annanotbob2's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- No dark sarcasm in the classroom Well, I'm very stoned, having inadvertently, or perhaps absent-mindedly scraped all the pollen out of the grinder and put it all in one spliff. Ah well. I've just been reading a blog by a teacher, a Brit, with bi-polar and it's made me realise that the loss I still haven't even thought of is the loss of my teaching career. I mean I've thought of it, but hadn't ever stopped and let myself feel what it means. Don't get me wrong - I wouldn't want to go back under the current regime of compulsory bollocks laid down by the fucking government and overhauled every single year, with six-weekly assessments against a massive list of criteria so you have to work twice as hard to get a proper feel for each group you're teaching and it's really fucking hard to entice them in, and that's what I can't bear to know that I'll never have again. Fucking teenagers. They're not like us, us adults. They're not fixed yet - they could still go in any kind of direction, emotional, ethical and sexual as well as academic. Even the most unfortunate, the most jaded, still have an open, playful enthusiasm tucked away somewhere, every one of the sullen, sneering little fuckers. I saw Niece at the weekend. She works with someone who was in my English class for two years and has just realised Niece's connection with me. It took me a while to be sure I had the right girl in mind (misled by Niece's: "She was so excited - said you'd been her favourite teacher, she really liked you!") and fucking hell, she was from the most full on class I ever had - ach, I drifted off into thinking about them. You could write a novel about that class that would illustrate so much about aspects of modern society we generally prefer not to think about. But I can't think of a way of writing now that conveys any of this whilst remaining sufficiently anonymous, so I'm fucking off, right now. 9009 steps, to the end of the pier and back. Cold. 11:58 p.m. - 25.02.13 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||