Saturday 17 September 2011

Back to School

Going back to the daily grind is always a bit demoralising after days of golden buttery sunshine, filling Time with pleasant things as one fills layers of spongecake - with jam and cream and origami butterflies. Suddenly, one has no more Time to go out cycling every day or make lovely little presents for friends. Time has been consumed by little monsters and planning lessons.

I don't actually work at a school; I'm not sure how sane I would stay after being put in charge of thirty mental eight-year-olds. No, I work in a language academy and I'm grand with just a handful of mental eight-year-olds. Teaching here means working evenings, which was quite a topsy-turvy change at first, but now I realise it's brilliant because it leaves the mornings free to do all the stuff everyone else does after they've been released from the bonds of slavery.

The first lessons are usually the Q & A sessions of predictable getting-to-know-you questions. Did I say predictable? Here, it truly is more like the Spanish Inquisition - this year I have been more prepared for the onslaught. Last year, the force with which I was asked about my marital status, my address, and what my favourite food is took me by surprise. Only Catholics interrogating poor people suspected of witchcraft are that determined to discover every possible detail about you. Now I am infinitely wiser: my English sensibilities have been hardened, and I have even navigated some of the pedagogical weeds below the seemingly calm surface of academia. These weeds are the classroom menaces, those who would disturb the academic surroundings and shatter the morale of the wretched teacher. They shall be castigated at the first out-of-line saliva-encrusted pencil... Fortunately for me, most of the little horrors I had have been palmed off onto the new American teacher.

One of my duties is to go to one of the schools to pick up some of the children in order to relieve the parents. This normally isn't a chore, or perhaps I've just got used to it now. At the beginning, when I was first told this would be part of my job, I went into headless chicken mode - be responsible for seven or so kids crossing car-riddled roads? I hadn't bargained on that. I was apt to wander onto the road in a socially imperilling state of whimsy myself; how could I possibly look after children who were either going to dart off like miniature human whippets or stop in the middle of the zebra crossing to intently examine their sandwich box, philisophically contemplating whether their Nutella sandwich would be infinitely more enjoyable if they unwrapped it fully or kept the foil on? Would the irritating stickiness of gooey chocolate on the hands outweigh the glorious practicalities of clean fingers? If only Socrates had left us the answer to this bewildering conundrum.

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