Hugh Reilly: Rusticated by April shower of holidays

Published on Sunday 17 April 2011 15:52

Despite what my detractors may opine, I am a sensitive man. For example, as a young boy I cried my eyes out at the 1948 film Oliver Twist, unable to control my sobbing as I watched a nice workhouse master face financial penury due to the sheer gluttony of an ungrateful orphan.

My empathy for the emotional state of others has stayed with me to adulthood. Being insightful, if I were the owner of a B&B where Iain Gray had been my overnight guest, I would not put a newspaper showing the results of recent opinion polls on his breakfast table. Call me overly sensitive but I would consider pouring a portion of "Cheerios!" into his bowl a tad tactless.

Ann Ballinger, general secretary of the Scottish Secondary Schoolteachers Association, is clearly bereft of basic emotional intelligence. Showing an utter disregard for the mental welfare of the anti-teaching brigade, she stated in a submission to the McCormac review of teaching that teachers are working more hours than before the McCrone agreement. In terms of comedic timing, choosing April to complain about a workload burden lends credence to the view that Ms Ballinger is trying out some material for her stand-up debut at this year's Fringe Festival.

For dominies, this April is showered with holidays. Most teachers just returned to the frontline yesterday after a two-week respite break and, thanks to the Good Friday and Easter Monday public holidays, face the pleasant prospect of a long weekend to get over the exhaustion of having to teach the kids four days on the trot.

By dint of a fairytale wedding involving a prince with hereditary male-pattern baldness falling in love with a commoner (oops, eyes welling up at this point), the following week is a three-day interface with youngsters - making it a total of seven school days in the whole of April. The impending royal marriage has caused much angst among teaching colleagues of the Catholic persuasion. Celebrating an institution that operates a sectarian recruitment policy against followers of The True Faith must have been a source of much soul-searching. However, rather magnanimously in my view, Roman Catholic co-workers have stoically ignored the blatant discrimination and joined the fifth columnist ranks of the 24-hour Royalist army.

I spent my first week of the Easter vacation in Turkey where a business partnership exists between restaurant chefs and manufacturers of toilet rolls. Waiters, perhaps cognisant of the value Scottish education places on vacuous praise, made effusive comments that I was handsome and that my female companion resembled, ahem, Jennifer Lopez. On discovering the small tip I'd left our insincere admirers, we quickly morphed into Shrek and Miss Leper Colony 1978.

Like many pedagogues on paid leave, I used part of my holiday to do school work. I marked Paper 2 Higher NABs, Intermediate 2 USA resit NABs, as well as correcting the second part of the Higher prelim.Eager to while away the hours in a classroom environment, I popped into my workplace and finished off a new S2 unit I had been composing. Heck, even though it was a sunny day, I photocopied a class set of my handiwork so as to hit the playground running.

Although not quite so bad as April, May also affords limited opportunities for the dedicated teaching professional to engage in full-time teaching activities. The first Monday of the month is lost as a consequence of May Day and the final weekend features yet another Friday-Monday short break for something or other. It's well-nigh impossible to build up a teaching momentum.

To compound Sir's misery, the SQA Standard Grade examination diet begins a smidgeon early this year, the first week of May. As if the loss of face-time with S4 youngsters weren't enough of a blow, the Higher and Intermediate exams start on Friday 13 May.

Although Sir's teaching commitment may be decimated by pesky national examinations, there is still much work to be done; after all, pencils don't sharpen themselves, you know.

Would it be insensitive to mention that the school session ends on 24 June, the earliest ever end to hostilities?