Posts (page 2)
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 changed my perception of the job completely. 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.
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.
You could say I have jumped from the pan into the fire. 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.
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.
I have wanted to write a book for quite some time, a kids book in particular. The trouble is that I can't think of a good story.
Until recently Thabo Mbeki was the president of South Africa. He had been so for almost a decade, ever since he took over from Nelson Mandela as both the president of the ruling African National Congress party and president of the country.
He took his first knock when he lost presidency of the ANC to Jacob Zuma, the very man he fired as Vice President some years back over his alleged involvement in a massive arms deal scandal. That involvement is something that has still to be heard in a court of law. It was finally meant to be get under way last month after several delays only to be dismissed by a judge on a technicality. Part of which was that Mbeki himself has meddled in the proceedings.
The Zuma camp has consistently claimed that the charges of corruption have been a plot orchestrated by the Mbeki camp to keep him from becoming the next president. When the judge uttered the words that Mbeki had been inappropriately involved in the proceedings of the case their suspicions were neatly confirmed. In a matter of days Mbeki was shown the door.
Mbeki’s recall was followed by half his cabinet and various regional premiers however. Even the vice president quit. Naturally this left sudden wake of leadership. What would happen next? It was as if the country was holding its breath. A new “care-taker” president was quickly introduced to the nation. A man no one outside of politics had heard of. Kgalema Motlanthe. How do even say that?
Motlanthe made an impressive debut though. He came across calm and collected - just the thing to ease the frazzled nerves of millions of South Africans. His first big move was to get rid of some of the most incompetent ministers including the widely detested minister of health, “Dr. Beetroot” so called for her stalling on procuring anti-retroviral drugs at the cost of millions of lives insisting that a basic diet was sufficient treatment. He also put a lid on the leader of the ANC Youth League, whose lack of even a high school education clearly comes across in his belligerent rhetoric and mob like antics.
All in all Motlanthe has rapidly met the approval of both blacks and whites in South Africa, and as the dust begins to settle it seems that South Africa might be alright after all. If Motlanthe could stay on as president there is a ray of hope for the country. Unfortunately there are seldom happy endings in African politics.
It is far more likely that Zuma will never have to face trial and will become the next president of South Africa by hook or by crook. He will be sworn in dancing like a fool singing his trademark “Umshini Wam” war cry, “Bring me my machine gun” from the bygone days of the liberation struggle. He’ll probably stay in power for years and the country will prosper just like the rest of Africa has.
Motlanthe will probably fade back into the obscurity he only recently emerged from and as for Mbeki, he will almost certainly lose the tentative sway he had on negotiating a settlement in Zimbabwe. The best thing he could do, I suppose, would be to start a splinter party from the ANC, hopefully creating a viable, much needed opposition party thereby. Then again, considering that he has a pension of 100% of his salary as president he might just want to enjoy his spoils in the comfort of his brand new house.
South Africa is such a beautiful land, the people are great and sun makes everything shine. It is just a pity about the “comrades” in power like who have no skills beyond being at war with something. People like Jacob Zuma are like a single dark cloud in an otherwise bright blue sky, but it blots out all the rest for me I am afraid.
