Seeing

            Having been in Manila for 110 days, I feel better than before. But old habits threaten me. I should begin to paste some of my plans, old and new.

I came here to make human connection. There is enough to be made. I need to just keep my head.

An insufferable corporate girl

Today I met an insufferable corporate girl who clearly made an impression on me. She was on transmit most of the time. We met for almost an hour exactly.

Her confidence was galling.

She achieves in some corporate ways of imposing her will on the world.

I watched Star Wars. It was fine.

This time in my life was dislocated. I spoke to some certain in their ways and in their values, a life privileged from birth who rewarded hard work and more. 

Seeking to Write

Liquid Girl lives in my thoughts but only because I let her. In welcoming her in, I am really fleeing from pain.

One response to pain is to flee. Flee to a safe place, a metaphorical cave away from people and the chance of crushing miscommunication, of utter... And then what? I will be rotting in the ground in 30 years or less.

One response to pain is... action? Improvement? Piety?

I cannot wake up each day wondering what to do. Let's look at my Wunderlist. 

Six items today. Reading my Year 13 texts looks ideal. I really need to email Brian and Nick to ask what texts are going to be studied in the new year.

I am looking at the Orwell essays. That is... something that I want to look at another time. This is not for me. And it is technical.

I sent emails to Nick and Brian asking about the books I should read. I was a little pointed in my ones to Brian. Hopefully that will come across well to him - maybe it won't. I wrote it anyway.

My Wunderlist has so few tasks left on it. I do not have a happy relationship with that to-do list at the moment. I am in a period of transition.

I am seeing Brian in about 90 minutes. That is cool. Showing and walking will be my aim.

There is nothing rhythmic in this writing because it is a necessary toil.

Creating A Literature Curriculum

Over the past four years, I have unpicked some of my expectations of what it is to teach. I believe now that:

1) You need to aim a lesson at yourself. That is, aim the lesson at the most passionate students who are willing to work hard.
2) You need to signpost the content expected in lessons.
3) Each lesson should be enriched by external content.
4) Lessons should include dialectic debate and student presentations on a regular basis.

So, what should a literature curriculum contain?

To understand each of these aspects, at least one situated example is ideal. Preferably 2 or 3 is best in order so a comparison might be formed.


Which texts am I teaching? What can I bring into this curriculum to enrich it?


Novels
Narratology
Characterisation
Structure

Teach each of these ideals with situated examples from key authors.

These key authors can come throughout time.
The key texts around which to structure this are: The Art of Fiction by Lodge; Modern Fiction (texts in Context); Texts in Context Popowlski; Massolit lectures etc.

Contextually this is important... Victorian, Edwardian, Modern... Massolit lecture choices helpful and important?



Plays
Stagecraft
Cultural points
Stanislavski vs Brecht

Teach each of these ideals with situated examples from key playwrights.

Greek Tragedy...
Shakespeare
Early Modern...?
Modern British?
Modern American?


Poetry
Prosody
Poets' lives and cultural points... romantic poets
Songs and Youth Culture

Teach each of these ideals with situated examples from key poets.
Pre-1900?
The Romantics
TS Eliot
Yates
Larkin
Anthology?
Etc...


Non-British Literature
Russian


Media and Non-Fiction
Advertising
Magazines
Films

Language
Gender


Debating
Topics to be debated culturally...


So... using these actual books will structure my curriculum... I can pull these together... plus videos/.mp3s?

Ideas...

Modern Texts

Media Studies and Pop-Culture points... non-fiction approaches...
Podcasts etc... points to note...

Literature also comes in various sections... Victorian/Romantic/War...

Shakespearean... Early Modern etc...

Maybe enrichment modules for students that really want that extra education?

Information on Capitalism and Work
Information on Media Theories and Ideas
Information on Pop Culture


Contextual Figures

Greek Tragedy

Medieval? Chaucer. Sir Gawain.

Petrarchan Poetry

Shakespeare
Marlowe + Kid + Webster + Johnson
Renaissance Drama and Culture

John Donne
Wyatt
John Wilmot

Milton

Lord Byron
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Keats
Wordsworth
Shelley

Blake
Mary Shelley

Defoe
Swift (and Satire)

Flaubert

Austen

Stevenson
Dickens
Bronte, Emily and Charlotte
Rossetti
Eliot

Dickinson
Hardy
Tennyson
DH Lawrence?

Henry James
Oscar Wilde
Edgar Allen Poe

Conrad
Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Fitzgerald
Steinbeck

Virginia Woolf
Beckett
TS Eliot

Graham Greene
George Orwell
Hemmingway
Harper Lee

Miller
Williams
Ken Kasey
Jordan Heller
Nabakov

William Burroughs
Anthony Burgess

John Osborn
Pinter
Larkin
John Fowles

Jeanette Winterson
Martin Amis
John Godber

John Updike

McEwan
Ishiguru

Monica Ali
Zadie Smith
Ad. Roy

Palaniuk
Carol Ann Duffy
Armitage

Haircuts Abroad

I just returned from having my haircut. It is a disappointment.

My hair is coarse. It lacks the natural oils needed to flow smoothly in Western styles. To style it I need hair product. This means that when I get my hair cut in UK, it does not seem possible to style.

Another issue is psoriasis. Alas, the NHS has never given me the topical steroids I needed to combat that.

In response to both these I had been shaving my head for almost two decades. It made my hair easier to manage. But it lacked style.

In response to two traumatic events (a break-up and a job change), I grew my hair into a comb-back and a full beard. These look great. With product reasonably regular grooming I enjoy the confidence of looking good. The price of maintaining both is easy abroad.

The price of a UK haircut is too much. Seventeen pounds for what amounted to 25 minutes of meandering. As usual, the barber was too keen to finish early. He did not wash my hair. It looked frankly terrible. And as I looked at the stark reflection of my unruly mane, I realised that if I had not travelled, I would not have stylish hair.

A UK male haircut is not sufficient to style my hair as I want. The ex-Pat lifestyle sees barbers paid enough to care about what haircut they give. My Syrian barber would take 45 minutes, managing my hair over 3-4 comb-overs. He would wash my hair to finish it. The UK barber? Too quick, too weak. And without taking a chance on moving abroad, the coarseness of my hair would never be tamed.

How many other opportunities have I missed by staying in? How many other chances in life remain when I begin to say yes?

Leaving in three days

Today and tomorrow I will be travelling across the UK by train, reading books and enjoying the company of my mum as we go.

Reading and being and enjoying that company will be remembered. 

4 days until I depart

And so in four days I will depart this country for life anew.

When I left university I discovered a vital metaphor for balance. Either side of the middle line screams freedom.

I saw the middle line of life as a balancing act. It is an arbitrary walk between two potential extremes:

a) One side is individualism, the satisfying of instinct and indulging in satiation. It is aiming for artistic endeavour, the abstract and the universal. 
b) The other side is communalism, the completion of duty and satisfying society. It is aiming for a career of worth, the situated and the specific.

Both sides are in themselves not enough. An artistic life can lack connection. A communal life can be crushing.

The metaphor has not served me well. I look now, at 38, back towards the ancients. Life cannot be general. It needs to be situated.

This summer I have seen many friends old and new. The provincial welcome I enjoyed in the North of England was revitalising. I felt some of the old tensions of small towns. The passing fortitude of a few was appreciated, their ambition in the face of relaxed satisfaction still burnt. 

My family was great to meet. For three days a garden party ran. People behaved themselves and tolerated misbehaviour. For a family such as mine it was enriching to be with people in such a way, with love and warmth and occasional rants.

I have seen two of my pals. Both reflect my lifestyle and friendships over the decades, men who wander the earth as I do. We shared wisdom and love and life. The conversations were easy. And righteously so.

My finances are notable. I have almost secured a passive income. Questions remain over whether I will purchase property, but those questions will be answered in two years. Two years will determine much of my finances. 15-20 of doing what I have been doing already, teaching internationally, will be me well and right.

I have walked for most days for over two weeks. I have lost two pounds which is 1kg. My cardio and my leg strength has improved. Constant movement for the next year is needed. I am confident I can reclaim my body. That was not always possible in the misty past. Sacrifices were made to secure some finances.

I sold a lifetime of miniatures for two thousand pounds. That is not terrible. It is not great either. It is about a thousand pounds undervalued. However, it also clears out my mother's garage, something necessary. It also scrubs a little more my mark upon this world.

And so what lists of things do I need to take with me?

Clothes
Work clothes
Socks and underwear
Shoes


Paperwork
Bank cards
Passport
School receipts (in an envelope)
School adminstration


Electronics
Surface pro
Charges etc
Hard drives

Extras
TBC

I think that today is the time to begin to administrate my Wunderlist again. That and writing. Firstly, I spoke with mum and then I am walking for a haircut.

