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.