Alright, you fat fuck.

I'm not under any illusions about how my subject area is regarded in this country. Despite this veneer of pride in our supposed multiculturalism - HA! - the majority of native Australians remain steadfastly, stubbornly monolingual, and the height of linguistic prowess is all too often considered to be the ability to say 'Voila' and not spell it 'Viola'. (Right, Bern, Gayle?)

So I know that the other teachers have no idea what I do. I was at university a year and a half longer to be able to do it, but still I can cope with professional development days where LOTE is considered to have been dealt with in depth by the suggestion we cook pizza with the kids. Everything you do as a department I can do on my own. I have to interpret the syllabus and write my own assessment items, criteria sheets, units and work programs. The textbooks available here for language teaching are so appalling I end up making most of my resources too.

I will do all of this without their support because the kids that push through everyone else's discouragement and choose to learn another language are worth their weight in gold, and in my own small way I am helping to make this compartmentalised world a little more open.

So this is all I ask of you, my head of department. Do you think you could wait unti' I'm out of the room until you start bagging my job? If you're going to bitch to my colleagues, one of the other LOTE teachers, no less, about the complete redundancy of my efforts, how you don't want your daughter studying another language, could you not do it when I'm sitting next to you in a meeting? I don't expect you to recognise me as one of your charges - after all, I've only worked in the classroom next to your office for a month now - but it would seem that I have more professionalism in my two front teeth than you have in that enormous gut of yours. Just you fucking watch me run rings around you, you waste of space.