Just four more lessons (and a tutorial)!

2012-07-17, 11:08 p.m.
One more day of school. We finish for the Summer Hols tomorrow lunchtime, when we summarily dismiss 667 little blighters into the care of their maters, paters, Jeremy Kyle and the neighbourhood Po-liss until the first week of September when we restart the whole process of filling their heads with knowledge that will be useless to them in the prison cells and mama-and-toddler groups that are their respective destinies, depending on gender.

Actually, that�s awfully unfair of me, as most of them are spiffingly splendid little devils, who jolly up my days most mightily, but there�s just one or two who�.well, lets just say theyre a bit harder to love.

Ones that are �harder to love� include a 14 year old whose attention I was trying to attract in class as he wasn�t paying attention to the instruction for the lesson. After calling his name FOUR TIMES without any success (despite the fact that I was stood directly behind him), I tried once again, a little louder. He turned from his friends and bellowed in my face �WHAT? I. Am. TALKING!!

Yeh. Ive been a singer for a long time. And an actress, too. I can control my voice pretty well. I can project a whisper across a crowded auditorium or I can shout so loud that plaster peels off the walls and windows blow out. That means when I say �GET! OUT! And NEVER EVER speak to me like that again.� , not only does the little bastard actually go, sheepishly, outside (with almost no sighing or flouncing) but the entire room falls eerily silent and teenagers freeze on the spot, with their mouths hanging open. I raise one eyebrow and, in my normal voice, ask �anyone want to join him?�. Funnily enough, nobody does. They stayed quiet like that for quite a while � particularly quiet, I found, during the bit where I went outside and verbally flayed that rude little fucker. Lets face it, its always fun to hear someone else getting toasted and I made sure I put on a good show. The best bit was writing it up on the computerised behaviour log � I had barely clicked �send� before the Head of Year turned up and took him away to isolation for the rest of the day. I had to teach the same boy again next day and, I must say, he was definitely better behaved!


In a moment of weakness, I used the pseudonym �Tuka Pizinizti� this week, and then laughed myself silly trying to remember why that was funny and where I�d got it from. I got it from HERE and its one of the very first emailed jokes I can ever remember receiving. If you find public service employees being made fools of funny, or if you don�t remember it from first time around, have a listen. You might laugh.


Speaking of funny foreign things, I saw my lovely cleaning lady on Friday. I don�t often see her as she�s usually finished by the time I get home from school, but she was there so we had a chat and I asked her if there was anything she needed. She�s from Romania and we occasionally have little glitches in our translations from English to Romanian.

�Nid some blitch for toilettt, end some kit-sin spray. Also some cloeth�

She pronounces �cloth� to rhyme with �both� but I knew what she meant. She already has some dusters and paper cloth so I asked her what �cloeth� she wanted.

�Is grin cloeth. Very chip. Is packet this big *mimes a space about an inch thick*. Very chip cloeth, less then one pound. Yes, very chip. Is grin.�

I tried to get a better description but every type of cleaning cloth I described was met with blank stares and repeats of the �grin cloeth, very chip� mantra.

In Sainsburys I went up and down the aisles looking at cleaning cloths, eventually getting a selection as I couldn�t find anything exactly matching the description and not wanting to piss her off � good cleaning ladies are hard to find. I got green scourers (theyre �grin�), I got dishcloths (theyre �chip�), I got a pack of sponge cloths (is packet *this thick*)�in fact, I just got everything that was clothy or greenish or cheap.

When I got home from school today she was just finishing up. �Oh!� she says �You get many cloeth! Very good!� �Yes. Did you have the ones you needed?� �Oh yes! See!� she said, brandishing her �cloeth� of choice.

Ah. It all becomes clear. Then commences a lesson on English cleaning products, where I explain to Krystyna the Cleaner that the �grin cloeth, very chip� is known by ALL English people as �a J cloth� (�Chay?�
�no, J.�
�Zay?�
�no. J. The letter J�
�Gee-ay?�
�J. *draws it on wet worktop*�
�AH! *wipes it off* Shay! I unnerstan! Shay cloeth!�
�Yes, Shay cloeth�err J cloth!�).

And theyre usually blue, not grin�err green.


What with it being the end of term tomorrow and lots of teachers being out on MORE residential trips (History and Geography have gone to Sorrento/Pompeii/Florence, PE are doing watersports in Spain), Ive been teaching flat out again this week. The quality of cover work set has had the distinct ring of �end of term� about it tho, and there�s been a lot of DVD watching with some VERY tenuous links to the National Curriculum if I might make so bold. Ive had a lot of Year 9 and 10 Geographers �studying� natural hazards, which has meant I have watched Tommy Lee Jones saving Los Angeles from a Volcano about twenty times in the last 48 hours.

In fact, I have watched Volcano so many times now that when I was in town I kept expecting something terrible to happen! You know, in disaster movies where they do a couple of minutes of people going about their normal day-to-day business before something really cataclysmic happens? There�s a shot of a mum pushing a pram, some students running down some stairs, an old lady waiting for a bus, then it all kicks off and the tsunami/twister/zombies/outer space monsters gradually pick �em off one by one. Nipping into town today to get the kids some Euros for their impending cruise around the Aegean with their father (the lucky lucky bastards) and buying a loaf of bread, I had half an eye open for pyroclastic flow through the precinct and half an ear open for the sound of the La Brea Tar Pits boiling over. Probably would have needed a bit more than half an ear open as the La Brea Tar Pits are about 7000 miles from Chigley Precinct, but there you go. It was still weirdly spooky.


Fighting the urge to get horrifically drunk tonight and go into school with a hangover tomorrow, in a �Bad Teacher� stylee. Luckily, there is not a huge amount of drink in the house and its already gone 11 so I�ll probably not be TOO smashed before I call it a day. That does always presuppose that I don�t have any more of tonights cocktail of choice, which would be a White Lady (1 part lemon juice, 2 parts Cointreau, 4 parts gin) if I had not already drunk all the gin when making Martinis earlier in the week, but they are having to be made with Sloe Gin which I guess makes them Pink Ladies�or at least kind of sludgy blood red ladies. Anyway, theyre delicious!

Cheers!

S
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