Friday 25 October 2013

A grain of truth in this?

funny-definition-of-study-watching-TV-open-book

The painful will of Allah ...




(In pained man moaning voice) Ouch - that hurt a lot, actually, it hurt a fuckuvafucking lot  in a humbling and humiliating way.


Ibuprfen Nitro for men
 
I staggered in to the dentist with a cartoon comedy bag of ice from on my inflamed jaw. Once in the chair of pain the no-nonsense former Soviet dentista snapped on the rubber, shoved in her hand, gave me a few jabs with elephant needles, sawed, drilled and took out the long dangly, fierce sinewy web of electric pain which had, over an increasingly dreary week, spread from my bottom jaw to the top of my head by way of my sizzling sinus. It was not only a vicious lizard of a pain but far worse it was XXX Man Pain which no combination of whisky and new improved formula elephant strength Ibuprofen Nitro for men can possibly assuage.

The Will of Allah

The work based emergency dentist always attracts a huge crowd in the early morning as there are sick notes to be garnered but being an on-a-pedestal teacher hushed room was made for me at the front of the dolefully mourning queue.  X-ray taken, tooth tapped, filling removed and wire brush applied to the inner tooth while I failed pathetically to hide my discomfort in front of some slightly smiling female dentistry students who looked on as  la dentista made good the mess caused by the munificent kind and wise Will of Allah.  There was a chorus of surprisingly harmonic but shocked with a tinge of disgust bismillahs as they saw a text book seeping, suppurating abscess dealt with. Horror. But what added a fairy light to my dark day was hearing them in move to hushed and awestruck tones as their disgust moved  to medical interest and utter shufi al gove as they as the mess of my mouth was explained to the. Yes, gove it transpires is indeed Arabic for abhorrent abscess - seems to fit.


 
Regardless, the pain was gone and I can see how torture victims now come to love Mr Nice the one who takes away the pain, who cares and understands...unfortunately though she was unable to complete the root canal as in her role as the emergency dentist her job is far better it is simply to take away the pain and send you skipping and ever grateful on your way into the unknown hands of the High Street private third world dentist which is now my next job - she said I have a week to do it or the temporary filling (I'm sure I had a crown last time) will flare up and I will get a ghastly and most gangrenous inflamed infection which I really wouldn't want not least as in Gulf Arabic such a humiliating and shameful disorder is unsurprisingly I suppose called a clegg.




Monday 14 October 2013

Teaching boys and cultural diversity


A typical English schoolboy or puce faced comedy posh wanker...?
Teaching boys in single sex classes has many merits especially in languages as it takes the little tossers out of class and allows the girls to thrive and generally prosper. Yes, indeed there are some arguments for single sex education. In Sleepy Town-sur-Mer the Very Big Man has stipulated that in tertiary and higher ed at least, all classes should be mixed much to the wailing dismay of both sexes who generally loathe it as the only members of the opposite sex they generally know are from the closest recesses of The Family around which everything revolves. They have not the slightest suggestion of an idea of how to speak to one another, indeed they are told not to in case they get pregnant or something in which case the elder brother will have to take some kind of honour vengeance using long sharp knives and swords which glint in the sun...perhaps. So they naturally self-segregate (like primary school kids do), never mix thus reducing any hope of  pair or group work. A real pain as a teacher if the group is skewed towards one gender. Occasionally though you do get given a single sex class usually when there is an orphan in the group who then gets shuttled off to another class when this happens the dynamic changes immensely - everyone relaxes opens up and is generally happier with no more of The Horror of The Other which renders both genders pant wettingly speechless.
 
English boys...well the sort I taught

  • Fidgety
  • Feral haircuts and sprouting bumfluff.
  • Spots based on value packs no-brand biscuits, fizzy pop masquerading as breakfast / lunch / dinner
  • Scratchy and itchy - based on aforementioned junk diet and putridly poor hygiene.
  • Perpetual erectile discomfort caused by being congenitally teenage and consuming copious amounts of specialist one handed material on the net at 3.00 am...it was in The Mail so it must be true
  • Repulsive gag inducing odour of seeping sweat (see all of the above)
    • Add captio
  • Repulsive gag and reflux inducing use of industrial pollutant Lynx to fail to mask aforementioned suppurating seeping sweat.
  • Excellence in the manufacture of fast flying sharp nosed model planes
  • Thumping one another hard to cover up sexual identity confusion
  • Olympic standards  in non-syllabic communication
  • Creative insults (your mum, gay, wankah etc)
  • Insecure homophobic comments (are there secure ones?)
  • Great skills at sopping spit balling
  • Disrespectful of teachers, parent(s), alleged friends, and self
  • Hates foreigners - despite one in five (or something) being part - 'foreign' and trying to sound Gangsta.


Education? Why bother? There are so few -  even shittily paid - jobs at the end of it all anyway? 



Sleepy part of Gulf (but only in all boys classes)
 
  • Fidgety - which they cannot ever be among girls who inspire all sorts of evil and depravity and must therefore be covered up
  • Scratchy (surreptitious fear ridden comedy stiffies being constantly slapped down as they don't go with pre-medieval nonsense belief systems)
  • Beautiful moulded, hair and sculpted trimmed beards showing a careful balance of machismo and religious devotion and piety.
  • Clear skin based on plenty of  fruit and veg owing to a sad lack of value brands
  • Excellent mosque and religious based personal hygiene hammered home by fear of relgious damnation and death by slow spit roasting for the teensiest morsel of stray and bedraggled toe jam
  • As there is rightly a fatwa banning Lynx our boys use lots of musk and frankincense based oils and skin fresheners. Nice it is too.
  • Shit at anything kineshetic creative subjects are not taught as they get in the way of religious devotion...
  • Never violent or touchy ... in class anyway.
  • Mono-syllabic and unfailingly polite in English as teachers are hugely venerated objects of respect placed upon gleaming sun flecked pedestals of marble and gold.
  • Creative insults in Arabic (not that I can understand and they won't tell me but I suspect your mum is NOT in the repertoire)
  • Attitude to LGBT? Stone to death and get a few virgins in reward
  •  (Question I have yet to ask my Omani friends - what if the virgins are boys?)
  • What's a spit ball?
  • Foreigners? Ah yes, horrid poor people with their ...oh hang on they do all the hard, unpaid dirty dangerous frequently life threatening work don't they? Also mainly brother Muslims who do it. Just saying...
  • Westerners - Indian whisky and Filipina sex workers. Confused feelings of either jealousy or hatred or both. 

Education? Why bother I'll get a cushy government job with a big house and pension as the unelected  government needs to keep us all onside to avoid a Syria style spring.