SO BUSY! And a Tale of Two Blankets

Crikey, where has the time gone?

That's a rhetorical question. I know exactly where it's gone. SCHOOL. There's school, stupidball, knitting for tutor-group, marking, woodwork classes, helping the Tetris Queen move house (yes, I have the house to myself again), meetings, more school, more marking.....

You know what there ISN'T, on that list? Riding my motorcycle. *sigh* and it won't be on the list for a bit longer yet. Thank goodness I'm a patient person. Poor Piglet has become a commuter bike. How embarrassing.

A metamorphosis is underway, although not of the motorcycling sort. I've been writing every single day - nothing special, but I'm getting words on the page, and re-establishing my old habit of writing every day. I'm actually motivated by one of my classes in particular - the Year 12 Writers' Workshop.

I'm working at getting my writing mojo back. That's a plus.

And this weekend I'm off to Mallacoota to mow the lawn before the snakes decide to hide in it. That's another plus.

SO SO busy! My tutor group has almost finished its second blanket. I'm so proud of those kids - I learned to knit earlier in the year so I could teach the kids in my tutor group how to knit, so we could make blankets for charity as our tutor-group service project. It's been an amazing project. So satisfying to watch a group of kids sitting in their little gaggles, knitting happily and chatting away. And we'll have blankets at the end of it - something the kids can look at and feel proud of before we donate them to our chosen charity - YouthCARE Canberra - a community organisation that relies on donations for its survival (no government funding or church affiliations) - and they care for at-risk and homeless youth in the Canberra region.

Our two blankets may not go very far in terms of warming Canberra's homeless youth - we can only warm two of them after all that work - but the amount of work that went into those blankets has taught my tutor-group kids a lot about making a commitment, sticking to a task and the satisfaction you get from making something yourself rather than throwing money at a charity and feeling smug.

It's involved a lot of people besides my tutor-group. My Basketball parents, and others from the school community donated wool. Kids who aren't even in my tutor-group have spent time knitting with us. The Fashion Design class pinned all our completed squares together as a design project, and the Fashion teacher made valuable suggestions for sewing the completed squares together. It's been a great project - and it's not quite finished yet. I'm in the process of knitting/attaching the borders to the blankets, and contacting the lady from the charity so we can organise a time to present them with our finished product.

I won't be sorry to finish the project - I've felt inspired to start knitting a jumper that I'd like to be able to wear NEXT winter - yes, it'll take me that long to make it. Also, I have writing projects, woodwork projects and house renovation projects that I need to get onto pronto. There are plenty of school deadlines - marking, assessments, exams, reports - to get through. Stupidball finishes in two weeks (phew!) and I also need to sell my house. Eek.


For now, though. I'm just being happy about our blankets.

See below, added 2 October: The finished product, at last, handed over to YouthCARE Canberra at the last assembly of term. YAY!

Politicians and teachers: a rant

Back off, Christopher Pyne!

I am so, so sick of politicians taking potshots at teachers. The latest drivel to drip from the lips of one of our overpaid pollies is this: that 'underperforming' teachers should be removed from 'the system'. Ol' ChrisPy, with a smirk that would do Peter Costello proud, thinks money spent reducing class sizes has been 'wasted', because Asian schools have big classes and manage to out-perform Aussie schools. He thinks the wrong kind of people are entering the profession for all the wrong reasons - because they think it's going to be 'easy'.

Actually, this makes me so angry that it has rendered me (almost) speechless. I'd like to wipe the smirk from Mr Pyne's face by sitting him in front of 45 exuberant adolescent Aussies, half of whom have a below-average IQ, who would rather be outside kicking a footy around, who don't want to learn, who prefer Facebook to Physics and Angry Birds to angry teachers, who have parents with no manners who don't value education themselves because they left school at 15, and 'done all right', and handing Mr Pyne a copy of Macbeth. 

'Perform or be removed,' I would say to him. 'Their results are a direct reflection of your worth.'

Comparing Aussie schools to East Asian schools is a joke - it's comparing apples and hippos, FFS. It's not the teachers who are the problem. Australian society's larrikin attitude to education has to change. As long as teacher-bashing is a national pastime (short hours, long holidays - teaching's soooo eeeeeasy, teachers are all overpaid bludgers, and what use is History anyway?) many of our students will continue to undervalue education and underperform at school.

