There Will Be Blood

Today was an admin and prep day. We had training for the Hitachi interactive boards this morning. Actually, it was more like a sales pitch, but quite impressive as such. Like everything with PCs just now, we need a patch to be able to use them with Vista. (“Oh! I fucking hate Vista!” KST exclaimed later this morning; every PC user this year will have some sympathy with him.)

Then I was to liase with T2 about next week’s lessons, and the approach we’re going to take to assignments as evidence for the portfolio. Unfortunately, the conversation got bogged down in complaints about the curriculum and the book she’s using. The phrase “I can’t take any more of her” crossed my mind several times. So that was inconclusive. She later had a pow-wow with LM, and seemed to have her mind set at rest about the curriculum and the books at least.

Then with her and Reza to a government laboratory to get the blood tests which should be the final act in our getting residency. He told us that government buildings here change hands every few years, but that this one had remained the same since he was a little child, and he could vividly remember going there as a kindergarten pupil, as all children were obliged to, for bloodtests. He told us later that now, to get a marriage licence here, you need to get these blood tests with particular reference to AIDS/HIV and TB.

We waited an hour or so in a dusty courtyard. There’s a desperately cold wind her these last few days. And then forms, queues, bureaucrats quarrelling with each other over incomprehensible aspects of the forms, and then a sour faced nurse who took a blood sample with no pain whatsoever. And then back to work.

I spent the next couple of hours working out how I’ll present the curriculum to the learners next week. T3 is now due to arrive Monday, and we teach Sunday to Tuesday, (the past week was skewed by the Republic Day holiday: we should fall into a regular schedule now), so I’ll have the two classes next week again, and can hand over one of them to her the following week, or maybe next Tuesday).

Before we finished for the day, we set about re-arranging the furniture in the staff room. T2 managed to make this a source of resentment, querying the need for it, asking if she couldn’t stay where she was... It’s much better now. I’ve got my desk, an extension lead I share with KST, a stapler, a CD player for the class, one of those desk tidy thingies, board pens, class files. That ‘s me, I’m sorted.