Managing my To-Do List

And so with three days left in the UK I want this: to manage my to-do list, leaving space and time to do the things I need to do.

I should realise that I do not need to leave huge tracts of time.

Working for a good amount of time on a Sunday used to be my...
Planning the content rather than the lesson is...
Taking time to socialise changes the brain...

Reading and moving...

I need to rename my lists.
Mr Reliable... stuff I have to do?
Meat Skeleton - Stuff for me?
A richer life - stuff I'd like to do?

Even just two lists is ideal.
Mr Reliable
A Richer Me

I also have:

Passive - Open List (for items that I could do)
Someday List (if I have free time!)

And so I am down to a minimal number of things to do. It would be interesting to see how my to-do list functions in my new place. I expect to be less busy. My mind might be able to focus on more of my own thing.

This renaming of the lists works.

Consuming Books

I want to consume books today. Next door sit five books that I want to rip and scan. Scanning might be tricky, but reading them is the hard part!

I then want to read essays. One a day. I want the rhythm of the voices to resonate within me.

Updating my website to express my new ambitions is next.

My website should promote teaching powerful knowledge. It needs to be situated in my experience as an international teacher. Provocative articles will be read more widely. Resources that I create can be happily sold. The social media aspect is next.

Its design needs to be updated. I think a splash page and then what? The division between school and life might be kept.

Design
How to update
Political arguments - what is framed
How to sell things and books and resources

These things cannot be considered if I am merely sat, slumped musings do not find clarity. 

Unusual relationships and lifestyles attract me.

Unusual relationships and lifestyles attract me. I have proved myself in many times. Today I have lost some of my fear. That fear will return in different ways, without doubt.

I need to embrace unusual relationships and lifestyles. This does not necessarily mean to marry. It does mean that if I have some social movements in these groups then I could be a bit happier than I am now.

A great colleague and mentor here speak about how his wife, and by extension all decent women, desire money and luxury.

What partners have I had in the past?

There are a number of women with whom I could have made a life. Like me, none had some magical package of strengths that outweighed my flaws.

I hope to have the clearness of sight to see what I want when I meet her. 

How to deal with types of teachers - pesonality types in the corporate world

I will wake up soon back in the UK with no need to return to the past. An echo of how others have been treated impacts me even now. Degraded with spurious feedback, being told to follow PowerPoints, hearing physically offensive comments in a professional sphere - these unprofessional and cruel attacks on others demean us all. I feel compelled to muster a response. To do this I will stoke some of the slag that sticks in my memory before sallying forth a more pious interpretation of their actions.

I have seen terrible weakness in my immediate leaders. I will address these in turn:

1) Type One: She embraces low culture, boasting about supposedly being in debt despite earning 100k a year and recently selling a 400k house. She refuses to read and frames our discipline in the language of commerce and the adult-needs model. She is not entirely stupid and recognises the artefacts of reading and writing. She claims to want to know the good practice of other places but shuts down such conversations in meetings formal or otherwise. She abuses immediate leaders with cruel and capricious comments.

2) Type Two: Lazy and quite stupid, she sees herself as brutally honest yet a secret hippy. She is capricious in her choices, blocking and removing people from positions on the basis of personal relationships. She failed to secure a job in a series of other schools thanks to her lack of cultural capital and inability to read literature. Perhaps she will make choices to leave teaching but until that moment she will continue as she is, damaging others in that mission.

3) Type Three: Childish with a loose tongue, nothing you say to her will be private for long. Surprisingly gained high grades at GCSE and A-Level, but stopped learning after university. Her childhood was bereft of culture and support and she yearns for a partner and close friends. Continually she denigrates the bosses and is smashed down in turn. She has damaged morale with her contentious gossiping. Many jobs have turned her down due to her uneducated vernacular and ill-formed philosophies of education. Most damningly, she shuts down intellectual conversations.

4) Type Four: A cute woman with a soft manner, she is dangerously efficient and perniciously ineffectual. Selected by Type One, she is likely a vegan. She has planned the kind of curriculum you would expect someone who sees English as depoliticised linguistics. Not as terrible as the rest, but fails to address or counteract their weaknesses.

5) Type Five: Machiavellian and perhaps insane, she derides her husband in public. Most happy stoking conflict in a team, she plans lessons with inane PowerPoint templates. Becomes an outsider herself.

6) Type Six: A 'here's the lesson, take it or leave it' teacher. Believes that emotional investment or responsiveness in the job is unprofessional at best and laughable at worst. Unlikely to change.

If I was to deal with such unprofessional and difficult colleagues in the future, I think that elements of NVC might be useful. All these types seem internally coherent in way. I do not think that see themselves as inherently evil. What would I say to them if there was a better person to mediate? In Type One, maybe we see a teacher who wants to impress an overachieving father. In Type 2 we see someone who wants a best friend and a boyfriend. In Type 3 we see a lost and barren teacher who might be suffering from the brutal mistreatment of the heart by a callous ex. In Type 4 we see a glass-woman, insubstantial yet maybe aware of her cultural dearth. In Type Five we see a person who responds to past bullying with the rules that make sense to her. In Type Six, we see someone who struggles with notions of pride. Perhaps in hearing their vulnerabilities, my ire would quieten.

What is important is this - while my mind flashes to these types of people and a spike of rage is felt, their immediate absence is a bonus. I seek instead people who operate in less spiteful terms, people who offer positive action. This act of creating instances of human interaction is better than the negation of those above. Since the brunch of the first year, I struggled with socialising. After Canada, I was better and felt happy to meet and connect with people more freely. I remember the absolute fear I had meeting the writing group - I stepped through those golden doors and spoke and wrote.

It is time for better from me from 2019 August.

Just saying my reasons to these people should be enough. Even if I crushed them or reconciled myself to them, the position for me would not particularly change.

If I was to situate my response and seek to apply NVC methods, what would I want these people to do? Would I want these people to apologise? Would I want him to send me a single message? Would I want there to be a change in attitude in them too? Are they not welcome to their attitude as they choose? As each of these possibilities is mentioned, they seem to melt in relevance. They do not impact my daily life. Their happiness or sadness is too distant to impact me either way. If I was to choose, it would be for them to be happy.

Nothing in this is tragic. There is no nobility in these people that I can see. They are not archetypes who strive for any kind of moral goodness. They are middle-of-the-roaders who have shifted into a dangerous lane. And the world in which they operate is not one that deserves my passion.

Knowing that leaves them in the tavern as I travel outside a dusty road.

Self-Esteem is a peculiar navigator

Self-esteem is an unusual word for how we move in the world. It is a capricious navigator.

I am two weeks into my time in the UK. Unlike past holidays I have seen people each day. Within the spaces around those connections, I have read and planned and thought. Each day I wake up at eight thirty at the latest. For two days I have walked well, read and thought well, and cast the net of my future into the dark winds outside my mind.

It is time to recount the poem of my youth:

All awareness is accepted in these halls of thought
Grand Tradition stands sure and fortifies the door
While youthful lusts endeavour a roomy infinite within

Yet outside these walls
Lies Utter
And all windows hope for a glimpse of hell

For decades this poem carried the flag of my mind. That psychology and the modern mind traps you within clever constructs. The formless terror of that which we must trust lies outside ourselves, unverifiable and potentially dangerous. Conventional relationships, marriage and mortgages, demand fatal commitments that we cannot escape.

Moving and living overseas is a method of being beyond the hearth of these modern constructs. Living in Scarborough was an incubation. People were friendly if a little parochial. The best of Scarborough seduced you into the majestic heights of its hungry valley, Italian gardens and fingers of trees stubbled the surface of Scarborough heights. I often stood on the beach of South Bay witnessing the infinite rolling of the waves. The world would eventually die but only many billions of years after my bones had melted into the dust of the stars.

The Ancients believed in the horrors of the unknown too. Their Gods would rape and desecrate at wanton will, driving via desire the destructive events of Ancient lives. What they call their Gods we call our conscience.

At this age of thirty-seven I find myself standing with worthy potential. The spirit of me is as real as these finger-tapping words. The meat skeleton it rides is not one I would choose. I would be taller and stronger, healthier and easier. But it will do. I have managed in the lonely corporate wastes of Dubai to educate myself, a proud training in the humanities. I watched people of limited capacity achieve positions in the last school I worked. And fair play to them. Why should they not nurture ambition?

My ambitions in my new places are clear: be with people to the extent and richness that I am capable; support and establish public celebrations of academic ambition; nurture financial and future security. These are simple ambitions, remarkably generic in their vision but brightly guiding my behaviour.

My conduct over time does not reflect my worth. I have limited my socialising to smaller groups and with smaller ambition. But I have not wasted my time entirely. I emerge from the sands as a man of better intellect with a spirit that can range the historical framework of modern and ancient times.

