It has been a quiet week. The two tenants I shared the house with have both moved out and now that I out of a job I don’t see my colleagues or have people to talk to during the day. Often the first time I say anything is when I answer Nancy’s call from Taiwan in the evening. It is a familiar situation though. I feel like I have been here before.

Last year while I was in South Africa I remember feeling very lonely during the long summer break. Nancy was in Taiwan at that time too and the people I worked with were on holiday. The town itself was virtually isolated as all the school kids and university students were away as well so I felt kind of stranded. For a while I enjoyed it. It is therapeutic to be alone. Most people like some time completely by themselves every so often - I actually need some time by myself everyday. But even so, being alone for days and weeks on end made me depressed.

After only a few days away from people this time around I can already feel myself becoming gloomier - which is not alleviated by the quietness on the job front I might add. As yet there has been no response to any of my applications. Even the recruitment agencies I am dealing with have not called up with any leads. I can almost hear crickets chirping outside.

Nancy tells me that I need to relax and enjoy the fabulous excuse not to go into work. She assures me that I will find a job in due course and that I will then wish I made more of the time I have at the moment.

I suppose she is right about not worrying, but it is easier said than done. I cannot just decide not to worry. It’s beyond my control. The best I can do is to pretend that I am not too worried (which I suspect Nancy is doing herself).

Friends and family often ask me how it is that Nancy and I can maintain our relationship being so far apart for such long stretches of time. I tell them that it is circumstantial and that we wouldn’t make it if we did not love each other enough. I can tell that they don’t understand though. “I couldn’t be away from my boyfriend like that”, my sister told me. “I got married to have a wife”, my friend Stephane said, “by my side, not somewhere else”. A school friend of mine in London did not even realise I was married to Nancy. Recently my mother wrote me an email saying that I am essentially neglecting my marriage and that it should be more of a priority.

Nancy’s friends express similar sentiments. They told her that I will fall into the arms of another woman eventually, because “a man has needs after all” and that it is better for her to lose her job and join me in the UK than to lose her husband by staying in Taiwan. Over the years we have laughed off these concerns because between the two of us we know our situation perfectly. Even though it seems unfeasible when copy pasted onto other relationships, it has worked for us all this time because it was for a reason we both thought was worthwhile.

Nonetheless, our ability to live on opposite ends of the world has slowly come to a close. We cannot carry on living apart any longer now. As such Nancy will arrive in the UK on the 21st of July and we will start on a new chapter of our marriage. In a way the scary prospect of both of us being out of work and starting from scratch together is beautiful and it will probably make for a good story in the end.

It never rains it pours they say. Yesterday I was chatting with my housemate about the spate of bailiff notices that have been arriving with an increasing amount of capital letters, red ink and exclamation points on them. It appears that the landlord is behind in his payments and that a final warning has now been issued before the bailiffs have the right to come into the house and take out what they wish to auction.

Since the landlord does not live in the house, and my housemate does not have much in her room besides her work clothes, the objects that are likely to be taken will be mine. Amongst the pickings are my brand new mountain bike, a Macbook, cameras of different sizes and sorts and an iPod speaker console that I got for my birthday. Naturally, I don’t wish to part with any of them.

When I got to work this morning I told one of my colleagues about the most recent bailiff notice and she advised that I get my things out the house right away. Other colleagues overheard what we were talking about and agreed that it would be wise not to take any chances. Apparently after a fair number of warnings bailiffs will enter a property, take what they need to cover the debt owed and there is not much one can do about it afterwards. Having properly panicked me two colleagues then offered to help me pick up my stuff in a car so that I could store it at the school for a few days.

On the way to my house however they were stupidly excited. I am sure they were enjoying the excuse to be out of school for a while, but with my nerves frayed I was not exactly in the mood to make wise cracks and laugh with them. Perhaps they were just trying to keep me from worrying, but to me it seemed that they were simply happy not to be in my shoes, which is fair enough but irritating when you make it so obvious.

Once inside the house, they started looking about as if they were a couple of estate agents sizing the place up. They opened cupboards and doors as they wished completely disrespecting my privacy. One of them even put on a jacket that was left behind by a previous tenant, joking that it fit her perfectly and that she might as well keep it for herself. Amidst this apparent hilarity I was trying to think what to pack, what to leave and how to make sense of the whole situation.

