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)

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• 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.

Striking teachers - Mexico

Our Mexican colleagues have been a little active over reforms. I am just trying to imagine UK teachers (or any other group of workers these days) occupying say Trafalgar Square for three weeks and the trying to face down our noble riot Plod? Not that I would ever condone or encourage such action as that would doubtless raise eye-brows among those who have drawn the short straw and have to read such things.

Sure, it's a different political and educational culture and possibly to strike have not been so circumscribed as they have back home. To get teachers, the er...new vanguard of the revolution, so angry that they have been pushed to take such action is at the very least interesting.

From The Guardian 15/09/2013

Initially the protests were aimed at pressuring the legislature into modifying a wide-ranging education reform that threatens teachers with dismissal if they fail evaluations aimed at improving the dismal standard of the country's state schools.
With the reform approved earlier this month, they began demanding that it be scrapped. They also demanded face-to-face negotiations with the nation's president, Enrique Peña Nieto.
Most of the striking teachers come from Mexico's poverty-ridden southern states, and argue that the country's educational deficiencies are more closely tied to social inequity than their performance in the classroom.
They belong to the smaller of the country's two teachers' unions – the National Education Workers Co-ordinating Committee.
The larger union, much weakened after the arrest of its legendarily powerful leader Elba Esther Gordillo in February, has supported the reforms.
Having lost control of the Zócalo, the protesters began regrouping at the nearby Monument to the Revolution.
Organisers said teachers were not responsible for the earlier violence, blaming radical supporters of the movement who had joined the protest just before the police moved in.

My inner prostitute

Well, that was fun - a while back now, it seems so, I did enjoy a freebie to London for a rigorous interview to become a value free, grubby, educational prostitute in the jolly old Kingdom of the Magic Stones. It is not a teaching gig for everyone - least of all me. The brutal client is a hard bastard  who deals in oil, vicious weaponry and medieval high tech torture equipment (probably) for the greater benefit of  Britain and this part of the unethical conscience free business sector of course. They take unfeasibly large sums from folk who, like them, don't give much in the way of a micro-toss,  and of course they could see right through my facade of enthusiasm and a few days later thanked me so much and said they would keep me on file - adminese for naaaah not wanted. That said I knew I would not accept any offer not least because of the hassle I was getting from people around me and the sober finger wagging voice within that was telling me that it was a compromise of jaded and faded withered principles too far. There is just so much yogic bending over and contrived contorting and Obama style empty self-justification you can make.

I had found and breached my limit which, after times in the semi-slave feudal Gulf, is tolerably, worryingly, too high for a once high-minded wet lefty. My twenty year old self would loath what he has morphed into - or perhaps not?  Still, by desperate default I have kept the ragged shreds of my distressed dignity.  Yet my cheap and nasty inner prostitute (you have one too) would like to have at least been offered the gig with of course the option to high-mindedly turn it down. The terms and conditions were really rather good. Droolingly good - in such a place they would need to be. I could have closed my eyes, served my time painlessly and been out in three years with several heavy swag bags full of untaxed cash that Grubby Gideon and his fellow lizards would not get and who knows do something useful like erm...teaching for the good guys.

Ho hum, what next? See out the contract in the sleepy end of the Gulf or maybe I should get some tatts for I  am the only man or woman left in England without one, and do a crash course in the latest whacky wheeze from that educational colossus G*ve and sign up to the soon to be piloted teachers to troops programme...?

The Time of Starvation and Binge

Well, we all sloped home in our sharp linen suits, Panama hats and culturally inappropriate breastful dresses. Searching for a seasonally overcharging  taxi through the streets which had now been taken over by the celebrants of the Time of Starvation and Binge...there was no place for us at the abandoned and deserted pool side bar once the Tanzanian muscle made their discreet presence indiscreet and made it clear that the Last Drink must be surrendered as the silvery crescent moon had peeped coyly into view. 'See you in a month' smiled the Filipina bar staff as they joined the scrum to get to the airport for the first time since 2005. It was bizarrely, unusually quiet as the adherents to the Faith had all gone off serenely home or to the mosque to do their thing that we infidels do not have the wit, inclination or imagination to be part of. Same species of mammal but coming from very different worlds. I blame religion but that's for another time...or perhaps not, there is already way too much division even within the ostensibly same set of beliefs. As my fondly feral Yr 8s used to say '...er...duh..' 

At home the TV was on and some of the 4,691 unwatchable (to me at least) channels were being desultorily flipped through as one of the party wanted, curiously I thought,  to watch the Mecca Channel of which I had no idea I was the proud possessor - you might have it too. Quizzical I was for sure, as you too would be for this is the Koran wielding Middle East where no bingo or gambling of any sorts is allowed, and rightly so perhaps. So I thought albeit most fleetingly momentarily that this would be one of those very late-night ones on one of the many unwatchable Freeview channels hostessed by a bored, tired and success-lite unglamour model with an aura of lingering career bitterness who would be urging sad and / or drunken or maybe vulnerable and definitely deluded folk to part with their pitiful amounts of money via a piratical premium  phone line - the sort of thing which should be outlawed too but doubtless such corporate viruses give Dough Ball Dave and clubbable chums a friendly donation. Right Dave?