Ideas like momentum and ambition, family and love have been problematic. Reading history is to hear a voice; writing and speaking is to forge a voice.

Read and speak and write. Socialise and publish and love. These verbs are active and this life is finite.

I feel that I want to tell some of the people immediately around me that I despise at least or even disdain what they stand for

I feel that I want to tell some of the people immediately around me that I despise at least or even disdain what they stand for. Surely, in response, I could just express proactive values.

Be kind to new staff. That is needed for everyone. Enshrine the rule so that looking after newbies is important. See newbies as people that need to be challenged, yes. Where does the challenge stop though? What is it to make someone prove themselves and what is it to try to break them? And by break, I mean to make them flee the school.

This school is capricious and cruel, or at least those immediately above me are. They view themselves as being solid amongst themselves.

I am seen as someone who tries to make the management of things difficult. That I overcomplicate things. That things that should be easy to manage become difficult.

I need to dedicate my mind to things worth dedication.

The Focus of a Day: One Month Left

And so I have woken up at a decent enough time. My mind is feeling sharper than it has done for a long time. Having been in charge of a curriculum from inception to completion, taking responsibility for question choices and entry, moderating and sending away coursework, I sit here near the end with profound professional satisfaction.

Several emails and presents from students have proved to be wonderfully vindicating with my dedication and expertise both praised and appreciated.

So I have almost secured podcasts for several years' worth of study and though. I have good walking boots. And I am pretty much ready to leave this place.

The day will be framed with:

9am - Dubizzle, selling and organising stuff.
10am - Writing
11am - Cleaning stuff, Go to School for a Touch of Marking
12pm be around in order to secure the

All these things are procedural. The spirit of the day is not in this list.

Motivation To Educate Myself in the Humanities

My current colleagues inspire me to want to educate myself because they are so purposefully ignorant. The dearth of conversation from the top three is especially galling. In response, I want to raise the foundations of my intellectual palace. The Halls of Thought that once guided my life is a broken metaphor. It nullifies exploration. It suggests that a way to live and be is to fear outside. That outside me is broken and threatening, tedious and wrong.

The framework I speak of is to embrace an aspect worth taking to face the world. It is all the arts and philosophy. It combines all the authors and thoughts and ideas that I want to consider.

I am trying to make a podcast curriculum for myself that can be combined with a school curriculum. But, more importantly, it can be used to enrich the persona that walks in the world. It is a guide that might let me either walk with more confidence or at least begin some more interesting walks full-stop.

I want to connect the podcasts with wider tasks. I think writing on my blog would be really quite interesting. And perhaps essential. I should also combine it with walking.

Someone who is good at rugby and teaches business studies complained about academic snobbery. Seeing certain subjects as more desirable depending on the paths you want to take is true. It is disingenuous to match all subjects together. If students want to take the humanities at an elite university or medicine, it is professionally deficient to say that all subjects are fine.

Snobbery suggests that to delineate is inappropriate. To not share the ongoing conversation between subjects smacks more of making business studies teachers feel better than actually helping students.

What the IB attempts to do between the subjects is to make connections between these subjects. It compels the learning of a judicious range and (hopefully) for people to make connections between those subjects.

Discipline and diet

Discipline and diet – I am happy with what I’ve done. Two days lost in a row doesn’t need to be many days lost. Get back on when we can. Moderation in all things, including moderation. Although it seems that my diet fluctuations connect with my social connections. More loneliness leads to worse eating. Two beers and an icecream… 1500 calories! Should I consider the relationship between my present self and my future self?

It seems difficult to consider the extent to which I will resist pleasure. Food and drink…

Since Ramadan I have only eaten under the calorie count 4 times in 11 days. What is going on with that? I thought I was at least half. It is interesting to track this.

Last night I drank three glass of wine and felt myself literally warm up. I wanted to drink more. This time, at 6am, I am glad I did not drink so heavily. Too many times I have done that, especially on a school night. It is really an exploit of my future self. Instead, I ate ice cream. That was a way of enjoying the present at the expense of my future self. Food is something of a safe moderation…

Women and other things are enjoyable. Desire needs to be experienced. Order and nothing else is not enough. It can be crushing.

Again, I find myself eating an entire meal again later. What is going on with my discipline? I need to acknowledge that these desires need to be sated somewhat. In fact, I think I need to address desire full-stop…

Again, I write this later, my diet and discipline are quite weak. I am eating a large amount of icecream.

And so... at least even attempting to eat on a diet is useful. Last night I felt tremendously bored... but then I wake up today not feeling quite so disdainful. My diet fits around other stuff, including whether I have taken the time to see people or not. 

I reread some of the emails I sent and read this time last year.

I reread some of the emails I sent and read this time last year. I suffered the tedious machinations of my foolish immediate managers, and the ire of an especially disappointing colleague.

When I was in those moments where I suffered their bickerings, rebellion seemed unlikely. They drained my energies, mental and spiritual. And any rebellion would not seem to change deep-set values that they have about being in Dubai and being in teaching.

One teacher, in particular, is my boss. I offered her the chance of writing a blog. I would set her up with blogspot.com, maybe even Wix. I would not give her more. But after some exchanges with her friend – a cruel man who has cheated on multiple women – she has ignored several of my messages.

I think of how she might be if she moved to Thailand or became entrepreneurial. Her parents offer her a deposit to be more than she is: to have a house. Of course, this might be a real issue. A real issue. It would involve challenging her vacuous nature. Her ‘secret hippy’ identity is very secret indeed. And her burnt out experiences… I want her to heal from that, but these eyes are in my skull. She is again being remarkably cruel – ignoring me and ready to undermine me. She lacks, and my lacking means I am unable to fill her lacking. She responds with cruelty and laziness. And she chooses around her women who are lazy and unable as well. It is a strange and weird environment.

I do not really believe what I thought a month ago – that I was grateful for how I was protected from this horrible woman. No-one protected me. Those fuckers! I realised the need for my own boundaries. I became organised and really understood how to put a curriculum together. Would I have worked hard if I was simply given a position and gentle prodding? I felt as if I was fighting for my intellectual life.

And this side of things? I feel that I have gained a level of understanding and organisation that is a happy minimum, in that it is quite good. It seems fairly objective now that many of these colleagues, especially the painful ones, are unable and dangerously…

I reread some of the emails again from the tedious woman. Constant and difficult challenging of trying to fix a curriculum. Wants to be ‘bring in the fold’ other teachers, but defensive and aggressive in response to requests for clarification of what she thinks has been decided. Repeated assertions that she has lots to give and much experience underscore a profound belief that she does not have either.

I was unprotected by Sophia, Charlotte and Marie. For that, they are who they are. I survived this, and I am stronger.

After that Year 13 exam, I will be stronger. I will have taken responsibility for the most important terminal exams, managing staff to some degree.

Telling people that I am leaving and owning it.

A few weeks ago I decided to tell people that I was leaving. There are two worries in my place:

a) That telling students I will leave dislocates me and leads to a worse experience.
b) Being present at the beginning or end of exams will lead to undue stress for me and the students.

Both of these are perhaps based upon assumptions that do not seem to hold out. Last year I was present before and after each exam and the students seemed to appreciate it. My stress levels were not overwhelming. For the second point, I told students that I was leaving recently and the reaction was sweet rather than devastating.

I read my blog over the past two years. I will read my blog to see what this was like over the past years. I intend to tell my students on Sunday, now that the Year 13s and Year 11s have gone. I will tell my students that I’m going to Asia and I will do it in as low a key a way as possible.

I read my diaries and it is literally on this date in May 2013 that I told folks that I would leave.

At the heart of it, I spoke about the need to see elements of life immediately beyond your face.

Unlike in my UK school, I do not sense any community here. I feel embarrassed to be part of Dubai. I cannot help but feel that those who choose to come here are terribly exploitative. Lifecoaches and Dubai…

For some reason, I do not wish to give my heart to this place like I did for my students in Scarborough. I will see what happens. Likely I will say that I’m leaving the Middle East at the end of the year, and everything will be sorted out for their administration. I’m going to South East Asia.

And so I told people today. I know there was some disappointment but I handled it well. Here there is not the heart as we might see in other places. Instead it was a fairly functional process. That depicts my experience here, largely.

How to frame my time here in Dubai

I spoke with a Phillipino family recently about moving my furniture. When they asked me why I was moving, I responded with aggressive vitriol, largely about my colleagues. The behaviour of my colleagues justifies such comments since just today the assistant head again tried to engage me in conversation about 'Ting Tongs'. She asked me what I called Filipinos; I said that I am not sure that I did call them anything. This is the tone of my environment now.