15 minutes later I was back at school with most of my possessions hastily stuffed into suitcases and refuse bags and put into a little media room in our department. It felt strange to have everything that is of value to me in a place where there are hundreds of young imbeciles who given half the chance would rip and smash and break whatever they did not want to keep for themselves. The door would just have to be left unlocked for a moment for this to happen.

I realised at this point that it would probably be safer to take my chances with the bailiffs, so I called them and explained that I was merely a tenant and that the things in the house mainly belong to me. The bailiff I spoke to noted my name and said that should someone knock on the door they would have this information on record. I asked the bailiff if they could force an entry into the house when I was away and to my relief he said they could not.
 
Somewhat more appeased I then looked up what rights one has should a bailiff come knocking. Essentially they cannot enter forcefully but they could climb through a window or enter through an unlocked door. Should they gain entry however there are many things that they are prohibited from taking like clothing, bedding, tools, kitchen appliances and things that are needed for general day-to-day living.
 
So I may as well bring my stuff back home tomorrow if someone can assist me again, and simply find an alternative place for my electronic things, which is probably all the bailiffs would go after anyway.
 
Unfortunately the drama does not end there: More mail arrived to say that the landlord is now so far behind in his mortgage payments that the house will be likely repossessed in due course. I informed the landlord about the urgency of the mail that is arriving for him but he does not seem overly concerned and is clearly not providing a forwarding address to the people concerned. Perhaps he feels that he is so heavily in debt that he might as well just collect rent from his tenants for as long as he can before he loses the house altogether.

And so it is that my living arrangements are now as vague and uncertain as my work. There is so much that I know I am not being told and yet it affects me directly. The stress of not knowing what is going on and having no idea what will happen next is actually starting to weigh heavily on me. In all my life I have never worried about things like having a roof over my head or having enough money to get by - this is a first. It is also a first feeling this insecure about my place in the world and about what I have to offer.

All things considered my experience of England so far has been an utter nightmare. Nancy says that the good thing is that things are more likely to get better from here on because they can’t seem to get much worse. I do hope she is right.

I am only half-heartedly looking for another job. The truth is that I don’t actually want to teach anymore. 5 months of teaching in England has defecated on any romantic illusions I had of what teaching could be. I see it now as a torture, to a greater or lesser extent.

The thought of going into another school and facing another horde of rude, obnoxious children fills me with despair. That is not what I went into teaching for. I did it to inspire creativity and to share what I love doing most in this world, not to fight and argue with teenagers who have no ability or interest in what I am teaching anyway.  I am not a correctional officer. I derive no pleasure haranguing kids. In fact I hate it.

As an alternative to teaching I thought of doing a Masters in Art Therapy in London. The problem is that it is an expensive course that takes 2 years full time to complete. That is a big investment in something that is essentially an escape route from teaching.

I would be keen to do a Masters degree in Fine Art or Illustration so that I could get into lecturing but I have some reservations about that too. To begin with I don’t know what I would want to do. I have no particular angle or style or direction.

All in all I don’t know what I am meant to be doing with my life. I wish that I could just do art and be left in peace, but of course it is not that simple. Somehow I need to earn a living in a way that does not make living itself a horrible thing to suffer.

Things are not always what they are cracked up to be.

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Always take the weather with you

On Friday the headmaster called me into his office. He told me that the new deputy head teacher appointed last week would be taking over my classes and that I was no longer needed at the school.

The news came as a shock because I was expecting to be given a permanent contract. As much as I hate the school I figured it would be best to stay with the devil I know and get qualified teaching status before moving on.

Now I feel like a fish out of water. It is nerve wracking to be out of a job without another lined up. How long will I be flapping about before I find another post? With luck the agency I am registered with will to put me in touch with some schools in the next month and I can take it from there.

Despite the worry of being unemployed I must say that I feel immensely relieved to be out of the school. It was an absolutely soul-destroying place to work. I feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders and I am looking forward to finding another job.

The only thing I am not happy about is moving out. I live in a lovely quiet house that would be next to impossible to find elsewhere for the price I am paying. It is a one in a million find. If there is any consolation to be had, it is that I could move to a nicer part of England. Gravesend is nothing to write home about.