Not 2001 live from the Mecca Channel - probably on Freeview somewhere

Anyway I digress. No, foolish old moi, this version of the Mecca Channel showed full on live action footage of multi-thousands of the embearded Faithful  praying at an obelisk like thing from 2001: a Space Odyssey which is what I ignorantly mused, of course it was full on religion around the mystical Kaaba.  Even as an infidel it was fascinating and powerful too but also, for me very disturbing to see so much humanity  bowing down in what appears to me to be pre-medieval submission and supplication...but what do I know...? *


The praying and chanting was intercut with explicit hard core war porn from Syria and all sorts of righteously angrily voiced commentary and brutal font subtitles which made me wish I had been taught how to say more in Arabic than the initial Year 7 MFL rubbish in which you get to ask what someone has in their pencil case. How often has anybody ever had to use such pointless language beyond the second week in Year 7? Do something about that G*ve....on seconds thoughts don't, you're an unqualified one-eyed damaging fool.

Anyway to those stumbling across this as they seasonally say hereabouts Ramadan Murbarak.


*...er... I actually do know that Carols from Kings is far easier on the ear but never mind.

...(predicatbly) what a load of balls

Yep, well done to Murray, it might get a monkey and his mother off his back but replacing them are a swathe of dislikeable and objectionable folk crying out to give him a gong for winning a few tennis matches and thereby scrape a bit of kudos by association. Give him a break at least wait until he finishes his career and perhaps does something worthwhile thereafter.

Lurching into Lockdown

Well...the end of the world inevitably lurched  proudly into clear view or so it seemed in this backwater area of deluded Expatland - the rumours of the last eleven months had hardened briskly morphing into the black scab of an unspeakable degenerate truth. The world ends Tuesday 6.30 pm.

To compensate for this irredeemable impending disaster, for that is what it is, desperate (but enjoyable)  Bacchanalian  Dante styled orgies were hastily and lustfully held in the bars and hotels at the weekend and, as the rabid realisation took hold red-veined, gout hobbled Johnny Expat of every hue, blotch and addiction battered down the armour plated door of Al - Oddbins for desperate entry and stumbled and scrambled feverishly  grabbing armfuls of whatever remained on the soiled shaky shelves and broken-doored fridges...even the Pakistani Shiraz and the traditional fermented Azerbaijani aged and fermented dog testicle.

Scenes of feral despair at the booze shop

Licenses had been begged, borrowed and blagged as the whole of jaded Expatland cashed in its monthly ration in a 48 hour frenzy. In the 50 degree heat and humidity queues of Soviet proportions doubled round the block, the shelf-stackers and sales staff struggled to hold back the pulsing crowds needing judicious amounts of pepper spray and freely wielded electronic batons from the Nubian muscle to hold back the eye bulging fearful fretting license waving souls aghast at the incipient Horror.


The crowds were mercilessly kettled and removed by the dead hands of the law and the shutters slammed and sealed at 7.00 to a bitter chorus of ululating, wailing and sobbing. It was truly a brutal sight of degrading desperation, futile frustration, and middle-aged middle class junkie despair as the hour of tomorrow's end of the world  moonrise Horror gets ever and forbiddingly closer.

Ramadan Lockdown

Ramadan Lockdown and Expat Hysteria

Yes, the supermarkets are getting the Ramadan Kereem garlands out and offering special twofer offers on oil, cereal and other Ramadan Specials - all as tacky as Xmas except, fortunately,  it doesn't start three months before. At this time the students are saying how they are looking forward to the annual fast whilst getting their excuses in early and trying to amend yet more the already foreshortened timetable and reduced expectations.

Meanwhile, in the weird and parlous parallel universe of Expatland the slow burning realisation and developing panic has really set in with vicious circulating rumours that any places to get a nice cold drink, of which there are many all of which will be brutally and coldly closed for the duration. Fasting by proxy? This does sort of surprise me as it is not as anal here as the UAE in which the hotels and booze shop were always happy, smiling and welcoming through the Holy Month. Indeed, unlike the UAE most bars you go to here have a large proportion of local men happily knocking back the industrial fizz. But no, come sunset on 8th July, a merciless Lockdown will take place. Hotel bars and the offy will close....

The offy was cleared of booze by late last week with stocks being desperately air-freighted from India and replenished twice daily as desperate, thristy expats of all stripe were buying up with some (YOU know who you are) doubtless hoping to profit from the impending black market.

Tomorrow marks a new month the retarded booze license when the mean monthly limit  will be reached in a single spastic spree. Sad really for some, but not me, oh no, even the plastic White Mischief Indian vodka will go, as will the equally plastic McGhandi Scotlandish Whisky brewed in Delhishire. Evil, cheap, toxic brews I don't doubt which are probably bought by Dickensian building site owners to keep their serf-like charges (who have no access to nice things) docile and possibly grateful.

The Gulf is an odd part of Expatland which I have seen do strange, disturbing things to a person and their taste,  judgement and usual good sense and moderation. This time of year with the impending annual joyless (for us) Lockdown is symptomatic of a minor breakdown in rationality that sometimes occurs. Others let it drift by them and others become proactive some colleagues will even fast along (or claim to) with their students. They have in other places in which I have worked which always struck me as odd with a touch of patronising as unless of course it is (gulp) me who is missing something...?