I'm kind of bored of this blog. There's seldom much exciting and new to report anymore. I'll do a news digest once a month or so, unless there's something more urgent. First digest later this week...

Sunday nights are horrible these days. I realise nobody looks forward to monday mornings and the end of the weekend, but I really object to my current system. Spending weekends at my parents' place is fine, I can take it or leave it. Friday afternoons, I don't really mind where I am, but since my entire social life is up north, it's just more ( Read more... )

Been playing with the van de Graaff generator all day. It's working great now, and I've been stung about a million times already ( Read more... )

Why must EVERYONE else be so optimistic about my teaching prospects? I don't generally like to mindlessly follow the crowd, but I do feel a little defeatist when nobody else seems to think that the situation is as hopeless and pointless as it seems to me. All my colleagues, all the kids, all my friends who're teachers, all my family and anyone who ( Read more... )

This is a copy of a letter I've just sent to Kevin Fleming, probably the most approachable person at Teach SA. I repeat it here because it's probably the most coherent version of my usual bitching about working at Landulwazi and it makes my current position as clear as I'm ever likely to.

Hey, hope you've enjoyed Cape Town.

I really don't know what ( Read more... )

It's not been a good week. I couldn't even face the prospect of going in on wednesday, so I took a sick day. I gather Eric wasn't at work that day either. At least that gave me plenty of time to finish marking those exams, so naturally I played games all day instead. Ended up staying up til 03:00 marking papers, and just about managed to drag ( Read more... )

I'm seriously considering getting out of teaching as soon as I can. I enjoy it, so long as I've got the kids under control, but I'm apparently not very good at it. Apart from 1 or 2 bright sparks (who don't really need me), my kids are all doing dismally. The median mark for the March exam is somewhere around 10%. Part of me hopes that Teach SA ( Read more... )

Short answer: Fuck all ( Read more... )

All parties (including De La Salle) have agreed that our observation there has been mostly fruitless, and so it's been officially called off. Unfortunately, it seems that Nalini Reddy has thrown a tantrum and cancelled the unrelated maths and science afternoon training sessions, which pisses me off greatly. That would have actually been very useful ( Read more... )

Today was, as feared, a bit of a wank ( Read more... )