The thought of going into school tomorrow makes me feel ill. It always does, but especially after some time off. Weekends are just long enough for me to slip back into the normal world: one where I can choose the company I keep and speak in a normal tone of voice. At school I have to suffer the company of so many grating people who have as little interest in me as I have in them. I hate having to repress their rebellious spirit and make them pay attention to what I would rather be telling or showing someone else. If only I could just liberate them from their school hell and let them be free to find their way in the world outside. It doesn’t bother me if they completely fail and end up living miserably because I know some of them will make it, just like countless rockers have for example. If Johnny Rotten did all his homework and behaved in class there would have been no Sex Pistols. It’s a good thing he dropped out. It’s a good thing not everyone does well at school because then who would stack the shelves at Tesco?

I don’t know how much longer I will last as a teacher. Tomorrow might be the day I finally crack and just walk out the class, out the school and the out the profession. Sometimes I wonder if that would that be such a bad thing anyway? It might be just the catalyst I need to do something that is more fulfilling to me.

If I were to find myself out of a job I would probably look into going back to university and “retooling” as someone put it. I have been thinking of doing a Masters in Art Psychotherapy and I would certainly enjoy that a whole lot more than teaching. I might go back to Taiwan and open a recreational art centre for adults – an idea I have toyed with for many years. I could even work as a part time language instructor again and focus on becoming a professional artist during the day.

Attractive as these options are however I am still hesitant to throw in the teaching towel. One reason for that is money. Dreams tend to cost money to realise, and the dreams I have are rather expensive. The Art Psychotherapy course for instance takes three years and would cost a fortune. On top of that it might not land even me a job after I graduate. The art centre idea would leave me in even more debt and there is no guarantee it would even be a success.

Teaching is at least a sure bet. It can even be quite lucrative if you don’t mind where you work. Expatriate teachers in the UAE earn in the region of 40 000 Pounds Sterling a year I am told, tax-free. Plus they get other benefits like subsidised housing and annual flights abroad. It follows that teaching allows one to work all over the world. If I wanted to immigrate to Australia down the line, teaching would probably get me in regardless of whether I actually did that once I was there. Having an art centre in Taiwan would limit my ability to live elsewhere, as would being a full time artist as I would probably rely on my wife to have a fixed job.

I am also reluctant to quit teaching just yet because I have invested so much time and money to get this far. Leaving it now, just before I have gained Qualified Teaching Status in the UK would seem a waste. Although I am qualified to teach in South Africa, acquiring the UK equivalent would hold far more weight and be a much better job insurance policy if I had to fall back on it down the line.

Whenever I feel sick from school I self-administer this dosage of reasoning and encouragement but it doesn’t actually help much. The awful feeling of having to survive another day there remains... Ugh. It is now 11pm and I am going to go to sleep. It is the one true source of refuge.

My days consist mostly of telling kids who don’t listen what not to do: Stop this and don’t do that all day long. It’s pointless. Most of the students I teach come to school precisely for the entertainment value in riling their teachers up so why would they behave? I try to stay calm to deprive them of that pleasure, but the constant level of self-control required is exhausting in itself. By the time I get home I can hardly think straight.

It really is difficult for me to be a sergeant major in class. I hate making people do things that they don’t want to. My natural inclination is to let them do what they wish as long as it doesn’t bother me, and if it does my natural inclination is to distance myself from them. As a teacher I cannot do either of these things unfortunately. Not only do I have to put up with dozens of people who give me a hard time, I have to serve them an education as well.

Perhaps it is time for me to get out of teaching. It is not quite the job I imagined it to be and I still have the chance to do something else with my life.

Despite all that I have heard and read up on teaching in English state schools, nothing could have prepared me for the reality of facing mobs of unruly children. It is utterly exhausting.

I wake up at 5 am and get to school just after 7. My first class each day only starts at 8:40 but I need the hour and a half before hand to mentally prepare myself for the noisy, chaotic onslaught that lies ahead.

Picture 25 kids at a time all yelling and carrying on. My job starts by getting them to enter the classroom in somewhat of an orderly fashion. Then comes the far greater challenge of getting them to sit down and actually listen to anything I have to say. This usually takes up the remaining 50 minutes of the lesson.

