I’m a bit of a swat. I don’t think I used to be, in school I always sat at the back of the class, and managed to blag my way through college through looking at friends notes whilst I enjoyed some quality time with my duvet. But, for this course, I have definitely turned into a bit of a Swat. Its born out of fear, which I believe to be one of man’s fundamental drivers (not sure that this is something I should be looking to act on as a teacher), the fear that I have been out of academia for so long that I would no longer be able to do it. And actually its served me quite well, whilst others were burning the midnight oil the week before Christmas, I had handed in my assignments and was free, as demanded by the season, to make merry.
But, I kind of took the making merry thing a bit to heart, and more importantly, took the not having to do anything very much to heart. Not that I haven’t done anything, more that I’ve done very little and certainly am not ahead of everyone else, which is where I was before Christmas.
So now it’s Sunday night. Tomorrow, I start actually teaching for the first time in earnest. It’s not too horrible to start with, 6 lessons in the first week, and gradually increasing, but I can’t help thinking that I really should be nervous. But I’m not. At least not about that, what I am nervous about is the fact that I have a whole bunch of assignments that I should have started on, which I haven’t. And now my life is going to be full of writing lesson plans etc so that I don’t know when I’ll get the opportunity to complete my assignments.
Of course, there are mitigating circumstances – total disinterest. The assignment I should be doing (in fact, would preferably have done), is RE. And I don’t know why, but I just can’t engage. I should probably looking at what me preferred learning style is using that to find some way to motivate myself, but I really can’t be arsed. And the strange thing is that one of the first lessons that I have to teach is RE – Buddhism. And I’ve actually spent a reasonable amount of time mapping out the RE lessons for the next 6 weeks and getting what I believe to be a reasonably engaging lesson plan together for the first one, so its not that I’m not interested in teaching it.
In order to understand how fundamental this issue is, there is another exactly analogous situation that is occurring in my life right now – getting my tax return done. If I fail to do either, I’m totally screwed, but I really, really can’t seem to engage.
I have happened on a sneaky way of getting my tax return done, which is manipulate persuade my better half to do it. This has involved my sudden realization that I need to spend quality time with the 14 month old over Christmas in order to bond, and clearly couldn’t do the tax return at the same time - a top tip for any fellow shirkers out there (though I accept no responsibility for the outcome if you do try it, it was on a knife edge a couple of times), but I really don’t think it is reasonable to ask her to do my RE assignment as well.
I have thought about searching the web and lifting an assignment off there – there must be a bunch of them around – but we have been given strict warnings about the dangers of plagiarism.
So my solution is very modern – outsourcing, no-one said anything about that. I’m sure there must be a myriad of companies out in Asia that would write an RE assignment for me, but the stumbling block here is that they would charge. As you are aware, I am an impoverished student with no hope of any significant future income (I’m going to be a teacher). But if there is anyone out there who would be willing to do an RE assignment, your reward will be in heaven.
Hmmmmm. I wonder if I can work an RE assignment around this.