But to spend my time talking about this seems a waste of what I could be doing. And worse than that, my negativity of this place will rightly poison how others think of me.

How do I frame my time here in Dubai – what do I speak about? The colleagues? My ex? The difficult politicising of my closest colleagues? How does that come across? What is true?

I was reading recently an interesting book about small-talk. Its premise was rather dark, that small-talk functions on in-groups and out-groups. The desire to ignore this is only doing that - it ignores the concept. It does not deal with the dangerous inclination to form outgroups. Indeed, the thinker himself can be challenged and ostracised. Even thinking of this, I struggle to truly care and connecting through divergence, preferring instead to match myself through apt convergence the new people I will soon meet.

Will I be well-matched the people I will soon meet? Today I stood for a few moments and watched a privileged and effeminate chat in passing with an orderly and Northern colleague. Regardless of the differences on paper and in my perception, I witnessed the dynamic of these men in passing. It reminded me of my loneliness her. I am certainly too lonely here, and my lack of time with other people affects, I think, my reading and my eating in general.

A few friends and a good companion is all I need. In lieu of that, I need to reorganise how I spend my time in this place.

I do not say yes to enough things. Saying yes to things that perhaps do not interest me is a reasonably good idea, I think. I do not do this enough. I frame that time as wasteful, somewhat. And why? I should make more of a proactive effort to socialise on my terms.

I find it boring to see certain people here. Will I find the same in Manila? It will be different. That is all.

Just taking the time to see people. To create some momentum in doing so.

I really need to consider what kind of life I want mid-week. I think that doing things mid-week is necessary for a better life than I have now.

The quietness of Ramadan offers me time and space to do more. But instead I do little. I have sought easy times. The problem also comes that after the day has ended I just want to retreat to my room… or at least that is my habit. I need to instead do something else. Drive somewhere else. I don’t know where. Perhaps a podcast and driving will help me… walking and podcasts certainly will… More movement and more speaking will help.

If I was to treat myself better, what would I do?

If I was to treat myself better, what would I do? I both like and dislike my present, past and future selves. I spoke with Aisha Saeed about this today. It was clear she has set situated goals to look after herself.

I do not necessarily need to ‘date’ myself to find a better way of treating myself.

What would I do if I had a partner who was willing to treat herself and me? What adventures would I lead? What nourishment would I seek?

This is a useful question for today. It is a question about self-worth.

Last night felt really difficult before I went to sleep. I wanted to eat ice-cream and to compromise my fitness (even more than it is now). I could not sleep easily. In fact, since writing this I have often compromised myself due to tiredness.

Writing more in my blogs, especially framing how I have seen my time here, would make me happier.

Walking and listening to podcasts more would be interesting.

Travelling by the heart, deciding where to go by the heart... that is part of my travelling...
Planning every last fibre of my travelling hurts my heart. It is not how I choose to operate.

I think that gaming and playing is something I want to do more of. Attending conferences and similar would be interesting.

If I start a family then my ambitions would change. But that is something that could very well not happen.

TWE is it inappropriate to be passionate about teaching?

To what extent is it inappropriate to be passionate about teaching? What do I call passion in what I do? How might what I am calling passion be seen by others? How has my approach really been received in this place I am in now? Tell me…

I remember first working in Scarborough how...

My first forays into teaching were tempered by my artistic endeavours and the realities of living in a deprived North-English town.

I was passionate about writing, and less so about history and reading. Such an approach reflected my educated to that point, something that my learning since has revealed and reframed.

I taught in a small yet 'Outstanding' coastal town in Yorkshire. Those were great years. I did not teach Sixth Form, and that is something I have rectified over the previous five years or so. But my pedagogy and practice developed, and my classroom manner. I was passionate about my subject, and the Catholic and spiritual element allowed me to treat the classroom as much than just exams.

When I moved to China, I openly spoke of my desire to deliver the best education in the world. My leaders spoke to same. I spoke about the school being the 'Best School Beijing'. I recognise now how that must have come across to some. There were a range of teachers with different ambitions and experiences. All wanted to do well, but passion to be 'the best' was reframed as something. Annoying?

When I moved to Dubai, I actually engaged in conversations about passion. Every person who had worked for my immediate boss had left (some after open contention against the limited and procedural curriculum established). I recognised some of my previous practice could be useful. I was actually told to 'calm things down' in such conversations. On three distinct occasions I was told to stop talking about work. I think that talking about administration over lunch or instigating contentious conversation during preparation periods is unbecoming at best and annoying at worst. But my conversations were about the texts I was teaching and engaging with the pedagogy of what we were doing.

I am now due to work in a new school in Manila. I do not think that everyone will share my education or approaches. I think that there will be some who are quite happy with their philosophy and will be busy with family and the necessary procedures of schooling. So holding a mirror to myself, I will use this website as I did originally: for an ongoing conversation and reflection about what I am doing and why.

One philosophy that I increasingly find abhorrent and ill-fitting for education is the management approach. The thought necessary for the humanities is difficult, messy, specific and human. It requires specific and situated understanding.

When managing large departments, complexity is the enemy. Uncertainty and nuance destroy systems. Reductionism is king. If we combine this with other philosophies of aiming at a hidden middle and ensuring that pedagogy is only enacted if everyone can measure such action, then we have a place where my presence is ill-suited.

Planning a lesson for interview - revealing a the philosophy of teaching and learning

These past few years I have both seen and delivered a number of interview lessons. I believe these lessons reflect the philosophy of the observer as much as they do the capability of the teacher. The stakes for an interview lesson are high: will you be given a job? Or as an observer, can you judge that that teacher's wider operation? These outcomes are pragmatically important but also reflect more profound approaches to the profession. So with this tension in mind, here are some of the ways I think about interview lessons:

1) Firstly, interview lessons reveal how people frame the subject.

As a literature/English teacher, the subject can be put together in many ways. Brian Cox's Report in the 80s gave five distinct ways to consider the purpose of the English classroom. These are listed below:

The role of English in the curriculum
2.20 It is possible to identify within the English teaching profession a number of different views of the subject. We list them here, though we stress that they are not the only possible views, they are not sharply distinguishable, and they are certainly not mutually exclusive.
2.21 A "personal growth" view focuses on the child: it emphasises the relationship between language and learning in the individual child, and the role of literature in developing children's imaginative and aesthetic lives.
2.22 A "cross-curricular" view focuses on the school: it emphasises that all teachers (of English and of other subjects) have a responsibility to help children with the language demands of different subjects on the school curriculum: otherwise areas of the curriculum may be closed to them. In England, English is different from other school subjects, in that it is both a subject and a medium of instruction for other subjects.
2.23 An "adult needs" view focuses on communication outside the school: it emphasises the responsibility of English teachers to prepare children for the language demands of adult life, including the workplace, in a fast-changing world. Children need to learn to deal with the day-to-day demands of spoken language and of print; they also need to be able to write clearly, appropriately and effectively.
2.24 A "cultural heritage" view emphasises the responsibility of schools to lead children to an appreciation of those works of literature that have been widely regarded as amongst the finest in the language.

2.25 A "cultural analysis" view emphasises the role of English in helping children towards a critical understanding of the world and cultural environment in which they live. Children should know about the processes by which meanings are conveyed, and about the ways in which print and other media carry values.

http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/cox1989/cox89.html

At this time my Key Stage 5 curriculum concentrates on a cultural heritage model. Frye famed literature as a discipline balanced between history and philosophy. Literature gets its best ideas from philosophy whilst the cultural framework from which to contextualise its work must be historical. Moving my practice into an IB curriculum next year, a cultural-analysis model is needed whereby ancient and humanist ideals are tested against the power of advertising and social media.

An adult-needs model is essential; without exam and occupational success, no-one gets paid. Yet it is also the most ineffective and unimaginative framework for a curriculum. If students are repeatedly reading the same texts in a curriculum, or if they approach texts via 'question 3' or other such deadly methods, then much is being missed.

The adult-needs model seems to be matched to an English 'language' curriculum. But the idea that an English teacher can be solely a 'language' teacher does not really sit well with me. To be a linguist surely requires the understanding of several languages on a meta-level. That meta-understanding moves beyond social commentary on contemporary 'gendered' or 'power-based' language use and instead tackles wider corpus-based issues. To be a linguist also surely requires a tremendous understanding of politics and cultural-historical events in order to frame how language has developed amongst varied demographics.

Within these political and socio-historical frameworks exist forms of literature that attempt to interact with those social events. Language in such works is not functional but rather adventurous and magical. They challenge prescriptivist approaches. Language in, say, Nabakov attempts to unpick the limits of perception and to tease us with the attraction of aesthetic magnificence and unsettle us with moral questions. Such works reflect wider social ideas of challenging social norms and an increasing relativism in received morality. To not understand or even ignore the range of literary texts is a deficiency as an English teacher.