I like to think that as times goes by I’ll develop a rapport with the students and they will stop giving me such a hard time, but at times I feel it is a lost cause. Some of the teachers I work with face the same problems I do after years at the school. Perhaps the discipline problems are so deeply entrenched that it will require a long period of time and exceptionally dedicated teachers to work itself out the school.

This is unlikely to happen though considering that in my department alone at least half the teachers are openly looking out for other posts and the other half probably doing so in private. It doesn’t surprise me. I am sure that even by English standards this particular school is a tough nut to crack. Only a crummy inner city school could be harder. Then again I heard about a past teacher now working in the kind of inner city school in London where kids carry knives who said that the school I am in is what really toughened her up. It’s worrying to think that she found an inner city school a step up.

Every morning on my way to work I wonder how I’ll make it through to the end of the day with my sanity in tact. Every evening on my way home I wonder how I am going to get myself back to the school the next day. It is torturous to be in a job where you are not only unappreciated but abused left right and centre. Sometimes when I am at my wits end during a lesson I feel like throwing in the towel right there and then. Any other job, even working behind a MacDonald’s counter, seems more appealing than trying to teach kids who wouldn’t even notice if you dropped dead in front of them.

The only way I can keep going at the school is to constantly keep the things I wish to achieve there at the forefront of my mind - gaining qualified teaching status in the UK being the main one. The teaching experience I gain in the process will pad up my resume nicely too.

So in a year from now I will have either made a niche for myself at my current school or I will be at another more congenial school. Either way I’ll definitely be in a better position - I just have to ride out the storm to get there.  

Nice kitty

The other day a man in overalls carrying a box into the school building I had just left paused a moment to tell me that there was a dead cat in the garden. He nodded towards a concrete fountain thing in the flower bed beside us and told me the cat was just behind it. “It’s going to stink up the place”, he said. “Somebody better take it away”.  He was still talking as I went to have a look and when I saw it I felt a sharp pain in my chest. It was the same black cat that was often around the school yard. A beautiful sleek creature that would turn onto its back when you approached, purring furiously if it succeeded in soliciting a cuddle. Just yesterday I had stroked the soft fur and its stomach. I had grown very fond of it. Now it was dead. It lay stretched out as if it was asleep except its eyes were open.

A disproportionate sense of grief welled up in me. “What happened?” I asked but the man just shrugged his shoulders. I walked back to my classroom, closed the door and put my face in my hands. It would have been a comfort to cry, but I haven’t so much as shed a tear in years. My heart doesn’t respond to much, but I was really sad about the cat. The thought of one of the cleaners picking it up by the tail and sticking into a refuse bag was just too awful to bear.

I took the newspaper on my desk and went to the store room to get a spade. Then I walked around the school looking for a suitable place to bury the cat - somewhere quiet, under a tree. When I found the kind of place I had in mind I began digging a hole, half a metre deep through roots and stones that left me sweating and out of breath. I wrapped the cat neatly in newspaper and laid it down in the hole in what would have been a comfortable position if it were alive and filled the hole, patting down the soil at the end.

After that I put the tools back in the shed, cleaned up and went back to my classroom. I felt strangely comforted after burying the cat. Nature had taken its course and the cycle of life went on. I made a cup of tea and thought about how people must take a similar comfort in being able to bury their loved ones and how it really seems that they are able to rest in peace thereafter. Cremation might be a practical thing to do but it doesn’t provide the same emotional comfort or sense of closure for those left behind, at least not for me.

The next day I was at my computer when a colleague told me she had just seen a black cat walking about the school. “Come have a look” she said, “It looks just like that friendly one”. I followed her outside and spotted a black cat identical to the one that was now buried under a tree around the corner. As I stuck my hand out it rolled onto its back and when I picked it up and it began purring, rubbing its head against my chin.  It was the very cat I was so fond of!

A pang sprang up in my chest again and I felt like crying. I was embarrassingly overwhelmed with relief and confusion to be holding something warm and alive that I thought was gone. My colleague laughed about the needless effort I had taken to bury a different cat, but I am glad that I did it anyway. I still feel comforted knowing that it is lying in the earth and not in a dumpster somewhere.

Last week Friday I had an interview for a job teaching Design Technology at a “technology college” in England. It lasted for an hour and a half. The agency who arranged the interview said it was much longer than normal and predicted a favourable outcome. On Monday I was offered the post - which I accepted.