Schools are microcosms of society, not homogeneous little divisions of corporate Australia or (heaven forbid) the Australian Public Service. Yes, they are often staffed by people who may be employed by the government or the church, but they are filled with students - bright and dull, keen and lethargic, but all human - and the performance of this disparate mass of youngsters (some of whom are, not to put too fine a point on it, as dumb as dogshit and twice as nasty) is seen as an indicator of the teacher's ability to teach. Reducing this ebullient mass of humanity to a series of performance indicators and league tables is farcical. This is why politicians should keep their noses out of schools. 

It's dangerous. There's a legion of hardworking, exhausted teachers out here in the Real World banging our collective heads against brick walls, going back to school every day because we care about the kids and we understand the value of education as an aid to social mobility. We want that for our students, but not all of them want it for themselves. It's hard work, learning - harder for some than for others.

Holding a big stick over our heads, and telling us we have to make silk purses from some of the sow's ears we teach, or else, is not going to work. Playing politics with our schools by making ridiculous comparisons between Aussie schools and Asian schools when our cultures and values are so vastly different, isn't helpful. In fact, it's downright counter-productive.

Oh, and a final point, My Pyne, before I get off my soapbox. You said

"At the moment, unfortunately, a survey was handed down in 2010 which showed that the students who are choosing teaching are choosing it because it's cheap, because it's not going to push them much further than they were in Year 12 and because they think it's easy.

"Now that's not the kind of students we want to be teaching our young people."

Don't worry, Chris - they won't be. Not for long, anyway. Have you seen the stats regarding the numbers of new teachers who are leaving the profession when they realise how difficult it is? When they realise the level of commitment that teaching requires is so much greater than they had thought? When they find out it's exhausting, frustrating, often unrewarding? When they feel so utterly unsupported by legislators, regulators, pontificating government powerbrokers? When no amount of money can make up for the levels of stress they feel? Have a look here

Bloody politicians! Just back off. Please.

Office Memo

Dear Anonymous Car-Driving Member of Staff,

You recently sent me a verbal request via one of the office ladies. You wondered whether I might park my Harley on a gravel verge, instead of taking up a ‘car space’ in the staff parking area.

The answer is an emphatic no. For lots of reasons.

1. I’m staff and I need to park. That is what the staff parking area is for.
2. There’s no dedicated motorcycle parking at school – simply a ‘staff parking area’. I park in a designated parking space, just like everybody else. Anybody else who rides a motorcycle is welcome to share that space with me.
3. Piglet is a road bike, not a dirt bike. I am not going to try to manhandle 250kgs of Harley Davidson onto a small sloping patch of fine-crushed gravel on a clay base. You are totally clueless if you think that would be a simple thing to do. Gravel is unstable and slippery, and the clay beneath it turns into even slipperier mud in the rain. Given my history, it’s best avoided.  
4. Said gravel patch is used as a thoroughfare by students crossing the access road, and I’m not prepared to leave said Harley Davidson in their path.
5. I take up one parking space, which is no more than anybody else.  The difference is, I use single-person transportation. Perhaps there’d be more room in the parking area if a few more people rode single-person transport instead of whopping great 4-wheel drives or family sedans that are made to carry 4 or more people.
6. I am usually the first or second person to arrive in the morning, and the parking area is empty then. Perhaps you should get to work earlier.

Thank you, that is all.

Meltdown

There probably isn’t much in this world that’s more embarrassing than sitting in a classroom full of teenagers and being utterly unable to stop tears from pouring down your face. Except perhaps doing it twice.


What triggered it? Who knows? Sleeplessness, exhaustion and relentless overwork, more than likely. Whatever the cause, the descent into marking and reporting hell put me over the edge this semester. My brain, over-tired, decided that if I wasn’t going to give it a break, it was going to take a break of its own.

When I couldn’t stop crying, my head of faculty sent me home via the doctor. The doctor put me off work.
I didn’t cook a single meal for myself. I rarely ate. I slept a bit. I babbled inanely on Facebook, just to have some communication with the outside world, to prove to myself that I was still compos mentis (because everybody knows how much brainpower Facebook demands, right?)

I decluttered the house, but couldn’t declutter my mind.

I couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t think straight. I still had to get my reports written. It took me about four days to churn out some embarrassingly bad reports (wonder if I can get four days of sick leave restored? Hmmm, probably not. And unfortunately I now have no sick leave left.)

