Keeping Informed

There's a kind of awful fascination in watching what the stress of being overworked can do to the people you work with, and being grimly aware of what it can do to oneself. Schools in Singapore make good places for such observation. Why they have decided it's a good thing to make their inhabitants impossibly busy I'm not sure, but presumably somehow someone somewhere has decreed such. Or maybe it's just the inevitable product the whole machine of education throws up without anybody being really quite in control?

Simply keeping some sort of grasp of the information that is piled upon one each day (without necessarily doing anything with it) is a Herculean task, except that lucky Hercules usually got to grips with material that was not so staggeringly banal. Happiness is an empty Inbox, not that mine ever is. And even then there's the stuff that gets said at meetings and briefings, sometimes meetings and briefings you can't actually attend but are expected to find out about, or the stuff that comes at you in the classrooms, on the corridors, in morning announcements, in announcements over the PA system, in your letter slot, or the stuff that everybody is mysteriously supposed to know and soak in through a species of informational osmosis.

When I first started teaching it was pretty easy to remember what you needed to remember. Most of this had to do with the classes you were teaching and the stuff you were teaching them. I suppose then that constituted about 90% of the information you had to process. My guess is that the quantity of that core of information has remained pretty much the same over the years, but now constitutes about 5% of what you need to deal with. In those days I managed with a simple diary. Around 1993 I began to back this up with a notebook. Over the last few years the amount I need to write in said notebook on a daily basis has increased exponentially, and I now have to back this up with odd bits of post-it notes as part of an increasingly sophisticated, increasingly crazy methodology for surviving each day without a major cock-up. This is not to mention bulging files of various documents, handouts, printouts of e-mails, and bulging virtual files of same, which I will now mention.

The odd thing is that I find almost all the various modes my paymasters instruct me to use for handling information - the record book, work review, records of training - almost entirely useless as a day-to-day way of coping with stuff.

One strategy I've notice one or two colleagues employ as a way of coping: as far as possible ignore it all until someone demands something from you. I admire the simplicity of this approach but lack the guts to try it.