Girls School

Personal Life

I exist in a bubble like cubicle in the school staff room. It is not bubble shaped of course, but it is tiny and I use the word bubble because I am encased in an English speaking world while outside of the bubble another language is spoken. I find this annoying because it means that I miss out on gossip, whoops, I mean essential news about members of staff which may be incredibly more interesting than planning a lesson on the present continuous tense.

Perhaps my presence in the staff room has now become accepted, no one gives the white woman a second glance any more and may be this means I am accepted. Recently I was included in some gossip sharing and they switched to English for my benefit. Up until now I thought the weird stuff that went on was only weird to me because of the cultural differences between east and west. How wrong I was.

One young woman told me that she had been called into the office to be told that a parent (yet to be identified) had seen this member of staff in a shopping mall. She was indulging in a spot of window shopping. An innocent pastime one would have thought? Again I was wrong. This unidentified parent had phoned the school to complain that seeing a member of staff wasting time in a shopping mall was a waste of time and that was not why she sent her precious daughter to the school. This young woman was reprimanded by the Big Sis for window shopping!! It’s not as if it was while she was supposed to be in school, this was on her way home!

Another male colleague told me that he had been called into the office of Big Sis whereupon she produced some A4 sheets of paper which he recognized as his own scribbles being some rough ideas about teaching the 3^rd conditional. For those of you who have got through life this far without knowing (or caring) what the 3 rd conditional is – basically it’s an ‘If’ sentence about an impossible situation e.g. “If I was six feet tall I would be a rich and famous model” you see, impossible as I have finished growing, upwards at least, and stopped at five foot 4 inches). The Big Sis had some how retrieved these scribbles and drafts out of the recycled bin, read them and also quite mysteriously identified them as belonging to this particular member of staff. She was right in her detective work. She had taken offence at his ideas for 3^rd conditional sentences he had written down so as to explain to his innocent charges in a lesson weeks previously. He had written:-

If I was a woman I would grow my hair long.

If I was your mother I would make you do your homework every evening.

This was then explained to the bemused, confused and bewildered member of staff, a male of approximately 30, that this type of ‘thing’ was completely unacceptable in ‘this’ school and would give a ‘wrong’ impression to the students.

Gobsmacked? Me too!

After this incident this member staff has now become paranoid about his waste paper and has his own recycle bin, in his tiny cubicle, where he collects any paper he throws away which he then takes home and recycles in the relevant bins provided which are miles away from the school.