When I told Nancy about it she laughed and asked me how I am going to manage it. “You might as well have accepted a job teaching Maths or Science”. I was quite upset by her response to be honest. I had been expecting her to say, “Well done you!”, and gush a bit. Still, Nancy knows me better than anyone and I wonder if she is right about me biting of more than I can chew with this job.

It is an all-boys school of nearly a thousand students, each one of them taking Design technology. This year I found the 20-odd students I had for art class enough, so how I will manage with 50 times that amount is something I cannot even imagine yet. I will have to deal with it when I am there.

So why did I accept the post? Well to begin with I don’t mind the challenge (albeit it a masochistic one). I will be learning new skills, like how to handle a variety of machines well enough to instruct others how to do so and how to use different CAD programs. I’ll also gain the confidence I currently lack to present myself to a large group of young people and maintain my ground. I’ll learn to be more organised and more efficient.

From a career point of view, Design technology is a good subject to be able to teach because it is a core subject in the UK with many available posts. So once I am okay with teaching it I will be able to cast a far wider net than I can with only Art and Design when looking for a job. In fact, it will probably stand me in good stead when looking for posts in international schools as well. Teaching in international schools is an excellent way to earn good money as a teacher, see the world and experience different cultures, and it is something I would like to do in the future once I have a solid base in the England. Accepting this post is a tactical step towards that goal.

Nonetheless, I am aware that the job might get the better of me after all. Despite all that I stand to gain the fact remains that I prefer teaching Art and Design, I prefer small classes and I prefer teaching girls. But if it really does turn out terribly I will simply leave it at the end of the semester in June when my probation period ends. Even so I will have gained valuable experience and by then I would have found my feet in England, saved some money and be in a better position to go after jobs without the need of an agency.

Time will tell how things turn out.  

Some time ago I quit smoking. Nothing in particular prompted me. I was just tired of feeling guilty about it. Now I have one less thing that bothers me about me. In fact, I have gained one thing to like about me. I like the simple fact that I am a non-smoker.  When I go for a job interview or have a health check for example I am happy to say that I don’t smoke.  I regard giving up the habit as an improvement, which I am often conscious of and the feeling I have of self betterment is what keeps away any temptation to smoke again.

In retrospect I wonder why I did not give it up much sooner. Why did it take so many attempts over so many years when the benefits were so clearly apparent?

I don’t think addiction to nicotine is the answer entirely. I think it has more to do with leaving behind some aspect of who I perceived myself to be and being a smoker was a part of it. My best friends smoked. A great number of artists, writers and philosophers smoked. It was something that people I wanted to be like and be liked by did. In the end smoking became really difficult to give up (even though I knew it was bad for me) because it meant becoming someone slightly different to the person I had grown used to being.

The curious thing now is that despite the fact that I enjoy my new non-smoking self, I am just as reluctant to make other similarly positive changes. For instance, I know that drinking 10 to 15 cups of coffee a day cannot be good for me but I keep doing it anyway. I could quite easily drink the same amount of green tea, which I also enjoy, and actually benefit my health in the process - but I don’t.  I have resigned myself to being a “coffeeholic”. Sometimes I even joke about it, but the truth is I wish I could just have a cup in the morning like my colleagues at work and leave it at that.

I also have a tendency to eat too much. If there is a box of biscuits in the cupboard say, I can’t relax until I have finished every last one. Then I feel guilty about it and berate myself. The lack of control has left me with a flabby gut that I am not happy about, but not even that can motivate me to change my eating habits. It’s perplexing. The only conclusion I can draw is that it is difficult to change ingrained tendencies because in essence it involves changing who I am accustomed to being.  

What really concerns me about the difficulty I have making changes as simple as drinking less coffee is the comparative impossibility of making profound changes to who I am. If I don’t have the ability to have two biscuits instead of twenty, how am I going to resist the far more serious urge to be lazy and unproductive? These are the kind of things that don’t just make me feel guilty but worthless. I need to change them.

As such, from today, I endeavor to give up anything that does not contribute to my sense of wellbeing or self worth. I cannot think of a more obvious way of improving myself. I’ll start by changing the small things like fixing my diet, which will give me the fortitude to tackle the big things like being more productive.  In the process I’m sure to find a bit more to like about myself.