Danny spent a couple of days carrying around a stick around as his pirate sword. He took it to music therapy, and went in, explaining to Gustavo, music therapist, that it was his sword. Then they were playing together on the piano, and Danny started using the stick as a baton to conduct while Gustavo played. So Gustavo asked him whether it was a sword or a conductor’s baton. At which, Gustavo says, Danny looked at him like he was bonkers and said “it’s a stick…!” No flies on my kids.
It’s fascinating some of the ground we cover when I am taking English conversation classes. This week I discovered that in the state school system here for every teacher covering a class there are seven teachers being paid a salary. Which is why they aren’t better paid because the country couldn’t afford it. So why don’t we just stop paying a few of the other six inactive staff for every post? Because there is a constitutional clause making it almost impossible to get rid of any public sector employee no matter what they did or didn’t do. Apparently in the last twenty five years in San Francisco two people have been successfully sacked from the municipal payroll, and both of those were for murder, so for anything less, forget it.
Meanwhile, on another tab I am waiting for a page to load, headed “datos personales”. This is the next step in the painful process of registering myself as a potential employee in said education system. So far I still don’t have a recognisable degree, but with my now recognised secondary certificate there are apparently jobs I could apply for if I can get myself onto the list. Two trips by bus to Cordoba, a lot of walking, a fair amount of arguing, and a few emails in between finally won me a registration number written in thick black felt tip pen and handed to me with a “Don’t lose that”. Now I need to upload the same, along with my other personal details to the centralised educational employment pages. I have been doing this on and off for the last two days, with varying levels of frustration. I suspect the server of not being entirely up to the task. The idea of having a centralised employment system was something that I thought might be interesting, maybe even more efficient than having to apply seperately for every job as in my passport country. This may still be true. Somewhere else. Here, the form is indeed centralised. But on the first line of your form you have to specify which schools you would like to work in, up to a maximum of three. So your first task is to guess which three schools out of the forty or so in your local area, might have a vacancy between now and the end of 2018, that you would be a. interested in and b. eligible to apply for. Which might seem rather to defeat the point of having a centralised system.
- Me to Joni: Didn’t I ask you to go through your drawers and give me all the clothes that don’t fit you? (i.e. pretty much everything he owns) so we can see what we need to buy you (i.e. a whole new wardrobe)
- He: Yes, but I haven’t been bored enough yet.