The College that Prays Together...

The exams are pencilled in for the 1st June, but it's looking very flakey. City&Guilds seems to be a very impersonal, bureaucratic organisation, according to KST and LM. We have centre-status but can't get the students registered on line. Assuming that's done within the next few days, the big problem as I see it will be to get the papers and tapes physically here. Getting any sort of documentation into this country is always difficult, they can language in some sort of customs warehouse for weeks. Ironically, bringing things in with you in a suitcase is a breeze. Perhaps the solution will be for someone to fly to London and collect the papers and fly back. But I'm not paid to find solutions, and those that are seem to blunder around like people on speed with dustbins over their heads in a darkened sports hall.

It's not a good situation. We've managed to time the preparation really accurately with 1st June in mind. If we let it go over, there's nothing much for the students to do. Any further prep now would be psychologically counter-productive. I fear the worst. We've, I'm told, got a succession of Big Cheeses coming to visit over the next weeks. All the hard work we've been doing will be set at nought if we've got disenchanted students and meaningless lessons. A second Leadership and Management teacher has arrived. I'll call her Janice. She seems pleasant enough. She went out with Shelly, who's her colleague, last night. I noticed they were wearing jeans and had their heads uncovered. Janice is blonde. They were telling me this afternoon about the remarks they got in the City Centre: offers of money to see Janice's breasts; are you Russian? Bulgarian? They seemed mildly amused by this, though flummoxed. The culture clash here makes me very uncomfortable. Of course, a woman should be free to go where she wants and wear what she wants. But this isn't Stockton on Tees.

I was thinking that PTI had perhaps settled down and was finding a modus vivendi with the students. And then today, Brokeback Mountain came back into my class after a 45 minute "prayer" break, (gobshite break more like, but calling their bluff on that is fraught with obvious peril). PTI must have seen them in the corridor because he followed them into my class and asked me if they'd just got back from their break. They both began shouting. PTI went out. The shouting in Arabic continued and I couldn't make it out, except the irritation.

One of the students said something in English about "Line Manager", (PTI is technically the students' line manager).The noisiest of the Brokeback Mountain duo said loudly "I do not have a manager!". Now, this bloke's a prick, but I have a lot of sympathy with him, being bossed around by a numpty like PTI, a foreigner. What PTI hasn't the imagination to realise is, even if in reality these two aren't praying in their break, that time is universally regarded - being a little after 1pm - as a prayer break. Fuck around with that, as a foreign atheist, and you're heading for big trouble. The reality is irrevant, the face value is all. This has the makings of a teddy-bear situation.