2) Secondly, how do people (especially teachers) approach learning? Is it something limited to that which can be ratified? Is learning something where difficulty been embraced and failure faced? Has personal time and money been invested in continued education? Is reading a regular habit?

Teachers who have not enjoyed teaching themselves must, I think, find it hard to make learning enjoyable for others. Such teachers are perhaps in education because it is a job. That is still an acceptable notion for there are not enough people in any profession to run that profession if we are to demand vocation. But such teachers are limited in the vision and management of their classroom. Without having experienced enjoyment of learning in themselves, how can they encourage an enjoyment in learning in others?

Firstly, let's consider how the teacher approaches the interview lesson. Are they planning a bunch of tasks? Are they selecting the tasks as interesting in themselves? Or are they treating the thoughts and ideas in themselves worth knowing? What are they trying to get the learner to understand?

For me a lesson needs to start with the ideas and implications themselves. Such ideas need to be contextualised within their ancient or at least original context. Immediate and contemporary relevance should also be found and threads found between the two. Tensions and problematisations should be identified. For example, I recently taught a lesson on 'Rising Five' by Norman Nicholson Understanding that Rising Five refers to the urgency for public success and a prioritising of rationality over sensibility activates some of its tensions. Situating the poem within the lived reality of a UK government placing children in school early, with teachers then judging those students on against more developmentally advanced peers, makes it real and relevant. Political and social questions can be raised and expectations activated.

But there is more than this. Understanding the poet's life - of his relative poverty and cynicism about institutions - allows us to consider his message, of how we should recognise his bias and reveal where he has made choices.

From this the approach of the poet can be considered in the frameworks of our own perceptions.

We can do this by bringing such questions and choices into the public discourse of our classroom. Relevance is challenged and provocative questions are raised and explored. Maybe the necessity of placing 'Rising Five' students in schools early needs to be understood within the reality of the mass-schooling system. Are there not yet feasible alternatives to place people in school at a time personalised to them? Where else do we make necessary social compromises?

After such content has been understood, questions and concrete metaphors can be formed and framed. These questions do not need to be presented in a linear fashion, but rather responsively to the perceived frameworks of the class's critical and cultural understanding. The tasks, therefore, can be largely presented as a series of questions debated publicly and leading to the consideration and engagement to difficult and real knowledge. There needs to be excitement and thought, but this excitement and thought needs to be as close to the conceptual origins of the text as possible. Engagement should become social and constructivist, with the management of the social dynamics of the class harnessed to access the content in its purest and most difficult forms. Personalisation should exist at the level of where the students engage with the knowledge, with simplified and more fundamental considerations possible for those less able. Such personalisation should look primarily towards the most-able and passionate, with extensions of lectures and books that drive such ideas without limit. We are talking Massolit and Yale Lectures and David Lodge books for all.

In comparison to this approach, I have seen lessons taught and planned that reflect a task-based approach. One interview lesson I saw aimed to excite students about Romeo and Juliet. Rather than foregrounding the tensions between desire and obligation, between parents and children, into the classroom discourse, a choice was made to employ funky and novel tasks. Artefacts in an interview lesson - such as writing ideas onto plates to make Venn diagrams - make me a little suspicious (although in themselves are not defunct).

Another choice made in a lesson was to compare the Shakespearean text to a contemporary pop star. The comparison was only possible on the basis of figurative language being present. Knowledge of iambic pentameter, or of Renaissance stagecraft, or of the patterning of classical and religious allusions would surely be more appropriate choices. Students might complete a task by filling in a table or interacting with an artefact, but are they thinking about something useful for their knowledge of drama and poetry, Renaissance or otherwise? And if not then, then when?

When teachers overemphasise the tasks they plan, believing that they have an 'outstanding' interview lesson to wheel out for observers, I am suspicious. Such lessons can be visually impressive and students can be happy and excited. A naive observer will be impressed. Yet are the students actually thinking? Don’t get me wrong – students need to be excited in their learning at many points. But such excitement should exist as close as possible to the ideals and scholarship of academia itself. Such excitement perhaps starts with the teacher’s experience. Maybe those who find the concept of Renaissance drama or Victorian Fiction tedious are themselves rather boring, especially if they express it.

3) How should an approach to a literature curriculum be considered?

I believe that literature as a discipline sits between history and philosophy. It must be recognised that literature reflects the concerns of the elite but should be understood by everyone.

Literature, especially pre-modern literature, can be challenging to the non-selective cohort. Modern populations more worried about personal success or urban survival might be less enthralled by complications of how wider society can be better organised. The forces of neoliberalism prize the newness of things and by implication their separation from what has come before, as if something being separate from the past is itself an innate virtue. I know myself that my university lecturers promoted post-structuralism as the best approach to analysing literature, perhaps knowing that a historicist approach to literature would alienate too many of the cohort.

But literature must be taught to everyone regardless of the historicist knowledge and context of that context. Any other approach is culturally, and perhaps morally, deficient.

Such a digital declaration of pedagogy is not enough, though. Young people of non-selective cohorts can suffer particular deficiencies of cultural knowledge of elite society, not to mention difficulties of formal literacy and reading stamina. To realistically learn literature in a mixed ability classroom requires compromises in the same way that to train elite footballers requires a different approach than mediocre athletes like myself. Therefore, as I will say elsewhere, I believe approaches based on both genre-expectations and text-world theory to be particularly useful in engaging all cohorts, including non-selective ones.

There are three text types when teaching literature according to conventional exams: novels, plays and poetry.

Over 15 years it has become most apparent that students will approach each text-type as indistinct, noticing only the ideas and context of the text and its aesthetic ambitions. This is a disservice, but one enforced by how sold schemes of work are put together by various bodies, both official and private.

I believe that a curriculum needs to openly teach narratology, with various choices emphasised and worked within. Within narratology, students simply identify figurative language and word order in isolation. Responses then become limited to responding to these fragmented examples.

A curriculum also, I think, needs to teach stagecraft. Teaching drama as dead words on the page is deficient. Acting choices need to be made explicit. Drama itself should be framed as conflict, with conflicting motivations and Stanislavskian ideals foregrounded for all students. Understanding how characters suffer conflicting motivations makes a Shakespeare recital far more interesting than just hearing difficult words and allusions tumble out breathlessly.

Finally, a curriculum needs to teach prosody. I have never been formally taught this, perhaps because teachers themselves have been undertaught it. I have achieved first class marks and straight As when analysing poetry without referring to choices of form.

At a recent CPD even I heard a teacher and Head of Department exclaim, without irony, that another school's encouragement of students to write poetry was naive and pointless because such a task is not directly on an exam. This comment was not even a troll as it was apparent this teacher believed their point of view was sensible and dominant, a status quo. In fact, they believe the other school needed to ‘sort out its curriculum’ because their approach was wasteful and pointless and indulged in personal growth in precious classroom time.

I could only challenge that teacher with an assertion to the contrary.

Firstly, to be able to analyse poetry for an exam requires identification of prosody. Attempting to write poetry fosters a sense, and perhaps an understanding, of meter and rhyme. Such practice, shared with by the teacher allows us to also appreciate the length of syllables, of how they often contrast stress, and how they might be matched against meaning. This is difficult.

Such appreciation of the difficulty of matching meter to meaning encourages aesthetic appreciation by the students. Aesthetic appreciation through the process of creation is part of the power and interest in the subject - writing choices are not always made consciously, and joining literary traditions, no matter how clumsy or childish the attempt, fosters an appreciation for literature's position amongst the disciplines.

Presenting poetry as something to pass solely for exams or assessments would fail in even attempting that base aim.

That a teacher believed it wasn’t farcical to critique a curriculum that required the writing of poetry is beyond my expectations. I can only think that it is because their perceived purpose of schooling is to pass exams. And that they presume that writing poetry is unimpactful on passing exams.

4) How to revise literature for exams.

The new AQA exam has a tremendous emphasis on the memorisation of quotations. I also saw teachers chanting quotations with students. Again, quotations without context, quotations without reference.

Some colleagues here have expressed awareness that quotes etc need to known in context. But they don’t have pedagogy or other ideals for this. Their own knowledge of texts is deficient: I saw them set a character log task over several weeks that saw underdeveloped and naive recordings of texts created.

A reading diet when my phone and loneliness impinges – how to read?

A reading diet when my phone and loneliness impinges – how to read? What do I want to read? Shall I set a reading expectation? A reading habit? I have some good time in the evening, three days of Ramadan now seems to promise a lot. I feel that I might plan a reading schedule.

I have been reading much better in Ramadan. My job does seem to take my mind. And I do not feel inspired by my colleagues.

