Beginning a Countdown With Reading

It is the day after boxing day and I sit here in Wolverhampton, my stomach light with the nauseous tension of a mixed diet of both digital and olfactory indulgence.

I have read a fair bit about NVC (Non-Violent Communication). While there is much easy criticism to make about its tenants, its invitation to step away from value judgements is empowering. Read some of this stuff: see what you think to it. Conflict resolution seems it most likely application. Being kinder to yourself is another. It is something that I hope to take more of as I grow through time.

This holiday I recently read Yes Man by Danny Wallace. I remember it impacting me when I lived in Hull. Alas, so many of the opportunities I saw available to me required heavy drinking. Whether that was true or not, I will be dead in 40 years or so, and it is how I remember things. Maybe it is the heavy drinking, or maybe it is the dislocation of me from the immediacy of my surroundings, but I realise the need to say no to myself and yes to opportunity more often.

It is without any doubt that I need to leave Dubai. I will look back to that time, which is currently this time, and realise that this time where I am overweight and overstimulated has ended.

I am tired but I am not broken.

Reading the writing of others is perhaps the best way to approach these final days of 2018. That and moving more, sweating more. I have survived this barrenness.

A new future to be realised

I sit here in the late hours of the penultimate day of the Xmas holidays. Another evening spent smoking shisha, reading furiously and eating kebabs. The rest of the evening saw two beers imbibed and this blog written. This same time last year I was sick with tiredness. Now? I am floating in time. Definitely a little weary. But not destroyed.

I have been enjoying interviews with several schools, one of which has really taken care of me. The British School of Manila. Now such a place will be mixed, a potential British School of Beijing. But I am in a good place mentally – somewhat more pragmatic yet without too much of the excitement dimmed. I expect a new future that will be far from perfect yet very human. With rest I will rise up again with the potency that I expect of a man of my mind. 

Yet now I more measured. One of my bosses, a person whom I harbour mixed feelings about, spoke about how I was not expressing hyperbolic excitement about my potential new job. How can I express my relief and determination to make a life away the from the insidious mindlessness and casual cruelty of this place? Especially to those who revel in it? It is to you, my silent reader, that I speak to of such things. You will come to share eventually in how I have resisted the calm battering and banal neoliberalism of this wretched place.

Part of my winding down in the next 200 days will be to ‘forgive’ a range of people at work. Some have been terrible colleagues, amongst the worst in my career. They have been cruel and foolish, procedural and dull. But even to mention these weaknesses melts my ire. To forgive them is really a reverse: I want to praise the people whose I values I really love. Yet in some ways I do want to call people out. And I might do this with praise.

Being a source of good energy is my true ambition here. And that is something that I have achieved. And it is something that I want to achieve in my next place.

Tomorrow I will Skype with the outgoing principal/Head about a possible Teaching and Learning role. I have somewhat fallen out of love with Teaching and Learning over the past year or so. I suffered a weak interview with two dire characters: one a nepotistic science teacher who brought her best mate into the fold, and the other a farcically ignorant PE teacher who has only two A-Levels at D and E to his name. They have taught me how such roles can exist as pragmatic projects that operate to create numbers. Aside from a marking project, and doing observations, it is tricky to see what these characters are doing.

In their place, what will I do? I think the Screencasting Project is a worthwhile teaching and learning thing to do when I first arrive: a champion from each department, focusing on thinking and providing these links. A link library. Critique the issues behind it, and the need to create BSM-flavoured ones. Another one is creating a canon of intercultural literature that everyone is aware of, and considering the cross-curricular links there, holding public celebrations of learning, galleries of experience etc. Looking at marking projects and policies are also useful. Interleaving questions and learning is also a useful aspect. Looking at metacognition is also an idea, as perhaps is the prioritisation of cultural capital. The key thing is that I want to see what the school wants and from that I will deliver a worthy project. Tomorrow I speak about this, from this.

And the good work I do day-in, day-out will continue. I have found rhythms of practice that allow for both excellence and a life. I speak to hearts and minds. It was only my speech that gained a round of applause at the options evening. To speak about the specification as being your curriculum is not only mindless, it is dangerous. I have enough about me now at 36 to make a curriculum. I will not suffer the dangerously limited curriculum of this place for any more than 200 days. 

Living with integrity: challenging wrong doing where you see it

One of the things that I remember from my youth was a freedom to challenge wrong-doing where I saw it. At primary school I challenge some boys who I saw as ineffectual and nefarious: I couldn't understand why so many weak-willed boys followed the charismatic but deeply stupid boys in my primary school class. It wasn't that they were evil - they were boys who didn't fit my idea of the kind of person I wanted to follow. While I did suffer some altercations, I held my own and more.

I carried such behaviour into secondary school, challenging others where I saw fit. Socially I was reasonable, but always suffered a kind of awkwardness - the machinations of Wolverhampton school-society passed me by as rather unworthy. I felt most connected when I discovered a rock music community. My first partner was experienced and I loved music and some sense of belonging to a people that spoke to me.

At university, I remember distinctly the moment in which I spoke to two girls who seemed lovely and were alone. It was funny, and I really enjoyed their company. The story stays with me now: I ventured on the second night the bar without my block. I approached one group of people, introducing myself and asking if they wanted to chat. One guy suggested that they were going to leave soon. Thirty minutes later, they hadn't.

I then approached two girls who seemed friendly. We chatted and laughed with delicious wit and vivacious nonsense. I remember seeing one of them later going out, and I was wearing a deerstalker hat. We passed each other by without words. That was a bit too much. In fact, at university I was largely a bit too much for many people: I was kind though.

My next move is seminal. If I do not meet someone that I want to meet, then I will loosen myself from social bonds and do something else quite different.

I do feel, however, a great desire to tell certain folk what I think of them in my current place. To right those wrongs. In terms of my career, though, I should realise where I feel strongly, and to concentrate my perspective there. I do not really care for these people. To challenge them is to risk a future reference. If I was ever invited to give an opinion or kick some ass, I would give both gladly.

To speak about the inner-life is the place where I would not shrink. Even with the characters who surround with undue power now. And even then I would present such ideas in a way that would shirk their worst aggressions. But deny others their inner-life? No, thank you.