Hubbly Bubbly

The minibus which takes us to work is now full with eight of us. LM, T2 and 3, KST, IT Bloke, and two leadership and management teachers, who I’ll call Paul and Shelley, and me. The driver’s a charming young man called Zaid. Shelly is from Teeside, which is near enough to my home. Paul’s a gobshite, on first impression, but at least he’s a serious photographer, and Nikon user like me.

T3 arrived from Egypt late last night, but went into work this morning. She seems very pleasant.

Tonight I had a pipe on the communal grass area with KST. T2 joined us for a while. The dynamics have all changed with the new arrivals, and we feel less isolated. T2 even seems bearable.

Less pleasing is the internet connexion which comes and goes every few minutes, making communication with home impossible – indeed any meaningful use of the internet is out of the question.

Also, there’s ill feeling on the horizon with the utility bills. There’s only one meter, and the bills are to be shared. This is unfair to the frugal. And it’s unfair to everyone because the site’s many lights are blazing all night long, and it seems wrong that we should have to pay for that.

They're Creepy and Their Cooky

The Addams Family had an episode today. One of them is a bit like Gomez, only older. He started to question the value of one particular exercise because it had no overt grammar. I asked him if we should have missed it out, but he ducked that and got onto the old theme of the all importance of grammar, “words we can learn at home – we only need you for grammar. All was well until the teabreak, when they decided unilaterally and without tipping me off, I think led by older Gomez, that they should have half and hour, rather than fifteen minutes.

I don’t think it showed, but I was thoroughly pissed off with this. See, frankly, I couldn’t give a tinker’s fart if they took a whole hour – I’m feeling a bit frazzled by then with the back-to-back classes. But the tea breaks are set for 15 minutes and it’d be my balls on the block if management thought I was letting them have longer. So I told them that going over the agreed time was unacceptable, whereupon Festa and Old Gomez got excited and started shouting. I left the room and got LM in to sort them out.

Which he did, by conceding them a 20 minute tea break. Thereafter they were wee baa lambs.

T3 arrives tonight, and will take Brokeback Mountain next week, so that I can devote my energies, for now, to the Addams Family. I need to do a Second Language Acquisition paper for my MA over the next few months, and they should provide some marvellous data. I’m thinking of some observations on fossilisation, testing, or obsession with Grammar Translation Methodology. Objectifying difficult students this way is a real help.

Teaching At Last

That’s two days actual teaching behind us now.

Until the arrival of T3, next week, perhaps, inshallah, whenever, I’ve got two classes, three hours from 8.30am, and then a break, and then another class 12 – 3pm.

The first class are nine in number, and the placement test and my observations over the next few days suggest that they’re Upper Int. The only problem is the Brokeback Mountain factor: two students who keep writing little notes on their jotters to each other, and whispering and giggling; this morning, I saw one of them remove a stray hair from his friend’s face, as a wife or lover would to a man. Nothing wrong with any of that, per se, except that they’re a pair of religious bigots, and a complaining pair of bastards to boot. I think I’ve managed to curtail the pillow talk, for now anyways.

The other class are more difficult. They have bees in their bonnets about being the only afternoon class. This has led them to be annoyed about every aspect of the course. I had a difficult hour or two today. One of them was raising his voice, and this led me to do the same. This would be totally unacceptable in England, no doubt, but shouting is the way of expressing dissatisfaction here.

By the end of the lesson, we were all on terms, and I shook hands with the shouter after he apologised for losing his temper. I privately restored my good humour by naming them The Addams Family – it’s a small class, some of them are a bit odd, and frankly their cussedness spooked me.

They do have several legitimate grievances – some bureaucratic nightmare regarding their wages in particular, I’m told – and it’s natural if unreasonable that I should get caught in the crossfire.

T2 has her own class, and is out of the road for now. Mostly she’s ok, but other times she’s just weird. Like yesterday, the first day of teaching in a new place for everyone, and I said to her, “Which classroom would you like?” And she said, “Why?”