distraction

Taught the Kid again on Friday. He asked to do exercises summarising texts and describing pictures, so i gave him articles about military aviation and various horrible airport/airplane disasters (hundreds killed, etc.), and i brought in my print of Titian’s Bacchus & Ariadne.

i guessed that for his test (to be an Air Traffic Controller) he might have to do such exercises while ignoring planned distractions, such as loud noises off, invigilators chatting with each other about hard anal sex, and so on. Accordingly, i asked Todd, a teacher from Chicago, to disrupt the class; he barged in without warning and we had a loud conversation about sex, rape, torture and murder while the Kid worked on his summaries. The Kid did a good job so i went on to bounce about him, making animal noises; when i tired i sat down and stared at him, then read aloud from the Wittgenstein’s Tractatus in my West Yorkshire-accented German, then some songs from Schubert and Rammstein.

He seemed able to ignore these without problems, only looking bemusedly up when i began chanting: “Eins. Zwei. Drei” to say: “Is this Rammstein?” For indeed it was. He said he finds it hard to ignore Rammstein, because he knows the songs (i would find it harder to ignore the unknown). So for tomorrow’s class i’ll recite some hip hop songs at him, by some guy called Akon. i may even do some Tom Cruise-esque hip hop dancing.

These are the lessons i most enjoy. On Saturday i “taught” some apprentices, an impromptu thing as the normal teacher is dead or in prison. A class of ten 18-20-year-olds, this is not my idea of a good time. They are impossible to teach. They all talk continually to each other, in German, fondling their iphones; they completely ignore error correction, don’t even look at the board when i give them new vocab. i had them for 3 hours, tried to teach them for the first 90 minutes then gave up and just kept giving them coffee breaks every 20 minutes, and chatted with the only bright student there, ignoring the rest, who were happy to be ignored.

They weren’t as horrible as the apprentice shits i “taught” in Kassel. When i barked “silence!” yesterday’s brats all immediately stopped talking, and stared at me apprehensively, probably expecting a meritorious & well-deserved thrashing. In Kassel, it was necessary to scream and hammer on the table. i recall in one lesson shouting: “Silence, you dogs!”, which worked for about 30 seconds then they began giggling in German again, the disgusting little fucks.

i’ll be paid 100 € for the 3 hours i spent pretending to teach these filthy scum, 26 € for the 90 minutes with the Kid. The first is for a small independent school, the second for McLingua. McLingua has a steady stream of students like the Kid, for whom one has to do out-of-the-ordinary lessons, but the pay is shit. i tire of ordinary teaching, which includes the pretend-teaching of apprentices. One can only teach the same tense, or vocab, so many thousand times before it becomes stale & tedious. It helps that each student is different; but not different enough, alas. My mind goes onto stand-by mode when i teach Comparatives or the Present Perfect, because i’ve done it so many times.

It’s still a billion trillion times better than minimum wage data entry in England. However, i would prefer a job only tangentially to do with teaching English, for example giving people articles to summarise and then chanting Rammstein at them, or sending my armies to war in my name – that is the right kind of job for me.

Another week begins tomorrow and i know i will find it hard to concentrate to do any real reading or writing. When i get a seat on the s-bahn i read, otherwise not. At McLingua – even with 6 hour gaps between lessons – i can’t focus to do anything but listlessly surf the internet. i generally leave my flat at 0630 and get home around 2200 so there’s no time for focussed reading/writing, only at the weekend, if i don’t sleep it away.

i feel i have fizzled out like a bad firework, and my present life resembles a burnt-out rocket, such as i found on the McLingua balcony last week. Incongruous and pointless but there it is.