God, I feel tired. Tired and ill: had the snuffles all week. I look awful: I caught sight of myself in a shop window as I came to work this afternoon. The face of a haunted, frustrated man. I feel stuck - trapped by everything about me, but most especially by myself. There is an explosion pent up within me, a desire to yell, shout, kick out and live, but I can't seem to find a way forward. each time it comes to making a decision, I go into agonies of doubt about whether it is the right thing to do or not, and by the time I've sort of made a decision, the time and opportunity have passed by. Why am I like this still?

5.40 in the evening. I feel knackered, but I've still got another 3 hours plus to go before I can weave home on my bike, avoiding the traffic. If there is any justice in this world, the fire alarm will go off mid-lesson, and I can escape to a pub or something. Actually, scratch the pub: I just need to curl up in a bed and sleep for a good twelve hours. Lesson today: not too bad, actually, tho the class screwed up at lunchtime. For some reason, they stopped listening, and I had to curtail the exercise and let them eat.

my throat is dying. I'm teaching all day and my voice could go at any minute. Oh well, back to EFL miming. It is today that marks exactly ten years since my first ever lesson. I was bricking myself before it: I hid in the bogs, staring at myself in the mirror, telling myself, 'I can do this! I can!' In the end, it went ok: No-one tried killing me. Well, not that week, anyway.

Ahhhhhhhh, Friday. Just finished class: exam techniques in writing. Piece of piss.

God, some drivel doesn't half get written on these blogs, and I'm painfully aware I'm one of the contributors. It's taken me the better part of two hours to get the OFSTED paperwork done for our up and coming inspection: I still have several more hours ahead of me, plus I must fake a load of lesson plans to give the impression of being an honest, paperwork-minded, conscientious teacher rather than the brilliant but bureaucratically errant firebrand I actually am. If I must teach, let me teach, for God's sake, rather than drown me in paper. Well, let's see how this evening goes.....

Only another four hours to go before I cycle home. I missed the action at the college this morning: Apparently, two gangs of Asians squared up to each other outside the main gates and all Hell broke loose. A few people ended up in hospital with hammer wounds. Honestly, what is the fucking point? I hate the gang mentality: The commonwealth of the lowest denominator. Groups of people who are metaphorically dragging their knuckles in the dust.

Nur started her ESOL course yesterday evening: I don't think she was entirely impressed by it. However, she came home and talked solidly for an hour about it, non-stop. She also had the cheek to be offended by the fact that I hadn't cooked anything for her. This is the person who, over all the years I have done evening classes, has never, not once, even bothered to put something in the microwave for me.

Lunchtime. I must plot a credible 3 hours' worth of lesson for the mong class now. Hmmm....

Halfway through the week.....I want to sleep..........

My word, I do seem to be writing a lot in here today....probably cos I'm not working...Two teachers just stormed and humphed their way in to the staffroom, annoyed at having to do a v. busy placement testing session, and not even of putative studentsn for our department. I have to consider what to do now for the evening class.....probably something straight from the book again....how professional, I hear some tightass EFLer mutter. Sod it, mate, I've had a long day. Besides, I got all my class through their CAE last year doing pretty much the same thing. So there.

What Egyptian Deity are you? go to:the quiz!

5.34 in the evening. just finished class, only the evening lot ahead of me now. God, Tuesdays are so long. And, after slogging my guts out over a hot lesson, I must cycle home and (almost certainly) cook for myself. My wife makes great soup on rare occasions, but I can count on the fingers of one arse the number of times I've come home to a hot meal. Don't get me wrong, it's not like I expect to be waited on hand and foot, it'd just be nice, every now and then, to come home and not have to do more stuff. Actually, the cycling home isn't too bad. It sure beats using the car, especially in the morning, and I'm starting to see the emergence of long-buried muscles in my legs and stomach.

Lunchtime. A quick chance to write up and look busy. I need to put something together for this afternoon...... I have half an hour to do it in....people faffing round the office....bollocks to it all.

just had the first half of the lesson. One of the students, a new face who turned up yesterday having unilaterally transferred himself from another class, spent the entire hour and a half either asleep or banging his head against the table. Oh, the stresses of English grammar...

mnnggh. Drank a bottle and a half of good red wine last night, went to bed at 1.30, arose at 6.15. I do this far too often to be good for me. Now I must teach from 9.00 until 9.00, a full fucking twelve hours. well, 8 and a half in the classroom. Six and a half of those hours are with the same fucking class! I just love Tuesdays.....