A reading diet needs to be nurtured. Phones and tiredness of being in my crappy little flat will not help a reading diet. The internet being on this computer does not help. Rather then my mind wondering into apt valleys, it instead is seized by the temptations of playing a game. Well.. just one!

And after that game? Do not continue. Realise that there is a time and a habit to do these things.

I am finding the reading especially difficult at home. Without the desire to escape from others, then what? Then reading might become tricky.
There is also the desire to write a character and to see how people might react. I actually have way too much order, or at least solitude in my life.

My thoughts about lifecoaching and what it is to live a good life.

My thoughts about lifecoaching and what it is to live a good life. The guiding force of capitalism and neoliberalism is almost irresistible – they offer a moral justification for those who wish to make money etc. It is exciting. Advertising used to sell ideas, not just making money for its own purposes.

Lifecoaching attempts to decide what it is to live a good life. But those who do so charge huge amounts of cash. There is also a link between the purchasing of property and the morality underpinning it, too.

Lifecoaching also ignores thousands of years of thought regarding what it is to live a good life. It is a dislocated philosophy.

One chap who visited our school derided the students, aggressively demanding that they would cheer for his selfie. He said how he used to own nightclubs but now he thought that was vacuous. He mentioned the first part for a long time.

The narrative of lifecoaches is one of where they invest in a guru elsewhere, sometimes at great expense when they risk lots of money taking a course.

There is a disingenuous disclaimer in lifecoachers. The emphasis is entirely on the person for not trying hard enough or similar. Neoliberal freedom. Playing on people’s dreams.

Needing to find wider social groups that relate to reading and writing.

Needing to find wider social groups that relate to reading and writing. I cannot rely upon teachers and colleagues for this. Instead I need to consider making these kind of groups myself.

These groups can possibly exist online. Although if I am being honest, the FB groups are not really my thing. I want something a bit more substantial… again I perhaps need to make myself.

I think I should create some of these groups, even in Manila.

Meeting a wider range of people would surely be enriching.

Now Ramadan and time to read

I am close to the end of my time here now. I have nine weeks left. It is up to the students to prepare for their exams - I have done enough. Those who have worked hardest have the most sympathy for me. Very often, this is those who like the subject most. There are two or three students I can name who are mediocre in their responses.

I leave the Middle East with a clearer sense of what kind of teacher I want to be. Some of the teachers that I admire approach the subject in ways that I would not do myself. My teaching is a peculiar mix of punk responsiveness and intense order. But at least there is a philosophy I can respect.

There is much to disdain here. Children can detect disingenuous BS, we hope.

Two weeks has not seen me read enough. In light of such distractions, I have planned a series of posts that will drive my mind beyond the peopleless and colourless desert. 

Forge your own

Yesterday I drank coffee with someone who simply does not care for the judgement of others. That is how I once lived. I cultivated at university the persona of someone who disdained the marked trappings of popular opinion. I travelled solo. I read my own syllabus. What changed?

Immediately leaving university was a traumatic experience. Occupationally, life in Hull was tough. Spiritually, I found the people I knew drank heavily and read little. I struggled with the intensity of inner-city schooling but I stayed a year. That was a tough time.

It is now that I have some of the words to recognise this. My family suffers from low social capital. My father took to heart the attitudes of higher-class boys against a scholarship lad. He cultivated an ire and self-absorption that affects him even now. My grandparents were not rich or especially educated. My mother was effectively abandoned by her parents, an experience that necessitated a survival mentality.  

My childhood town is deprived. Poor culturally and poor occupationally. It shaped me with the experience of the provinces. The recent success of the football team makes that past interesting and meaningful – that life can be reduced to sporting ambitions. But that is a game.  

Very little of my extended family enjoys occupational success. That is somewhat dramatic – some do, but not in the sense that they can support with creative internships. That operates for so few people.

So it was surprising to me yesterday to meet someone whose narrative spoke of rejecting expected roles and instead forging her own. Her background was religiously and culturally dominant. She was expected to follow a marriage and to subvert all occupational expectancy within that. Her subversion of that role was met with opposition from her family – they wondered what others would think of them.

There is something peculiar about religious expectation. It is tremendously hard to oppose. It holds an authority that is hard to usurp. It is the authority of the inner-life. We do not want a inner-life more damaged or unhealthy than we must suffer. Yet this is more complex than simply aiming to remain untouched and innocent. Living in a cult might create that experience. Instead, the desire to be ‘good’ or to be ‘pure’ is actually one that Boris Johnson et al do not appear to need. That upper echelon of British society provide seemingly very little example of decorum or virtue.

How good could life be if things were in order? That is Peterson. Is that disingenuous statement? He seems a disingenuous person. Move beyond ‘good’ and ‘pure’ I think. How about finding ‘order’ and ‘chaos’? When should we understand and accept the chaos that the human spirit craves so much? And when and how to accept the chaos that other people desire too? Maybe allowing other people that desire to establish their own fields of order and chaos… although not always at work?

I cannot always operate within a Wunderlist and a calendar. Only when I establish that order onto others…

My current job in the Middle East is one in which the opinion of others is more than a passing consideration - it is one frames survival. My place only has 84 days left, 24 until Ramadan. But even now I feel vulnerable. That is an echo of how others have been treated. Firing and bullying and the repression of ambition and thought. I am being treated remarkably well in that I am not under threat from the top in my work. But I find those nearest to me scrabbling for position. And key people in high places hold a philosophy of education far different to mine. I prefer mine. I see our tension as one of external order vs internal chaos. Of bagging peas vs growing people. Of crushing procedure vs rude vitality. It is one where the order established is tedious and naïve and far beyond the ambitions of a humanist education.

A humanist education – to be a humanist educator – is an identity that I can live with. To live as a cosmopolitan. To realise where I have come from and to educate myself beyond that. The truth of such a life is that it will annoy a number of people. But what kind of annoyance? And what kind of people? I order my life too much and in a narrow fashion. When I was in Canada I lived better. Here I have suffered some social ire from others that seems to affect me even now. I am tended to think in some dark moments that I want to speak to one man about his comments to me and others. To challenge a ludic dick with a dark past. Yet a cosmopolitan response is what I desire: direct my attention towards a different future.

To be as belligerently self-determined as this woman appears involves sacrifice. It does not indulge the kind of privileged self-consciousness or vacillation that my position has allowed. This woman has achieved some excellent things in theatre. She started a production company and educated herself. Theatre gave her a mode and space of expression beyond the obvious limits of work and family and money. But there is no security in what she does. I have enough security that will be recognised in the new place I will soon visit.

I need to think more about this. And I need to do more within this. And I need to negotiate some order and nourish the necessary chaos of a liberal humanist mind.

Leaving on a positive note

I am writing this at 1:30am on a school night. Sleep comes with difficulty at the moment. Despite having only 113 days left until I leave, and none of the seriously difficult events coming up, I cannot sleep.

I want to end on a positive note. The issues of this place are easy to identify: the issues of myself are easier to notice, less intractable and actually possible to deal with.

As I am in this job for 111 more days, I become more sensitive to those who say they have been abused. Have I suffered too?

What do I need my school for? A professional reference. Having just listened to a lecture on the psychology of Cain and Able, I am considering thoughts about jealousy and how we wish to destroy that which is noble in ourselves. I feel there is some nobility in work. Let me recount for you a lesson I taught yesterday.

Students came into the library both surly and unruly, with one boy repeating my desire for focus in an unduly playful way. In response I delivered an intellectual speech lasting 45 minutes without a breath that seemed to inspire thought and focus. In it I ranged from the questions of school, of why it might be so boring. Students responded and I made people think. The lesson left its mark on me if not these students.

From this story I returned to a moment in the recent past whereby one of my bosses said openly that she did not want mavericks in her department. She said, without irony, that she did not want students wanting to be taught be certain teachers. With the worst kind of socialism (ironic in a neoliberal world), she wanted to pull all teachers down to the worst levels of work expected. I look at the above. I wonder why the irksomeness of this behaviour should be so surprising to me. Surely I should be grateful that I have not met more people too procedural with work.

But what is it to treat people with respect and something better than I experience now?

II. Professionalism in work
A. What is it to treat people?
B. Expectations of how to treat other people
C. NVC and how to express
III. Critiquing via an exit interview
A. What do I really want to improve. There are distinct areas. Anything that relates to staffing... leave.

For too long the focus of my mind been insulated by work

Too much of my blog has become focused on work and machinations of lost people, or rather people lost to me. I am perhaps one of those people or at least I feel I have lost some of the most vital parts of me. Around me now are some are some who do not seem lost. 

