Background

We handed over our school in Japan last year, into the loving embrace of long-term friends & business rivals, who had already built a successful chain in the region and were busting to break into our town.

We had tired of the travails of being in business for ourselves: I, finally, after beating my head against the wall of long-distance involvment - and Natalie, who had already voted with her feet, 18 months prior, by taking a position with a local education group.

No, I wanted a job where I didn't have to think about staffing issues - including the major dance of finding and bringing them across the world to Japan, all without ever actually meeting them...talk about playing russian roulette!

...and training, management, marketing, course development, accounting...was the cleaner doing a good job...? etc. Everything but the very thing that got me into education: working in the classroom.

So, like a prodigal son, I returned to the Department of Education and Training, the favored fallback for of all who have ever dropped from whatever heights they might have attained and needed a nurturing place to gather their thoughts and lick their wounds.

...The sheer pleasure of being back and working with kids in a creative, albeit highly restrictive and bureaucratically convoluted environment, lasted about a semester.
Not true!

The fun of working with kids never really fades. What palls over time is the red tape and bloody-mindedness of people in educational power who have become vulnerable to the political winds, concerned about their careers and forgetful of what it's like in the classroom...I'm mindful of John Joseph, who told us that "education is a queer profession, in that it allows non-professionals to dictate what our job is and how we must do it."

...but that's all best saved for another place...