during the holidays. We get X-mas, Easter and a few weeks in the summer off. And yes I know this sounds like a lot but have you ever tried to take a holiday during these peek times, I know a lot of parents out there have and we are in the same boat on our crappy wages.

This half term saw me in lots of boring meetings that really achieved nothing but to remind me that whilst I enjoy my job I know I will never be satisfied until I am in a position to change things. Wednesday saw.... wait what the hell did I do on Wednesday. I’m being serious now I cannot remember. I must have reached a point of such all out boredom that I can no longer remember it for the sake of my own sanity. Well Thursday it is then! Thursday was a meeting about employability. Within this meeting there were some fundamental errors; The 3 guest speakers effectively all spoke about the same thing; that you cannot put a definition on employability. They then of course attempted to put across their own definition on it, each contradicting the last. The second error was a simple one, in a conference about employability there were no employers there. The organisers obviously felt that this would be a little too ‘on the nose’ and that we should all instead join the thrilling philosophical debate on what employability is. No wonder the best philosophers were Greek where they had wine and orgies to make up for this lost time. There was also a complete lack of careers staff/advisors there. This doesn’t really upset me too much as I have no respect for the profession however it does still make me wonder what exactly the organisers of this event were hoping to achieve. As far as I’m concerned the careers advisers are the lowest of the low. This stems from personal and professional hatred. I remember when I was making my decisions during my GCSE’s it was compulsory to go and speak to a careers advisor. I sat down and told her that I was going to work with animals, I didn’t want to be a vet and I more saw myself studying behaviour and conservation. Upon hearing this she asked me what else I wanted to do. Errr nothing. I’ve chosen what I want to do, I have all the right grades to get me onto A levels and beyond. And yet  for 15 minutes she insisted that we discuss something other than working with animals. I saw no point in continuing in the conversation and walked out. Apparently I said some rather flowery phrases upon walking out, which I am glad my mother completely ignored on the retelling of the story at home, and was happy to also overlook this fact at the next parent meeting when pointing out to the head that their careers advisors need to reassess their own professions. I would like to point out that the parents meeting wasn’t even mine! My parents gave up on going to mine in an apparent avoidance of hearing how great I was, something that seemed to be contradictory to my behaviour at home. Certainly my organisation skills never quite made the leap from revision to actually tidying my room. On a professional level I see no use for them. It is written into every curriculum that tutorials must have careers focus throughout the year and that every lesson should have an added value. It’s even included on lesson plans and schemes of work and OfSted look for ‘employability’ aspects within lessons. Why am I working my ass off looking for an employability angle for cleaning a fish tank when there are apparently people who devote their whole lives towards it. Either they do it or I do it, but don’t pay us both.... pay me more.

The employability conference was made good by one thing: Chocolate cake and mint custard. I haven’t had that in years it made me so happy. And then I realised it was poisoned cake. It was the custard of doom and bribery. It was a way of making us happy and nostalgic for school days past, when we were the students off on half term and spending all our money on crap and sweets and not the grown-ups about to do ‘Breakout sessions’. The breakout session was to reflect on what we had heard today, share best practice and outline how we were going to implement this into our own programmes. This is another fatal thing that management love to do; put you in mixed groups. This is both stupid and irritating. For one thing if you want me to start making plans about implementing new work into our programme then I need to be with my programme team. Secondly the people in other teams are dicks. I had to be with people from the computing courses. I could not care less what they do on some ICT course. By the way they get really upset if you call it ICT or computing. Apparently it’s got some long freaking name and it’s vitally important. From what I can gather though you need to be a boring bastard and then it might actually matter to you. The facilitator to my group........, yes I said facilitator. Did you know that lecturers aren’t lecturers but are facilitators? No? Well it’s an exciting new concept and basically a way on putting the onus on the student. We can be really lazy sometimes. The facilitator to my group was that air quotes twat, the area head. He has a new thing he likes to do now. He thinks it makes him more like an OfSted inspector, I think it makes him more of a C***. Whenever you say something he will bob his head at you like a mangy London pigeon with a nervous disposition and say ‘so’. This will continue every time you add something until he’s so far in your face you could start figuring out what brand of chip fat he uses in his hair. He did this to me several times. The violent hallucinations of using his eyeballs like finger puppets only ended when I realised I was actually stroking my hands manically. I would like to think that from all this pain and anguish something was actually achieved from the day. No. Nothing was achieved.

By the way in case you were wondering, employability is........ Moot, if a schizophrenic pigeon can get a management job we might as well just give up.

MockSted and Gay rain- Just a normal week!

