#~Maybe I’m Brainless…

…Maybe I’m Wise~#
-Fiyero, Wicked: The Musical

It has been a long week. It feels even longer than normal. I spent Tuesday to Friday at a new school which has seen me teaching English the whole time. Out of the 5 or so classes I’ve taught, only one shows any signs of intelligence or appeal to me as a teacher. The others are brutally arrogant in terms of attitude, and they are large classes too. I hate large classes. I managed 7 weeks at Pensnett simply because in awful classes, there generally weren’t many kids. At Wolverley I’m dealing with 30ish people in a class, and if 2/3 of them are misbehaving, how the hell does one make the lesson productive for the other 1/3? I don’t know the answer, and this either makes me a bad teacher, or there is a fault with the school. I’d like to err on the side of option two, but my own pessimism automatically ensures I assume a considerable amount of option one too.

Anyway, I have an offer of 12 more weeks at this school. I’m honestly not sure I could stand that. After four days of being a real English teacher, planning lessons for myself etc., and I honestly think I may be spot on when I say full-time teaching is not for me. Large classes, the workload, and the general “I have to care for the kids” attitude just doesn’t fit my idea of work/life balance anymore. I just want to do day-to-day, have a mercenary attitude, and do my best while I’m there. Either that or quit teaching and find something else to do. Or teach abroad, which is apparently both lucrative and less restrictive.

So this coming week, I’m back to Pensnett for Monday as I know the English department are having a moderation day. I’ll be taking over the same classes as before so that will be easy enough. Then four more days at Wolverley. I’ve already told the boss that I don’t think I’m the guy for a long-term post at the school, but I’m not sure that sunk in. Apparently the head of English has said good things about me. Hardly surprising. Without blowing my own trumpet too much, I know I’m a good English teacher. I’m just not so good at managing the behaviour of so many horrible students at once. And I’m poor at handling stress these days, so I need to avoid it as much as possible.

Speaking of the joys of illness, I’ve managed to screw up my back again. I think it was last February when I did something to it. The muscle that stretches round the small of the back, over the kidneys, twinges horribly, and it’s a pain if I try and stay in one position for too long. Lying down is the most comfortable for the longest period, but that’s obviously of little use if I want to get anything done. Fortunately the chair at my PC is good for the posture so I can sit down here for longer periods of time than I would in another chair, but I still have to get up and move about fairly regularly. Stretching helps, kinda. It hurts first, and then it helps.

So that’s not been the best of weeks from a work standpoint. Teaching with a bad back is horrendous by the way. Not quite as bad as trying to teach with a migraine, but pretty darned bad. What else have I got up to this week?

Well, I bought Assassin’s Creed for the PC. I’ve been looking forwards to this for a long time, and while I haven’t devoted too much time to it yet, I’ve been really enjoying it so far. The pace is quite leisurely and slow, but I have a feeling I’m being more cautious than necessary. I need to push the boundaries and see what I can get away with. For those of you who don’t know the game, you take on the role of Altair, a 13th Century assassin during the Crusades. Your job is to assassinate 9 key political and sociological figures in order to actually stop the Crusades from wiping out the East. It takes a leaf out of Prince of Persia’s books, allowing you to perform amazing feats of agility, as well as being able to free-run up most of the architecture in the game. Apparently the game plays very well on keyboard/mouse, but I do fancy trying it on a gamepad if I can find mine. The controls aren’t QUITE as intuitive on the keyboard as I had hoped and while they can be reconfigures, I think a gamepad would be better. We’ll see. So yes, AC is a beautiful game, with a sweeping soundtrack, and I’ll let you know my final impressions later on.

I also ran out of books in reserve this week. I’ve been left with Lukyanenko’s ‘The Night Watch’ which I’m working my way through, but I do like to have a couple of novels on the go if I can. So I went out and bought some more last night: Gregory Maguire’s ‘Wicked’ and its sequel ‘Son of A Witch’, both of which I’ve been interested in reading since Amanda told me that I’d like the musical based on the first book (which I do. It’s very very good!) I’m a big fan of alternate reality type books, or reinterpretation books, and have been ever since I encountered American McGee’s ‘Alice’ on the PC. While ‘Alice’ was, unsurprisingly enough, a reimagining of ‘Alice in Wonderland’/’Through the Looking Glass’, ‘Wicked’ is a reimagining of Baum’s ‘The Wizard of Oz’, centring on the activities of the Wicked Witch of the West, and what made her wicked in the first place. Have only read the first fifty pages or so, so again comments and opinions on the book will come later.

Also, while on the subject of what I’m reading: if you’ve seen the film version of Night Watch/Day Watch, please read the books too. After the first half of Night Watch in paperback, everything makes considerably more sense, even if it is translated from Russian.

And finally, I finished the second draft of the novel a while ago, and have been doing some odd jobs on cleaning the text up into a presentable manuscript. There are a considerable number of continuity errors, and I’m now resigned to the fact that, for the second novel at least, I should actually write a plan/notes out rather than doing it from my head.

And that’s been my week.

~J