Being Me

Two things that happened today. 1. In one of my English lessons, the students were experimenting with pronouncing the word 'monologist' (the speaker in a monologue). None of them could get it right, because if you start the word with the stress on 'mon' as in 'monologue' the word runs away with you and the 'g' ends up as a hard 'g'. I had an epiphany. 'Think of the Muppets theme tune,' I said. 'Uh?' I sang it. 'MonoloGIST, doo-doo-dah-doodoo, monoloGIST, doo-doo-doo-doo ...' Here are the Muppets doing it. Ma-na-ma-nah One or two of the girls laughed. Others smiled. Some looked worried about being in the same room as me. That's a shame, because they're trapped with me until the summer exams next year. 2. I'm lucky in that our school has a proper chef to cook the lunches, so the food is usually yum-yum. But today I chose a slice of ham and some pasta salad. The pasta was nearly-raw. Sometimes i

Last year, my teaching timetable went like this: in school every day by 8.20 except for Wednesday, my day off. This year, it's: Monday: start at 9.55 Tuesday: start at 10.55 Wednesday: start at 10.55 Thursday: start at 8.45 Friday: start at 9.55 Those times indicate 'start teaching' so usually I'm there at least half an hour before lessons to give the photocopier chance to run out of paper, the coffee machine chance to give me hot water with milk in it, and the computer a chance to give me nothing at all except error messages and the urge to whup its screen with a HAMMER. *calms down* Anyway, as you can imagine, with all those erratic start times, there's room for confusion. And that's why I was sitting on my sofa, in pyjamas, one day last week, slurping a second cup of tea and wiping toast crumbs from my lips, convinced I had acres of time before I needed to be in school.  I'd even filled in a couple of crossword clues.   &