I’m a lumberjack
I have mastered the wood burner. It makes some peculiar noises and causes some radiators to shake violently (and sometimes get warm) but it goes. It consumes wood at a huge rate but keeps the house lovely and toasty.
It also means I get to split logs with my new axe. Very manly. I have a checked shirt and eat squirrels. Ok, I don’t eat squirrels but I do ‘dress in women’s clothes’ on occasion.
So, I’m throwing logs into the fire and spraying around lighter fuel with gay abandon. And I set fire to my jumper. Which I sensibly remove. In some haste. Without removing my glasses. Which snap. The only spare pair I can find are shades. Very dark shades.
So, I’m walking to work. Not to be healthy. Not to save the environment. But because I can’t see. Oh joy.
It also means I get to split logs with my new axe. Very manly. I have a checked shirt and eat squirrels. Ok, I don’t eat squirrels but I do ‘dress in women’s clothes’ on occasion.
So, I’m throwing logs into the fire and spraying around lighter fuel with gay abandon. And I set fire to my jumper. Which I sensibly remove. In some haste. Without removing my glasses. Which snap. The only spare pair I can find are shades. Very dark shades.
So, I’m walking to work. Not to be healthy. Not to save the environment. But because I can’t see. Oh joy.
posted by Old Man Rich at 8:16 AM
5 Comments:
Blimey Rich you lead such an exciting life! I am sooo envious. X
you and your conundrums.
must be very entertaining to sit round and watch you...
Truancy
So the truancy figures haven't gone down after ten years of throwing money down the drain. Here's what should happen in my opinion:
Pass a simple law that says any child found truanting should be arrested along with their parents and made to spend a whole day from 8 until 6 in a blank room with no windows, doing the most boring activities that the teacher (who swaps every hour) can come up with. Parents employers informed, £50 fine taken from wages or Benefits. Believe me they would never, ever do it again. Total cost- a couple of million in overtime for the teachers.
Here's what happens at the moment:
Pupil truants and parents deny it, come up with some lame excuse or just say that they can't control their brat. If the pupil truants repeatedly (say 500 times) then the school can beg their Education Welfare Officer to beg the Council to take the parents to Court. The EWO finds some reason why she can't do it so the teachers beg again, and again. A year later the EWO eventually agrees.
Six months later...
Council decline to take parents to Court. (Parent is mad/has promised to improve/is drunk)
Pupil truants another 500 times, school begs etc.
Council take parents to Court. Parents given a stern warning to improve.
Pupil attends school for a month.
Pupil then starts truanting and the whole process starts all over again. (Unless the child is in the last two years of school in which case nobody even bothers as the Council won't try to prosecute because of the time delay in going to court.)
Total cost of various ludicrous initiatives, vandalism, muggings and burglary committed by truants-£Billions.
chopping wood now ?
christ you are sex with an axe
I blame the hippies ...
There’s been a lot of talk from Government, and Shadow Cabinet, ministers recently, about how they’re going to deal with ‘violence in the classroom’.
Well, here’s the thing; they aren’t.
They’re not going to stop violence in the classroom. They could, but they won’t. They aren’t going to solve the problem of violence in schools for the same reasons that they don’t solve the problem of violence in A&E departments or violence against firemen.
There are a number of reasons for this; I’ll go through some of them.
Firstly, we have a real problem at the moment that the decision-makers in our society are the product of the polytechnics and universities of the 1960’s and early 70’s – they’re a bunch of disappointed hippies clinging to the forlorn belief that, if only we are nice to people for long enough, they’ll be nice back to us in return. Those middle-class former students and cultural revolutionaries who wore donkey jackets, identified with the working man, smoked spliffs (but didn't inhale, apparently) and ‘tore down the barriers’ of social repression three or four decades ago are unable to grasp the concept that, now, they are the establishment.
And they got it wrong.
What this means in practice is that we have a small but very influential group of ministers, education professionals, legal experts, well-meaning school governors, Heads, Deputy Heads and other ‘professionals’ who decide what is acceptable in schools but who, crucially, never enter the classroom and, from my experience, never send their own children to typical ‘bog standard’ secondary schools.
Very much a case of do as we say, not as we do.
Secondly, we have a social contract that says that, no matter how badly you behave, you’ll always get support, and unless you do something heinous you’ll never really get punished.
And by heinous, I’m not talking about something like beating someone to death in an unprovoked street attack – that’ll only get you two years served for manslaughter.
Basically, you can do whatever you like, and nothing bad will happen.
And while I understand and applaud the motives for this laudable approach - it harks back to the mid-nineteenth century philanthropists who were rightly appalled by the realities of child-labour, savage penal codes and exploitative working conditions – the simple fact is, this mid-brow sub-Marxist approach to current social conditions is not only wildly inadequate, it’s actually serving to encourage, if not actually create, a class of helpless, welfare dependant, chaotic families that… well, just have a look at the Shannon Matthews case on TV to see where that particular road leads.
Thirdly, and on a similar theme, the family unit is breaking down; in some areas of most towns it’s disintegrating completely. For young boys, we’re seeing an equivalent breakdown in socialisation and increase in what is euphemistically termed anti-social behaviour, often given a pseudo-medical label and treated with drugs, the long-term effects of which we don’t yet know or understand.
And girls? I don’t even want to go there.
To be honest, all of the above factors act to create violent situations on a daily basis throughout the country. Teachers’ authority is constantly undermined by professionals determined to protect the rights of the violent, the anti-social and the abusive, often to the detriment of the hard-working kids in the class.
Parents who we never ever see on parents’ evening, who's phones are permanently switched off whenever we try to contact them, and who never come to meetings when invited, to discuss their child’s appalling behaviour, will nevertheless come roaring down to school, shouting and swearing at all and sundry, should we be so precipitate as to confiscate Cherelle's iPod (because we're trying to teach her some stuff and we'd like her to listen a bit).
And Cherelle watches this and understands.
The good kids, still a majority, I might add, just sigh and put up with it, occasionally asking why, if Liam’s behaviour is bad enough that he has to be sent to the Special Unit, he gets to go home an hour early every day, except on Fridays when he is taken out of school to do rock climbing, mountain biking and …(insert your own favourite outdoor sport here).
And what do the ‘challenging’ students think?
Well, they may be under-achieving educationally, but they aren’t stupid. Like any amoral, egocentric, pathologically indulged teenager would, they’re taking full advantage of a system which refuses to stop their poor behaviour and which rewards them copiously on the odd occasions that they do something well.
They have no boundaries, though they know where these boundaries are and will quite happily lodge a complaint, should they perceive that a teacher has crossed one, they can’t really be punished, they enjoy almost one to one adult supervision, rarely have to do real class-work and enjoy special status within the school.
Hmm. This is coming across as a rant, and I try to keep my blogs on the sunny side of the street, so apologies if you were looking for some mildly amusing tale of classroom mayhem, but occasionally I have to say, this is how it is.
The reason that students behave violently in classrooms is simple.
It’s because they can.
the teacher from the crown
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