One of the things that gives me joy in this job is the weird variety of western names that the Chinese students give themselves. I often wonder why: I dislike using them, as it strikes me as a kind of colonialisation of the person. Then again, maybe they dislike having their real names mashed out of all recognition in the mouths of their teachers. Some of them have had names given to them by British, Australian and, in particular, American teachers back in China. These instructors clearly take a deeply sadistic pleasure in giving them, as evinced by some of the following examples:
Fanny (who rapidly changed her name to Judy after finding out its slang UK meaning)
Monty ( a name not used in anger since about WWII)
Branch
Clementine
Jet
Ames
Patty
Stimpy (yeah, I wonder if he had a friend named Ren?!)
Woodstock
and two of my favourites:
Nemesis (a thin, weedy kid with really big glasses)
Turbo (Small, rotund, very slow with a dead hedgehog for a haircut)

bluhhhh. Monday.
I ahve been trying to plan my entire week's lessons this morning, but to no avail. I can't get my head round it.
I had a miserable weekend, by and large. Friday evening's freedom from no.1 son degenerated into a pointless, silly argument. Not my fault: it seems I can't do anything right these days. I really don't know what my wife wants from me. If I do something, it's wrong. If I don't do something, it's wrong too. We seem to be caught in this hideous cycle of annoyance and recrimination. I hate it.

Hurrah! The end of the lesson!
I just read some guy's blog just before signing of for the day. Dear oh dear. It was very redneck. I won't honour it with a link. Just suffice to say that, while purporting to be the true American voice, it flies in the face of every principle of the American constitution. Hey, pal, just listen to this. The right to free speech does not mean that only the voice of the loudest must be heard. Stop calling me 'weasel'. Stop calling me 'Commie'. stop objectifying me. I am a human, like you, yet seemingly unlike you, I can bear to listen to others' voices without stopping my ears or turning away.

Friday! Just one lesson to go. My mum is taking No.1 & only son off our hands tonight, so wife & I can go out together and get pissed up. Or maybe just stay in and have copious sex all round the house. Or maybe go out, get drunk and have a shag. or something.
Just had a faculty meeting: Not many of us there. Two were off on a BASELT freebie, one at an aunt's funeral. The two ESOL teachers, Elaine and Rachel, were screeching and clucking like a pair of hysterical chickens. They wind each other up into paroxysms of worry. Thank Christ I don't share a staffroom with the buggers. Right, time for some work.

grrrr....students running back and forth, waving visa extension applications in my face, screaming 'You gi me attendan recor!' and now I have to go and teach some of them...oh joy....

half past two on a lazy thursday afternoon....I'm writing up the blog to give the impression to my fellow instructors that I'm engaged in profitable labour. I actually have a shitload of stuff to do, but I am, as ever, seeking to avoid it. The story of my life, that is.
We have an OFSTED inspection coming up, and everyone at management level is bricking themselves. Not only have new mousemats and post it notes been ordered, but projectors, computers and screens have been shoved in every classroom, along with orders to use them or else. It would be nice if half the bastards worked, or didn't fall on heads. Again, it is an example of senior management being obsessed with image, not substance. They see people as things, units to process or be used, and that's a sad failing in an academic (ha!) institution.
Right, that's enough of a rant for now, time to do some work. Or not.

and another thing....I mentioned in an earlier post how we got some new post it notes covered in fuckwit slogans. The slogans - fine. But the fucking notes do not fulfill their function. In short, they do not stick. This is, it seems to me, a fine example of the management attitude at the college - produce something flash that doesn't actually do the job it is designed for. Fuckwits.

Halfway through the lesson. Just had the buggers listening to something about living in Sweden, just to prove that there is somewhere more depressing than Reading. Halfway through, the Ninja Dunce staggered in. I told him to piss off until the break. His face was in a bad way: It looked like someone had kicked seven shades of Hell out of him. Good.

