445. Mad mad school

 I come out of a meeting and I am so angry and frustrated. I feel hopeless, useless and maybe soon jobless because if I were the head I'd fire me. We clearly do not have the same vision on education. At least I have a vision, maybe vague and blurry and totally unstable but still it is a vision made up of ideas, of principles, of things I know from experience and things I know because I read, listen and question.

He has just a spreadsheet, target figures, bonuses and promises of promotion. So when Jojo lets the teachers know that he hates it here and wants to go to a vocational school our boss shakes his head from left to right and top to bottom and grumbles that it is too late.

'Too late? He's 15! Can one not make a mistake at 15?'

'Methinks one can. One had to accept a student into my literature class as late as October, and that's the final year. And we have plenty of examples like that.'

He just ignores me. What a gentleman.

There are countless of other instances where he decides, just by looking at the grades, who goes where next year (this is the end of term 1) without taking any account of what we, teachers, know about what these kids can and cannot do.

An other student, who is repeating the year because he was always absent last year, has had too many days off already. 

'He got his two front teeth knocked out during a football match, so he has a lot of appointments to ...'

'Well, dentist, dentist, maybe he could just work it all out differently.'

I'm listening to this and am thinking, is the poor kid going to have to wait for the holidays to get his teeth fixed? what about that student I had last year who was absent from February onwards  and went to sit the exam with a fake port-folio straight form the internet and still got an A for her exam? I could go on for hours on this.

'And the week of the 4'? Where was he?'

'He was in Belgium to do tests with a team.'

'And he'll be off to Italy next. He might go and play there.'

That sends him into a rage. Which is quite fun to watch actually.

'Well, well, I hope he'll be successful as a football player.'

Everyone in the room can tell he wished him the exact opposite. But no-one says anything and our boss is so upset he moves on at the speed of light through the remaining dossiers. And I am thinking this. I am thinking that we should feed all the grades and comments and days off and targets into Chat GPT (hey the kids do their homework with this so they could assist) and it would be done in minutes and we should not have to stay in this dreary cold and damp classroom listening to empty sentences and superficial comments and I would not be ignore and the boss would just have to say 'please, readjust, my numbers are too low for success rate.' And I would be home drinking tea (or stronger) in peace and I would not feel frustrated and angry and miserable.

OK. Who's going to tell him?