There are a great deal of absurdities that mean my job offers only rare opportunities for teaching English. One way that I keep myself sane is by making my fulfillment of various institutionally-defined roles as efficient and as low-effort as possible. I might be wasting my time and the time of my pupils, but goddammit, I’m going to do so efficiently.

Emacs keeps me on track. I do my thinking at my desk typing into Emacs so that when I’m actually in the lesson, I can get through the textbook material we have to go through without really being awake. Custom Emacs commands set-up the lesson plan in my well-organised folder hierarchy with minimal typing and pressing the return key (to minimise future effort in finding stuff) and Textmate-style snippets fill out chunks of text. One thing I do is ask various questions before and after watching the textbook video clips, which probably has a positive effect of priming the kids to pick something up when they watch and to take something away after, but is mostly just a solid and reliable way to fill the time. I write these questions in advance so that I often totally drift off for thirty seconds when asking. I’ll ask a hard question, and then spend the next forty seconds totally zoned out, repeating the question at different speeds giving them an opportunity to think it through, while I’m not really in the room. Then I’ll come to and realise that I should proceed with the lesson because no-one knows how to answer it.

Another key component is “Mr Whitton’s timers”, pictured above. I wrote it with JQuery and HTML5 using Bootstrap, like everyone else does, and I load it in the browser on the computer in our classroom just over a standard Windows shared folder, a folder on my computer in the office mapped as a network drive in the classroom. The data is stored in the browser’s local storage. It means that I can time an activity by hitting F12 to switch to Firefox (uniform on all the computers I use) and then pressing e.g. 3 to set a timer for 3 minutes. I got tired of always shouting “1, 2, 3” to prompt the whole class to read something together or come up with a sentence at the same time, so I recorded my voice saying it and added it to my web page. I get tired of hitting the bell we have that they know means they should be quiet, so I incorporated playing a bell sound into my web page. Again, I just press F12 and then another key to make the sound play. I refuse to take hold of the mouse of all things and click through various windows to make what I want to happen happen, as I watch my co-workers uncomfortably do—we don’t want to sit down at the desk just to set a countdown for a couple of minutes, but trying to do so while standing up is uncomfortable. I got tired of opening an Excel spreadsheet and typing in the number of minutes of time that a class wasted at the end of the lesson, so I added the times to my web page and set it up to add the time on the time wasting clock directly to a class’s total wasted time by hitting a button.

Then there’s the various routines I’ve developed for stuff I’m required to do outside of lessons. There are three computers in our office and the hardware for each is plugged into a four-way splitter. Two of these splitters are plugged into the third and this is plugged into the wall. At the end of the day we’re required to flick the switch on this master splitter so that no power is running through any of the computers in the room. This makes sense. But we’re also required to turn off the two splitters which are dependent on the main splitter. This achieves nothing, but apparently we’d be reprimanded in certain spot checks (which don’t seem to actually happen). There’s all sorts of requirements like this. So I have a list. It’s scheduled at a certain time of the afternoon. At that time I power my way through all these activities.

I care a lot about my pupils and am always trying to figure out ways in which I might teach them. But I refuse to pretend that they’re being educated when we go through the motions of our textbook. I come alive, and don’t behave as described here, when we do activities that I’ve found online or developed myself.