Oh dear God in Heaven. I'm stuck in a staffroom full of whinging teachers. No wonder I'm depressed. I'm not feeling quite as pissed off with teaching as I was yesterday, but that is about to change as I'm going into my Wednesday Afternoon mong class. It's full of depressed Chinese, not speaking to each other. Oh well, only another 3 hours, 30 minutes to go....

....and there it is. It is now ten years to the day that I accepted my first teaching post. I got a phone call from some snide guy with an faux-American accent offering me the job: My future boss, as it turned out. I nearly refused it, but then decided to take the leap. After I got off the phone, I almost bricked it. I felt a wild surge of elation and fear. Then I went to the pub. What followed over the following twelve days before I left was a mad whirl of packing, buying tickets, and trying to do some research as to exactly where the hell i was going in Turkey. I hadn't a clue as to what I was letting myself in for, nor did I speak a word of Turkish.
Well, that was a day where I changed my life. But now? I'm back in Reading and I'm still a teacher, and I am fed up to the back teeth with both. I need to make the leap once more. trouble is, it's harder this time: I've got a wife and a son to think of too. If I screw up, then mthey come into free fall with me.

I'ved been having some very weird dreams recently. Sunday night, I dreamt I was playing with an elephant as though it was a dog, then last night, I was told I had to go back to primary school, into my son'd class. Everyone was very nice about it, and somewhat embarrassed..apparently, it was some kind of bureaucratic error. I'm sure there's some weird significance to all this, but I'm buggered as to what it may be.

D'oh! I intended trying to get all the work I needed to do done by this time, but I've fucked up once again. The best laid plans of mice and men..............

Ahhh, a new week! I cycled through the grim and forbidding rear gates of work today, looked up at the creaky fifties brickwork, and thought 'Oh, bugger this. I must find another job!' I look around at some of the sad, downtrodden faces of people who've been working here for years and get a terrible premonition of myself: Balding, overweight, miserable and old.........ewww!
I had a nasty bout of existential angst on saturday. In Tesco's. By the frozen food section. I just began thinking, like, what's the bloody point? All I do is work, spend the money, work etc.etc. I don't live.
We had guests around yesterday. I sweated over making a load of food (Mucver [courgette patties], haydari, green beans in tomato,garlic and olive oil, chicken in a carignan, thyme and mushroom sauce, rice), they came in a whirlwind and departed almost as fast. Pleasant as they were, it all felt a little disappointing, as if they'd all come to a restaurant.

feel strangely dopey today, not in the mood to do anything.......I've got a class at 7 - the advanced group, all 6 of them. woo-hoo. My feeling of ennui is gradually increasing as the tenth anniversary of my first ever EFL lesson approaches. Fuck it. Fuck it all.
We were given new mousemats at work today. They are plastered in slogans, like 'Valuing the individual', 'Innovation and responsiveness', 'working together and with partners'(huh?), 'Avoiding properly constructed sentences', 'strength through joy', 'ein reich, ein volk, ein fuhrer'. Ok, I made the last three up. I had an image of our Glorious Leader, shouting out these meaningless phrases in his office while wearing a Benito Mussolini uniform and gesticulating wildly. Only desperate fuckwits need to plaster this kind of meaningless, pseudo-dynamic drivel everywhere. We also have post-its with more of the same shit.

It's now 3.43. I must frantically devise something to keep my afternoon class happy for the next hour and forty minutes. Perhaps scrabble with electric cattle prods. At least the ninja fuckwit hasn't turned up. Whenever he does, the atmosphere in the class becomes pervaded with the smell of fear, which is not a nice thing to inhale on a wednesday afternoon.
Anyone got some lucky lottery numbers they want to wing my way?

Mnnnurrrghhh. Drinking a bottle of good quality australian wine and going to bed at 2.30 in the morning is not a good idea when one has to be up at 6.30. I do this far too often for my own good.
Grimbo got into contact with me yesterday. He's trying to escape the vilnesses of teaching, and has applied for a job as a hotel receptionist. He asked me to be his referee, and make up something along the lines of how he was both a teacher and a receptionist when we worked together. The image of him smiling cheesily behind a front desk wafted through my mind, and fortunately disappeared. Some things are too terrible to behold :)
I must now return to bloody class and give my darling students something to do while I fall asleep.