Easter Hols! Huzzah!

2014-04-07, 12:16 a.m.
Stuff I have learned today:

Im not all that keen on Teacher�s whisky, even if it was a Mother�s Day gift (given by my daughters but bought by my ex-husband � slightly odd), but it�s rather unpleasantly �burnt tyre� after-tang can be mightily improved by mixing it half-and-half with some leftover Christmas Mead. I don�t know why we have leftover Christmas Mead � I guess we just haven�t been trying hard enough.

Jooj has no boundaries when it comes to being able to watch the season premier of Game of Thrones. We don�t have SkyTV so she�s just arranged to go over to her cousin�s house to watch it on their TV at 2am tomorrow morning.

Prawns are fucking expensive. I don�t know why, they just are. If you live somewhere where prawns are cheap, I envy you. I fucking love prawns. Prawns are even more expensive if you take your teenage daughters with you to Tesco�s to buy the aforementioned prawns as they will fill your basket (luckily I didn�t get a trolley!) with clothing items that they ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE, which will bump the cost of the prawn-buying experience to just over �30, making the prawns approximately �1.36 each.


Tried channelling my inner Liz Hurley today, with a pair of white jeans. It wasn�t good and they lasted all of about 5 minutes before I took them off and changed them for something less tragic. Luckily it was too cold for me to even consider getting the gold stiletto flip-flops out of the cupboard or my sartorial suicide would have been complete. The white jeans might re-appear at some future juncture but there�s going to need to be some severe �anti-styling� going on to make them credible.

The white jeans are my only pair of jeans so I guess their non-wearability now means that I have no jeans. It is a state of affairs that I heartily applaud. Ive never really liked jeans and now that I don�t have any I don�t feel obliged to wear them. I feel strangely liberated. I also have a vague notion of complaining about jeans previously in my diary but Im certainly not going to trawl through 8 years of archives for the phrase �Im not very keen on jeans� to find out when it was, so we�ll just leave it at that, shall we?

I have now officially started my secondment at Grapetree High, having been up there on Tuesday for an orientation kind of day, which was mostly just me shadowing other teachers and meeting (some of) the students that I�ll be teaching. Only one dodgy moment, in the class which Id taught at my interview and which is currently being taught by the Principal. I observed the class and joined in with some of the activities, doing a bit of one-to-one coaching and helping out where I could. Then the Principal gave this little introductory speech where he started off saying �Do you remember when I told you that I wouldn�t leave you until Id found a really outstanding teacher to take my place? Well, Im pleased to say Ive found one� which would have been fabulous if the girl sat next to me hadn�t said (nice and loud) �Cool! Who is it?� I looked at her and she looked at me for what seemed like an eternity, while the whole of the rest of the class laughed, then it gradually went as quiet as the grave while we all waited for her eventual �OH! YOU!� It was a lonnnnnnng time coming, boys and girls. *sigh*

Business as usual at Chigley Academy on Wednesday, when a child screamed FUCK OFF in my face and then said �Im glad youre leaving � good riddance to bad rubbish�. As it was her 3rd incidence in 48 hours of telling a teacher to fuck off, she was excluded for the rest of the week which is probably just as well as the Behaviour Support Officer (male, ex Army, occasional flashes of PTSD) came into the staffroom an hour or so later, flopped into a chair and said �It�s a good job (name of child) is a pupil, or Id have just dropped her on her arse outside the library�. I assume that my transatlantic readers will appreciate that the phrase �dropped on her arse� means �punched hard enough for her to fall down�. Im sure you would agree that�s not an ideal situation to occur between a full grown man and a 15 year old schoolgirl.

My departure was announced at assembly on Friday and there were enough gasps for me to feel like I might actually be missed by the general student populace. I had to say �I�m coming back � promise!� quite a few times during the course of the morning and then the kids all went home and it was time for Staff Netball, which was brutal and vicious and (being the oldest person on the court by about ten years) way faster than I remember from the last time I played a proper game, back in 1983. Oooh, it was a right laugh and way more fun than going to the gym or some other such nonsense which doesn�t involve barging one�s colleagues to the floor and taking the odd ill-judged elbow to the face.

If you don�t play netball where you live, it�s a kind of 7 a side ladies-only basketball variant but with no dribbling, no running with the ball, a 3 second �holding� rule and no pussy backboard when it comes to shots on goal. You can watch a bit here if you feel so inclined. Our teams were mixed, with young male PE teachers all jumbled up with Senior Leaders (ie the Headteacher and the Deputy Head), a particularly competitive Geography mistress, the bloke from the IT office and a motley assortment of others including a middle-aged, fat-ish ersatz English teacher on her last day in the job (*ahem*).

Oh, and then we went to the pub.

Two weeks of holidays for me now before I start �proper� at Grapetree, during which I very much hope they are going to send me some kind of scheme of works or Im not actually going to have very much to teach them. Adept as I am at plucking lessons from thin air, Id rather not *have* to do it.

Couldn�t go out and celebrate in fine drinking stylee on Friday night as I had to pick Jooj up from her school trip � 5 days in Istanbul (yeh, you gotta love a private school �school trip� � 800 notes for 5 days, organised by the Classics and Geography departments, neither of which subject she actually takes), so I had to make up for it last night which was relatively easy as I was mostly drinking to forget the horrible din of the �act� at the workies. A bloke, a mini disk player, and a bit of guitareoke (L�s word!) � nobody needs to listen to the original Brown Eyed Girl, let alone a mediocre cover from a middle aged man in a �douche-neck� t-shirt (these. Bleuurgh.

Made myself feel a bit nauseated thinking about that, so time for another Teacher�s Mead cocktail (I say �cocktail� because I am drinking it out of a cocktail glass. It is NOT a cocktail. It is a drink that a discerning hobo might drink. I have no shame).

Later
S
x

Meh. 'douche neck' link doesnt work. Try googling "Low V neck tshirt men's" if youre that interested.



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