I am reading Bear Town, a book about a crime that shakes an insular community who suffer as an economic casualty. It strikes me how a family is pressured to conform in various ways. I detest how Dubai is like this, or rather how I perceive Dubai like this. There is a sense of painful conformity in my peers that grinds in my mind, stuttering fragments of communality embed my past into dangerous shrapnel.  They shut down any conversation about people, ideals, politics, literature, love. But... they have a right to treat teaching as job and to experience full lives outside of the place. I have chosen to reap financial benefits by staying here, and so these complaints lead to one path - a visit back to my youth. 

I spent much of school-time relatively alone. I enjoyed some connection with my peers, but I know now how I was aloof. Some times I wished for a greater connection with others, of a collection of friends who would have gamed and loved and adventured with me. But mostly I just wanted to be in a realm beyond the machinations of Wolverhampton teenagers, of the typical fashions and concerns of a youth insular to me even then. I remember distinctly, and I might have mentioned this before, of one particularly irksome peer asking me if I wanted to walk with his friends. I remember saying 'no', and he responded 'well you can't anyway'. Without guile I expressed appreciation that I would rather work with myself. At this point, at 37, I consider the possibility that they actually wanted me to walk with them because the need for connection and being accepted is strong in everyone, especially young people. 

At this stage, that need for connection is strongest in me. 

Today I feel somewhat better because my reading is at a reasonably strong point. I know that over Xmas my reading dips. I become easily distracted, affected by some spectrum of ADHD. Although not right now, I whittle away my time on chess games and browsing the internet. Such reading takes me beyond the insular and vulnerable relativity that has dragged my leaderless mind for so long. 

Such reading maybe reflects a truth that is growing in me for many years: that my mind is filled with varied personas. Without a goal or guiding path, the dominant version of me will simply be the one that seeks gratification at that particular time. I imagine a kind of theatre-in-the-round, as if I am back in Scarborough. Perhaps better would be a Roman senate, ready to accept rhetorical arguments with decisive, rather than derided or divisive, conclusions. 

I am ready for a new state of mind in a new place. Like taking a spiritual drug, or to embrace a rite of passage, I seek a refocussing of my mind. A profound change. Or rather I seek to be more decisive in the goals I wish to have. And of how my mind might interact. I don't want to burn everything; just to seek a little death. 

At this time I suffer a little bit of stress with my to-do list. It dissipates somewhat when I read it. For decades I would visit the cinema, friends or distract myself. My angst is not motivated by any one thing necessarily. And it will not be one thing that will alleviate it. 

This weekend I have enjoyed a relatively successful experience of walking, being and reading. I have read for longer than I have for months.

Read now.

Logotheraphy: seeking meaning

I have kept this blog for a long time without really knowing what its purpose might be. It does not really indicate any more the processes of transferring one life from the domestic to the foreign. It instead operates alongside my more public blogs to track my thoughts about how I feel about my current condition. I do not think that it has a significant readership and therefore it is becoming more a blog for myself and a few others that want to read my mind either now or in the near or distant future. That lack of purpose does not mean it is without meaning; it does mean that I want to seek meaning though. I do not feel that meaning is clear in my mind. That gives me angst. 

I have just finished a short holiday with my mother in Fujeriah. There we enjoyed a resort full of Russians. As with all things I felt myself at times irritable and short-minded. What I will remember is some time spent with the woman who brought me into this world. Together we considered things and hoped for the future. The past was put into some of its places.

I cannot know the future truly as it will occur away from the position I stand in now. So much of what I have done seems a pertinent rejection of risk and suffering, a seeking of equilibrium and the negation of pain. For a man with weak social and financial capital, that was a choice I made daily without wisdom. I was too poor and lonely for wisdom. Now? I have some strength, both moral and financial, to seek some other choices. Like the narrator of the Yes Man book by Danny Wallace, I seek to accept some choices that are perhaps not the ones I would seek directly, those paths which might unbalance my life. But in that unbalance, perhaps opportunities and ambitions that I would not necessarily understand or accept otherwise will become apparent.

My movement towards Manila is part of that choice. It is not my first choice, but then what is? Indonesia would have been a financially astute move and would have kept me in teaching A-Levels. Instead, Manila will transfer me firmly the IB system while still providing better wages than most other Asian contexts. Russia was another choice, but the winters would have been brutal and the school I wanted not so recommended. Either way, I am going to a place that I will see eyes-wide-open.

Professionally, I have brought into being something that I experienced in the latter half of my university years: boundaries. Boundaries make you less suggestible. I used to be immune to hypnotism, and reasonably confident in myself and my position. Dubai has shaken that confidence to the core, or rather a small number of colleagues have. It has been an especially mean place that only now I find myself recovering from. Brutal colleagues, three of which have attacked me in ways both nefarious yet spurious, have been unlike anyone I’ve seen before, including in Beijing where some of my colleagues were real oddballs. The boundaries I have sought are:

a)      A colleague trolling abuse about people’s physical appearance in a professional setting: calling them out on it in a private setting: I ignored 2 or 3 jibes, stating my disquiet verbally in passing before emailing them directly, resulting in their retreat from a social media group. 

b)     A colleague shouting and demanding personal favour: I refused to capitulate and maintained professional courtesy until end of the contract. Whether I remove them from my social network is undetermined. 

c)      A colleague with probably mental health issues attempting to impose an ill-will on others: I am literally refusing to engage, walking away if necessary and brokering an (morally unnecessary) apology.

I think that these boundaries might be written about in the future a little more…

A few more odds and sods for the day in case I am still reading. My MA course has been attacked online: just finishing it is my real ambition. I agree with almost all the points made by the OP, that the tutors are often deficient in their feedback and the course itself is largely me teaching myself. I give a huge amount of money in order to be able to then take advantage of the social capital an MA qualification brings. I would join in with the woman speaking, but my boundary means that I want to not unduly annoy my tutor. I do worry about whether a tutor is actually fair in their dealings and do not want to attack these people publicly. This is perhaps part of the power of the distance learner: they know that many people will not attack the institution. Perhaps when I have finished, I will write something. I will likely not.

Looking ahead to next week, I have some big projects; namely NEA moderation, assemblies every day, and comparative Paper 2 work teaching. I need to finish marking some NEAs, copy across the PowerPoints for the Paper 2 work. I also have to mark 24 essays for Year 12 and Year 13 (don’t forget that!). Management of this work is important if still arduous.

I think the boundaries of this work need to be decided… ‘boundaries’ is not the right word, but I know what I mean. I will research some stuff now.

So today will be some good work, some consideration of dating, and some due socialising. I will take my mother to The Palm for some coffee. I will likely see another friend today or tomorrow. And I complete some good work as I need. If I plan this well, it need not take up all my time.

Primarily, I will remember my mum for what she has done. I love her very much. I often say that family should not necessarily intend to be your best friends because there are boundaries that need to be set. The boundaries of my brothers, for example, are remarkably firm, which reflects them as well as me. I wouldn’t say that I say ‘no’ to too much: I accepted the Literature Leadership Position with the ardour that such a role created. I have said yes to leadership in Manila. But most of all, I have said yes to my mum. She is an interesting woman who keeps on going with strength and wit. She will be a boundary whom I will protect. 

Boundary Setting: Organising How My Mind Constructs The World

Today I have spent a substantial amount of time thinking of boundary setting, a term that sounds unduly technical but actually functions well as a metaphor. I know that I am not happy with socialising widely and freely in Dubai. I feel distinctly uncomfortable with a range of people. Yet now? I want to reconstruct how I respond to the world around me more usefully.

My mind occasionally drifts to those final few months of university whereby I had a sense of boundary setting. I strode into the world a confident young man, albeit brutally naïve and without almost no social capital or real support network. I loved an Australian girl from my Camp America experience, a relationship that predictably fell to pieces under the weight of distance and her capricious ambitions. In turn, with no money, I took employment in a desperate school in Hull whilst living in a tiny bedroom with a Cypriot girl. Without doubt, with my family in disarray, I suffered a breakdown of sorts. My boundaries had become quite porous because quite simply I needed to change my values and my ambitions in order to survive the circumstances that I operated within. I had little to no money and was suffering an exploitative job whilst living in decrepit accommodation. My network consisted of some drunken ex-students, although I knew three good people that kept me going.

Kindness still attracted me.

From then, 2004, I have suffered a wobbly ride until now, 2019. I consider that perhaps I have an unnecessary detachment from others: why? A lack of desire to go out with the people who surround me? A fear of being trapped and unable to leave? A disdain for the cost it takes to do anything of note in this town? And the porous nature of my wallet anyway? I know that weak boundaries led me into some romantic relationships that were not built on good sense. For that I suffered. And for now I suffer from seeking an intimate relationship based on good sense. I know that this holiday, like almost all holidays, like this article, akin to this sentence, I suffer from something of ADHD, scattering my attention between books and newspapers and conversations. My brain is flooded with dopamine. My heart is tired from its constant beating, the rivers of intensity. Things cannot go on like this.