It’s taken me a week and one weekend full of drinking to get over the hell that was the Mocksted. To be quite honest I’m still doing all the marking that took a back seat during the event so it may take a while yet to completely get over it.

The only way that I could survive the week was with the support of others around me and I like to think that I did the same for them. However you really require the people who know you. Otherwise you are likely to start imagining ways to kill someone with a ring binder.

Steeeve was a dick. And yes he did get an outstanding and yes I did point out to him that it was half mine, I said it very loudly, in front of the boss. His increased ego was nowhere near as irritating as him listing off all the things he had done to prepare for the week and how he had included everything. No one wants to fucking hear it. There is sharing ideas and showing support and then there is just making everyone doubt themselves until their brains explode. I watched as the office was engulfed in the stench of management’s arse where Steve clearly hadn’t washed his face and the rest of the staffs eyes began to bulge under the pressure of their increasing brain size. We all have these irritating people in our work lives I am sure; that person who is so fucking perfect and can’t wait to tell everyone about it. Well I have come up with a plan for these people. It’s called cyanide.

There was only one person worse than this during the week. Her name is hysterectomy fingers. Honestly her finger nails are sharpened to medical scalpel precision and her sexual activities (or those we presume her to have), have led to the conclusion that one good swivel and all lady problems would be solved.

I get nervous when I know I am going to be observed. Mainly because I set myself impossible standards to achieve, it’s a middle child thing and I’m sure I irritated many of my friends during the week. Those who know me well know to just tell me not to be an idiot, tell me I’m awesome and then leave me alone to deal with my meltdown. HF does not understand this. HF witnessed my running through the lesson plan to check everything was there, which at the end I was told it was all good and not to worry. Obviously I was still worrying and I went back to look through a few extra notes, hoping to be left alone and quietly ponder. This was the point that HF decided to slide up to my desk and continuously go on about how it was going to be fine. I’m sure she meant to be nice but she seriously could not shut the fuck up. She told me I was going to be fine in so many different ways I was mentally checking off the thesaurus in my head. Even after I found out that I would most defiantly be dropped in on and all I wanted to do was check over my work she stood there talking. I looked at my computer; I made it obvious I was working. I even said ‘I’m fine now, really’. She was still there talking away. It was like being tied to a chair whilst a fly buzzed around your face. All you want to do I swat the little fucker but you just can’t move your hands. My violent dreams led me to a place where I tackled her to the ground before ramming her finger in her ear and giving it a good twist before removing her brain.

My actual drop-in was a rollercoaster. I’m scared of rollercoaster’s. Machines of death. It was only for 25 minutes and in those 25 minutes a range of things happened. Unfortunately the class was quite chatty. And for a second I was worried, when somehow out of the mist occurred something that could make or break my lesson; Gay rain. Whilst discussing natural disasters my students brought up that fact that flooding was being blamed on the gay community. Equality and diversity was ringing in my ears. My students were in a fury. They were outraged and yet topical and grounded. They were ready to argue the over religious beliefs and accept them as long as it didn’t put down the beliefs of others. I was amazed. I was proud. I was on a roll. I had no idea they were such little activists.

“I hate all the Dutch though” I had no idea they were such racist little activists. The observers smile begins to slip.

“Honestly we should just kill all the fucking Dutch” I had no idea that they were such violent, racist little activists. The smile was completely gone now.

The outburst had come from a noble cause, after witnessing the brutal murder of dolphins in a coming of age ceremony. However I had to recover this lesson as it was slowly plummeting into hate crime, and ideas of violence started to parade across the room. It was at this point that I saw how much my students know me and how good they really are. I dug deep, deep down into my tolerance (it's usually buried really fucking low) and dug out the part that could both calm the class and allow for acceptance of the Dutch people by pointing out it was a minority and we should allow them to make it right. I saw their little faces turn into confusion. Was this the same lecturer who had pointed out that the world would be better off with the culling of 90% of the population, and then proceeded to name the 90%? Was this the same lecturer who taught them how to escape a zombie apocalypse?

“You are so right. We should be careful before we paint an entire country with the same brush”. Thank you God. The stern look to the others from the smartest of the class got everyone to click onto what was happening. They have been rewarded for their good work. Except for the one that said “I can’t do maths”. That one deserves a slap; I can’t give a physical one so I gave an emotional one instead, no rainbow vomit for that child.

So to conclude (as OfSted like to see you summarise all lessons), I can share three lessons for those people who also must suffer the pain of inspection.

1)      Carry cyanide capsules. Either for yourself or others whichever you are most comfortable.

2)      Gay rain makes the perfect lesson as long as you don’t mention the Dutch.