All Clear

Just back from the Drama Camp, with a performance at Jurong Library to round it all off tomorrow. Amazed at the speed and efficiency with which the guys cleared everything up tonight. You hear a lot about young people being irresponsible these days. All I can say is, not the ones I know.

Strange Days

It's that strangest of days in the school calendar in these parts: Teachers' Day. I've been here some three decades (actually first stepping into a school on this island on the Teachers' Day of 1988) and it still feels odd - but in the nicest possible way. Even the deepest malcontent would be touched by the generosity of spirit that manifests itself on school corridors at this time of year. And it's followed by a holiday - hooray!

(Mind you, I'm spending my day off in attendance at our annual Camp for our Drama guys. But, all told, that's by no means a bad place to be.)

A Weak Foundation

Just back from the gym and, for reasons best known to themselves, both of my feet keep cramping up. This is ridiculous and painful in roughly equal measures. At one time I suppose I quite liked my feet, despite their strange shape, but I'm increasingly falling out with them, and other bits of my delinquent body.

Progress

When I started teaching taking the daily attendance for a class was quite straightforward: there was a register and you manually marked the attendance. That took about two to five minutes with an average class; a bit longer with more challenging ones. In fact, we took the attendance twice a day in the UK, once in the morning, and again after the break for lunch. There was also a fairly simple way to monitor fluctuations in attendance by class. At the end of the week the teacher would calculate the percentage overall attendance of the class and the Heads of Year (as I think they were called) would monitor those general numbers. (For my first year of teaching this meant I had to relearn how to do percentages. But then calculators were invented to my profound relief.) Also there were folks employed by the local authority who would look at individuals' attendance and follow up on obviously problematic cases (these folks being known as the school bobbies where I taught in South Yorkshire.) It was easy to check on whether a kid you were teaching on any given day was actually in school as the registers were kept centrally and easily available to all. It was a simple but effective system that had been in place for some years. Pretty much forever, I would think.

When I came to Singapore the picture was much the same, except that attendance was taken only once a day, there being no break for lunch when kids could leave the premises. The only significant difference was that, to my surprise, there was much less emphasis on the teacher completing the register and getting it back to a central location. The assumption seemed to be that generally students would be in school so there wasn't so much following-up on them. It was also harder to 'settle' the register since students could be busy doing any number of official things even as the day began. It struck me then that the system was dangerously open to abuse and, in time, I realised I was right.

Now, three decades on, taking the register is vastly more complicated. In my school it's all done through an app that is supposed to facilitate the work, and, of course, makes it much harder. It still makes sense to have a hard copy, of course, just to be able to see who has been ticked as present. But now all that information has to be sent into cyber-space and just getting into where you need to be to record it means remembering a number of passwords (and hoping they work) and hoping that the system doesn't hang or decide to go slow. On Friday I got all the data needed recorded correctly but it took 17 minutes for the system to acknowledge receipt of the data. Today I gave up after 20 minutes, but was later reassured that my data had been captured. But the thing is I've got to go back in and check for this.

Isn't progress wonderful? I do wish they'd stopped at calculators though.

A Little Learning

Finally making some real progress on Joseph Campbell's Oriental Mythology. The chapters on Indian belief systems were full of interesting material and I gained some fresh insights into both Hinduism in the broadest sense of that word and the development of Buddhist thought. It helped that I had some familiarity with both, but I was taken aback by some of the gaps in my understanding. For example, I really had no idea of the place occupied by the blue-black boy-savior Krishna (Campbell's description) in Hindu thought. Also I've enjoyed Campbell's lengthy re-telling of many of the key stories, the tales involving Krishna being a case in point.

Am now moving on to Campbell's consideration of Chinese mythology. This is an area in which I'm woefully informed, so I'm looking forward to some degree of enlightenment.

A Reminder

Wonder whether the death of Senator John McCain might serve to remind those Americans seemingly bent on supporting the current POTUS no matter what the cost, of what decency, integrity and honour actually look like? Somehow I doubt it. Something fundamental seems broken in the republic, and is unlikely to be repaired any time soon especially now that the senator is no longer around.

Not A Good Fit

I was asked to complete a survey the other day relating to the use of social media, and I made a genuine attempt to do so. However, in the end I had to leave it incomplete. The problem lay in one question which asked me which particular manifestation of social media I used and gave some six options - one being Facebook and I can't remember the others. Now the devisers of the survey had allowed a degree of flexibility with the answer in that you were allowed to put more than one; what they'd not allowed for was an entirely negative answer, and there was just no way for me to tell them that I didn't use any of the platforms they listed. 

I was caught in one of those endless loops in which I wasn't allowed to complete the survey unless I answered a question which didn't allow me to answer it. This struck me as richly absurd and a symptom of something, but I'm not entirely sure of what.

Undecided

Have reached the midpoint of the Collected Poems of James Merrill and contemplating whether to continue. It isn't that there aren't rewards in reading JM, but it's generally hard work and I'm missing reading other short collections. Can't remember finding The Changing Light at Sandover this tough, despite that being his epic narrative.
 
Mind you, every so often you get something so obviously brilliant that it seems churlish not to continue. Case in point: I've just reached Ideas from the 1985 collection Late Settings, and the technical mastery of the iambic pentameters and his favourite abba rhyme scheme is so complete that you just want more. Can't think of anyone else who'd have the chutzpah to rhyme psychedelic and Tillich. Having said that, I'm going to have to read it at least a couple of times more to get even close to a basic understanding (and this is from someone who actually gets the Tillich reference without having to resort to Google.)

Getting Radical

Just reacted with a splendid fury to an advert on the telly for a programme with the baking lady Mary Berry cooking up stuff in the stately homes of England. Gosh, how I despise the English aristocracy and all who end up 'serving' them. Must say, I quite like Ms Berry herself, and definitely wouldn't refuse a cake or two from her oven, but the thought of her kowtowing to various upper class twerps made me mildly nauseous.

Vive la revolution, say I!

Bad Signs

Eid al Adha 1439

After attending Prayers early this morning I found myself nodding off every time I wasn't marking a script, which was reasonably frequently. In the meantime, in stark contrast, Noi was working hard preparing the nosh for a visit from some of the family in the late afternoon (which proved predictably delicious). Somehow I managed to stay awake once I needed to, but I've been surprised at just how run-down I'm feeling, for no particular reason I can figure out.

I keep fantasising about taking to my bed for three or four days and just disappearing there. It's definitely a sign of aging when even your fantasies become a celebration of boredom.