I haven’t really done traditional journalling-style blogging here, so let’s find out if that’s a thing I do. Some things, maybe, aren’t best served by a weird joke on short text-based social media.
For the past… probably eight months1This started between semesters last year. my schedule at school has included a… very rough 9:30 to 21:30 Monday. Last year that last class was Art History, with just the six of us.2I’m in the short version of the art teacher course, because as a fully licensed cartoonist I’ve obviously already got a diploma for the art part and I just need to do the teacher part. This 2-year version typically picks up between six and a dozen people a year. Last year most of our classes were just the six of us — this year most of our classes are with the third years of the 4-year version. Come next semester we’ll legally be fourth years. That specific configuration, with a fairly relaxed teacher who had the whole year to convey information to us, worked pretty well. Acceptable execution of a shitty situation nobody was happy about.
But this year, that last class has been Education3Or “Onderzoekswerkplaats,” technically, if you’d like a great word for Hangman or Scrabble, but that’s really just the other half of the class we call “Education.”, which means, a lot of fairly heavy information in the philosophy and pedagogy zones, which means, class from a teacher who is great but also a sentient bouncy ball even at literal night.4Esther! Calm down! All of this, surrounded by 25 energetic third-years whose primary passion appears to be to generate with their mouths a bed of static noise that makes it impossible to think. If you’d ever wanted to experience cognitive overload, room 4.18 at my school was the place to be on Mondays from 18:45 to 21:30.
I’m not kidding when I say cognitive overload — it’s like it was scheduled specifically to totally fry my brain. The volume of the information we were supposed to take in ratcheted up through the morning and afternoon, then came essentially to a total stop for Media5For me, anyway, because, like, video editing and HTML, please, in my sleep, I’ve got an exemption, I could teach this class, but even if you’re new to all of that it’s honestly a fairly chill couple of hours. and a lengthy dinner break, only to then launch right back into the HARD KNOWLEDGE of yer BILDUNGS and yer GERT BIESTA and yer THE BANALITY OF EVIL. This didn’t do justice to the great, well-prepared, informative classes, and it didn’t do justice to us as students who would be eager to learn and work with all of this information under better circumstances. I’m sorry, but after a full day like that you were just never gonna pull anything meaningful about the banality of evil out of me at 21:00.6In the morning I’m a writer, in the afternoon I’m a poet, in the evening I’m a comedian — but at night I’m a haunted shell of a person, apparently.
But that’s all in the past tense, because as of next week7No regular classes this week. Media8And the third-years’ Music class, too, I… have to imagine. is moving to Tuesdays, which makes space for that late, late class to move to the much more reasonable 15:30 – 18:00 slot. And thank fuck for that. It’s a little like, and this is definitely a metaphor that’s way too heavy for this specific scenario, I’ve been told the war is over and I’m now just waiting to learn when we’re being shipped back home. This war, if you’ll continue to allow me the metaphor, has taken its victims — by what we now know to be the last battle9Last late class. half of my little Six of Us gang wasn’t showing up any more. One of us was approaching a burnout, one chose to prioritise their family. I was being a real trooper, but I’ll definitely need a real refresher on this info before the end of the semester, and, like, by that last class I was giving a presentation lying down on a table because that was the only way it was gonna happen. What would another few months of this have done to me?