Duke, Stop Fucking Around and Pay Attention!

I've never been diagnosed as having ADHD but working with a number of pupils who have I find myself coming to the conclusion that I show many of the symptoms.

It affects me in a variety of ways. I get bored quickly and often find myself being distracted by anything other than what I should actually be doing.

I have great plans for my blog. I think of running jokes or thematic posts that I feel would be hilarious. Look at the manifesto post. Sure, it's a bit overlong and somewhat wordy but I thought it was quite funny. I then thought I'd run a series of posts based on a fictional parliamentary candidate getting into all kinds of amusing scrapes. Once again, plenty of room for cringe-worthy humour. Then I got bored writing about it. After ONE post.

I've done it before. I wrote a political profile on Lord Mandelson which I thought would turn into a series of satirical pokes at major British politicians. Didn't do it. How about the teaching advice posts that you promised us, Duke? Meh, other stuff happened.

How about my grand scheme to report the news in the style of a 1920s old time imperialist ("Today in the colonies there was some shooting. No white people were hurt.")? Or my plan to use literary critical theories to deconstruct the lyrics of modern pop songs (a Marxist reading of 'Single Ladies [Put A Ring On It]' anyone?) None of it happened. None of it will happen. As such my blog drifts aimlessly between personal mewlings and social commentary without any form of overall structure.

And it's not just on my blog. I can pretty much get any class I teach to be absolutely silent and working away like happy little things. That's great. Some teachers can't. The trouble is that I get bored so quickly that I start to wind the kids up. Stealing their pencil cases and hiding them. Pulling faces. Singing a nice song (currently my number one choice is 'Free Nelson Mandela' - I know not why). The other day I made a shadow puppet of a dog on the projector screen and pretended that it was throwing up the words on the PowerPoint I was using (yes, with sound effects). The kids generally ignore it or tell me to go away. One pupil once told me to 'grow up man-child'. Fair play.

This mucking around can occasionally turn a peaceful classroom into something approaching Brixton circa 1981. I then have to battle to get them quiet again.

Why do I do this? What possible use could it serve?

And when I have to complete work on my own I procrastinate like a mother fucker. If I have an 'absolute-must-finish' job I will spend twenty minutes working for every forty-five minutes of fucking about. This could be checking my blog, walking to the other side of the school to tell someone something (rather than send an email), try to improve my juggling, researching technical rugby moves that I will never pull off or even just staring at the light reflecting off the white board onto my ceiling. Sure, it looks pretty but I don't need it in my life.

It means that I'm 'okay' at a number of things (playing guitar, cooking, writing) but don't have the attention span to learn properly. Most of the computer games I buy are half finished. I listen to a CD non-stop for a week then put it away for the next twelve months.

There are however, some advantages. For instance, I have a knowledge about a lot of things. You could ask me a question on Roman civilisation, Russian literature or science and I'm usually pretty good at giving a half-decent response. I know, for example, that light can function as both a particle and a wave, that it is based on probability and can be in two places at once. That sounds impressive but that is the limit for me. I can't draw the equation that shows this for two reasons - I suck at maths and if I sat down, determined to get better, I would get distracted by a bee or something.

Anyway, I'm getting bored writing this. I'm off to play in my last match of the season. Have I told you about rugby?

Oh man rugby's great! So are 'Tool'! Dude, you've gotta listen to 'Tool'. They rock! Oh, have you ever eaten scallops? What about proper homemade jam? Do you watch 'Lost'? Yeah, I got bored too. How about 'The Wire'? It's great!

Ooh, look. A bee.

I Say Gerald, This Shit Just Got Real...

I'm really fucking excited!

I've just had through the accommodation spec for China.

How this may seem like a small thing to get worked up about. Some facts about how big the rooms are and how many bathrooms there are? This should be enough to send any sane person into a catatonic state only surfacing to take on some more ale.

What it does for me is make me put the hood of my hoodie over my head and run around the room like Superman.

It has been a week of excitement in this regard (not running around like Superman - that's next week) as my current job was advertised and has been filled.

BY TWO PEOPLE!

This means one of two things:

1) I'm like a messiah when it comes to the teaching profession and my Jedi-like understanding of pedagogy is so vast that the only way to compensate for my leaving is to get two people to do my job.

2) I've fucked up so much that the only way the school will be able to unravel the matted, unwashed and infested rug of my mistakes is to get two people working on it full time.

I'm going with number one (although I suspect I may be wrong).

It's a strange feeling being involved with the interview process for your own job. I have to say I was also frustrated by my workplace's lack of imagination when it came to possible interview techniques. None of my suggestions were taken up. These included:

§ Wrestling on the field (yes Seb, it was muddy and yes Seb, they were all female),

§ Asking the candidates to hum the Brazilian national anthem,

§ Getting the candidates to demonstrate how a cat would perform star jumps,

§ Holding up a red card and asking 'if this card wasn't red, what colour would it be?'

§ Requesting that the candidates say 'penile dysfunction' without giggling.

In the end though the people who got the (my) job are both fantastic teachers and they will do exceptionally well.

What all these little things do is make it all seem very real. I only have fifteen weeks of teaching before I bugger off on the biggest adventure of my life.

I do however foresee a problem with my current levels of excitement. In that I still have to do my job. I have to do it well. Or I'll be letting the school, the department and the kids down.

There are only so many times that I can be asked 'Duke, have you done this?' and I reply with:

'FUCK YOU MIDDLE AGED LINE MANAGER! I'M GOING TO CHINA'

I suspect once. On my last day.

There is another slightly more sobering side effect of this unbridled joy that I feel. The more excited I get about it the more 'real' (in a hippity-hop kind of way) it seems to the Duchess. The more I skip about singing 'I'm Going to China' to the tune of 'La Cucarachia' the more she realises that I'm feking off 8,000 miles away in a few months. That's not to say she isn't excited for me, or that she doesn't understand why I'm going but that she knows that it will be really hard for her to be alone. She is scared of the possibilities. The what ifs. The maybes.

So I have a bit of a dilemma. Either, I can be a proper boyfriend, go a bit low-key on the whole 'YIP-A-FUCK-A-DO' and acknowledge all the support that she has given me in getting this far in my career; or I get t-shirts made up with a photo of my face hovering over China and a massive shit-eating grin slapped on my chops.

Nah, I'm not that much of a cunt.