Right now I look in this space around me and think of several ideas:

1)      The part of me and my perception that is a Western rocker demands immediate action and hedonistic indiscretion. The bookish part of me demands the subversion of such behaviour for betterment. Many other parts contest these realms of being. I have the follower in me and the leader in me. Certain parts of me want to become more vociferous and open than others. Some parts are responsible, others are feckless. I do not even really know how to embrace them all, or even if I should. Instead I have a sense that I want to impose my will over things which I have no real power or status. That does not mean that, like some crazy colleagues, I desire to impose with coercion. I instead I want to cultivate my mind.

2)      A real issue I have with the desire to organise the world around me is that I can be an emotional person. Perhaps an overly emotional person. It affects the way I talk and the way I come across. Yet emotional states are not things we are always in control of... how do I feel now? What third person stance might I be able to adopt to consider who I am? Is the ‘who I am’ so culturally conditioned that I might be able to unpick it? Do I want to? Following from some previous posts, whenever I have been recently stressed or feel attacked, I begin to organise things. I want to perceive what is around me as harmonious, and I want things to have their place.

3)      When I consider my own worth, how does that compare to other people? Can worth be considered in itself? When I talk about 'best' and enjoying a better life, or even talking about ‘improvement’ or ‘potential’, what am I really talking about? Buddhist ideals speak of any life having worth. Just the act of being alive should be something of celebration. But Western civilisation as I experience it demeans life. It is not one which celebrates the act of existence in itself. It is a freedom from, not a freedom to. Instead it promotes more widely the idea that you must achieve tremendous material and social success in order to feel satisfied. Yet even from a young age that has never quite sat right with me. Who really understands the machinations of the schooling system? Socially, we should of course accept that certain facets of social and cultural capital will likely lead to definitions of success. But personal success? Personal definition? The strength of my own definitions seems to have waned, and unduly so. My esteem and ego seem… disconnected.

4)      What is it to be nice? What is it to be good? To be nice is to be conciliatory and convergent. We appreciate nice people, or at least like them. Yet to be good is to assert boundaries and ways of seeing the world with values of sincerity and authenticity. Of course, sincerity and authenticity may not necessarily be moral, ideal, accepted or even pro-social. But the act of asserting a boundary requires ratification from some others at some point. Perhaps.

5)      The problem with terms like ‘mission statements’ and ‘goals’ is that they use the language of commerce: they are inherently unmotivating and seem in appropriate. Actual mission statements or values tend to be fairly generic. Visions of great leaders do not have to, in themselves, be wondrously unusual. But they need to be firmly believed. And I don’t believe in some ‘mission statement’.

Exercising the boundary

So whatever I might think about boundaries (in my fragmented way that you can see above), I want to pragmatically establish how I can establish them psychologically and socially.

Firstly, I need to be aware of what boundaries I want to create. What are some common scenarios at work whereby a boundary or value risks being crossed? What are some boundaries that have been crossed that upset me?
 

a)      Colleagues refusing to engage with me in the staffroom about ideas or literature or pedagogy: attempt a few times to establish that conversation. If not, spend less time with them. Seek other colleagues. Accept them for what they desire.

b)      Colleague trolling me on social media in a professional setting. Speak up to them in a private medium: they get their 1-2 shots for free. Speak to others, and perhaps a leader, in a private medium to leverage action to encourage them to stop. Blocking them or leaving the group if action is not duly taken.

c)      Colleagues not supporting me with an ECA: consider if others are doing the same. Report to others. Or keep quiet about it and continue.  

d)      Being threatened by a crazed colleague: speak to leaders. Insist on mediation. Disengage and denounce.  

e)      Being passed over for promotion for several posts: speak to leaders. Proactively create a role. Concentrate on circle of influence. Identify values of the leaders. Seek employment elsewhere if leaders’ values are discordant to mine.  

f)       A good friend being continually racist: disengage from that topic of conversation. Challenge where apt. If attacked, curtail challenges, considering nature of the friendship. When asked, be honest about the nature of the racist commentary.

g)      An inability to organise my time with others: aim to meet people on a weekly basis at least on weekends; aim to organise something with more than one person once a month; clear time in my calendar – deprioritise work and individual time.  

h)      An inability to stick to gym times and more: ensure that I move most days; pack material for the gym; keep hydrated – pay for a gym membership; deny smoking and booze.

i)       An inability to read with clarity, recognising and strengthening my need to concentrate: pack the phone away; read immediately upon waking up - remove social media from phone; book into hotel etc.

I will explain perhaps the point at which the boundary becomes too much, and what I will do.

Some facets to recognise in boundary-setting:

A.    No over-explaining the boundary to others is important: reasons are often not heard or even really needed beyond the fact they exist. Just saying ‘I want to… because I want to/I have decided that’ should be enough for most interactions.

B.     You cannot successfully establish a clear boundary if you send mixed messages by apologizing.

C.     To consider what consequences I will enact if I don’t establish clear boundaries. Perhaps mental illness. A sense of purposelessness and a yearning for autonomy.

D.    Boundary setting is a middle-class concept that operates in a world where the consequences are relatively safe. It is important to note that in violent places boundary setting needs to be adjusted. If I am to challenge all examples of sexist language, I risk being physically attacked

E.     Boundaries based upon denying impingements risk losing opportunities: not having a credit card means I do not get points. Not being entrepreneurial means I don’t have chances for different activities.

F.      We can frame two broad dynamics when considering how people might act/interact in boundary setting – we can actively seek to change other people, or simply keep on route with our plans. Of course this division is not as simple as it seems. Keeping on with our plans might actually be framed as an attack on others (our desire to move onto another job might undo a team that another has created). But if your action is a positive thing motivated by particular values, then you should be free to assert those values you believe in. You should be free to enact a mindset despite opposition.

G.    The fear of being attacked, or the intensity of a response, risks an easy capitulation of borders. Anger is one response to a lack of boundaries on both sides. I think that there was a lack of boundaries expected in some of my previous relationships that resulted in extreme anger on my part. I remember feeling attacked by one of my brothers and overreacting in a phone call by shouting: confused and upset in an unscheduled desire for a more intimate relationship after years of distance. I remember an ex attacking me for being on an ipad in the evening because she was upset over a financial transaction – threw the ipad to the floor and would have left if I wasn’t so tied into the school. I remember being denigrated by a boss and having to relatively take it for a few days. In all of these, my emotional response was stark and strong.

Tools to Enforce Your Boundaries

1) Establish Clear Agreements with People:

“Now, I want to be clear about what each of us can expect from this agreement…”

“We will meet at the centre at 3 pm sharp?

2) Demonstrate Confident Knowledge of Yourself:

“No, that is not my style.”

“I need more structure than that, can we compromise?”

3) Reveal Commitment to Your Goals:

“I’m sorry, that just does not fit with the direction I’ve chosen.”

“I’ve committed to using my lunch hour for personal development 3 times a week, but I’d be happy to have lunch with you every other Tuesday.”

4) Exude An Air of Ownership:

Appearance that says you are authentic and know what is appropriate

Confidence in your role and contribution.

Spirit of enthusiasm and adventure.

A calm knowing.

5) Speak Up:

“No, I will not accept your behaviour.”

“I need to let you know that your actions and words hurt me.”

6) Suspend Privileges:

“I will not continue this arrangement!”

“Let’s step back and resume when we have adjusted our behaviour.”

7) Withdraw:

Withdraw emotionally to keep your objectivity.

Retreat and start fresh if the situation calls for it.

8) Denounce:

“You are no longer welcome here.”

When appropriate, refuse to speak about it, or hang up the phone. If needed, call for

help, hire an attorney, consult an advocacy support, or get a restraining order.

Forgiveness Emails: F-Emails

The last point to make in this post of associative thoughts is that I keep considering the possibility of writing a series of forgiveness emails (the F-emails, with the obvious implications). There are a number of people who occasionally cross my mind who I wish to reassert an intellectual boundary, at least in my own mind. I do not necessarily want to change their mind: I just want to express my reasons.

For that reason, I think the F-emails might be a project. I just googled this: it has been politically appropriated already. It is fairly generic term, or could at least become one, I think.

How about forgiving myself? For my past relationships, for not having stronger boundaries, for making choices about where to go, and for risky behaviour?

The Boundaries I want to Make

Intellectual worth and boundaries (you are entitled to your own thoughts and opinions, as are others)

Emotional worth and boundaries (you are entitled to your own feelings to a given situation, as are others)

Physical worth and boundaries (you are entitled to your space, however wide it may be, as are others)

Social worth and boundaries (you are entitled to your own friends and to pursuing your own social activities, as are others)

Spiritual worth and boundaries (you are entitled to your own spiritual beliefs, as are others)