I hate school

Satan's Arse, but my colleagues annoy me. One is a teacher new to this school, who doesn't seem to want to work with me on the grounds that she has no time to prepare a lesson with me. I have been here for over a year and a half. I have been to ten schools. I have worked with thirty-two teachers. She is the first one with this complaint.

This is one of those times when my job description becomes painfully obvious to naught but I - Assistant Language Teacher. It is my job to assist.

I understand that there are some teachers who have put themselves through a variety of gruelling ordeals to get where they are today, and will continue to do so now that they're there. The last thing they want is assistance from someone who hasn't taken their Nationally Approved teachers exam. The very nerve. The fact that I also speak, at a native level, the language they're spent most of their academic lives studying can't sit too well in terms of self esteem...especially when I correct their grammatical deficiencies...which can be tremendously satisfying...

Then there's one of the male teachers - a smug buffoon who seems to think that his charisma is an adequate substitute for a structured lesson and coherent plan. A year ago, I considered my self puny before what I thought to be greater ability, and associated scorn. Amazing how much an outside observer can change ones outlook on a situation. I thank you Joel.

We now come to the teacher responsible for the third grade lesson referred to in this post; a woman who might just be able to teach her way out of a wet paper bag if that wasn't such an apt metaphor for her classroom presence. That's without even going into her English skills - if you give your students false information, how can you expect them to pass a difficult exam? That aside, her lessons are either, in terms of target language, breathtakingly elaborate, or as substantial as a mummified tissue. Where is hope?

The Tyranny of Bureaucracy

I am fresh from that eternal quest of satisfying the baying hounds of my bank. How cruel that my ally should also be my adversary.

Readers of my normal blog (assuming there are those here who aren't) may remember an eruption of fury over the inflexible horrors of the Japanese Post Office, their confusion as to what to do with somebody who orders their names in a different way, the petty particularities of their ubiquitous forms and stamps...

...some months ago, when trying to transfer some money from my Japanese account to it's English counterpart, the assistant who dealt with me was caught out by the fact that my ID card said Patrick, but the form I'd filled in didn't. Maybe if I wasn't already so angry then, that would have been fine (at a push)...I wrote "Patrick" on the form with a petulant flourish of my pen...

..and so today, when I try to perform the same transaction, with a perfectly completed form containing all four of my names, who should meet my request other than the same woman? I'd clocked her from the moment I got into the Post Office, and was frantically mumbling incantations to every deity I could name, in the hope that they would spare me this torment. Alas, my prayers fell on deaf ears, and she called out my number...
"She can't possibly have a problem this time" thought I. "Assume" makes an ass out of you and me, dear reader. Her problem this time was that although my ID & the form I'd handed in said "Patrick", their records of me didn't.

The idea in my head that wished to be expressed transcended mere words. In it's pure form, it would have melted her on the spot.

Cue, more forms, and what should be a very simple transaction taking twenty minutes. I am now bereft of a cash card for the next two to three weeks whilst they give me a new one that says "Patrick".

What is it about this woman? Why, when I have one of her colleagues helping me, does the procedure carry on with nary a worry, when with her, she is foxed by hurdles which are, let's be honest here, really bloody simple and easily overcome by people who posses just an ounce of imagination? I hope that she, and her paper-wasting, tree destroying, and consequently, oxygen-thieving ilk, choke to death on paperclips.