I’ve been back at school for 5 days now and I’ve cried almost every day. I feel like a ghost, drifting through the days and trying to hold it together. Some days I manage better than others, but I have to show up for work every day for the next 3 weeks; have to supervise and mark exams, proofread reports, go to meetings; have to listen to the very public digs of a bullying boss. What the hell am I doing to myself? A job is not supposed to reduce a person to this, to strip a person of their sense of self worth and turn them into a gibbering and inadequate wreck. I’m better than this.

An hour ago I marked my last essay for the year. Can I have my brain back now, please?

Mental Hellth Pt II

Betty claws her way out of the Pit of Despair and peers around, blinking like an owl in the sunlight – and twitching, definitely twitching.  A nervous tic above her right eye, yes. She looks around furtively and checks over her shoulder, then lays a finger to quivering lips.

Sssssshhhhhhh, don’t tell anyone I’m here, she says.

The blog sits impassively. Betty throws caution to the wind and flings herself at it, squealing with delight.

Oh, little blog! How I have missed you! It feels like forever – I’m so so sorry! It’s been just dreadful.

The blog stares blankly. Betty looks hurt.

Oh, come on, don’t be like that – I don’t have long. I have to be back in Reporting Hell soon. I just snuck out for a quick visit – I’ve been so desperate. Couldn’t get out any earlier coz I was stuck in Marking Hell, and that’s one level deeper than Reporting Hell.

She looks at the clock on the wall and grimaces, then starts babbling.
 
I’ve been doing the numbers. Listen to these –

The number of 12-hour days I’ve worked in the last few weekends - 3

The number of days last weekend that I was too sick to do any exam marking at all - 3

The number of exams I marked between 4.30am Tuesday and 1pm Wednesday of this week - 3

The number of days I got to school at 7.30am and didn’t leave before 6pm - 13

The number of days I got to school before 7.30am and didn’t leave till after 6.30pm - 2

The number of Year 10 reports I wrote - 50+

The number of Year 11/12 reports I wrote - 50+

The number of other people’s reports I proofread/edited - 100+

The number of tutor group reports I have yet to write - 20+

The number of times I thought about walking out and never going back - 20+

The blog’s upper lip starts quivering. It’s only human, after all. Betty flings her arms around it again.

Yes, it’s been horrible – horrible! But guess what? There have been some bright spots in there – like diamonds twinkling in a bucket of shit. I haven’t got time to tell you about them, but as soon as I get out of Reporting Hell I will. Here’s a hint: motorbikes!

On hearing the word motorbikes, the blog relaxes.  Betty is still carrying her walking stick everywhere, but only using it for minimal support these days, and is booked in for another xray.
That stubborn bone will surely be mended by now, thinks the blog. Perhaps then, Madwoman Betty will calm down, cheer up, chill out.

Betty seems to read its mind, and laughs maniacally. An unseen force begins pulling her backwards. She scrabbles for balance, but is drawn, almost magnetically, kicking and screaming, towards the bleak, swirling vortex that will drag her back down to Reporting Hell for another week.

The blog pricks up its ears. It’s sure it hears Betty’s voice piping through the swirling miasma:

I’ll be baaaaaaaaaack!

Mental Hellth - living the dream

You know those nightmares you have when you are heading inexorably towards your doom (falling from a cliff, driving an out-of-control car, that sort of thing) and you can’t do a damned thing about it? You can’t even scream out because for some reason your voice won’t work. You can’t breathe, you can’t move, you can’t do anything to help yourself – you just watch everything unfolding, a sense of silent desperate helpless hopeless frustration gripping you. There is no escape.

That’s my life right now. It’s why I’m blogging, instead of marking the 60-odd essays, writing the 120 reports, and creating the two exams – Herculean tasks, all of them - that are due this week. Blog and be damned, because you can't do all that other stuff - there’s simply no way. 

I managed to mark 30 essays today, after starting at 5am. Yes, it is Sunday. Somewhere in there I managed to cook 2 vats of soup so at least I will have easy-to-prepare, no-fuss food this week, rather than opening a bag of potato chips.

I give up. It can’t be done. My head hurts. I’ve cried this week, several times, out of sheer exhaustion and frustration. I teach such a full load that I barely have any free periods during the day. So - just about all my planning and marking has to be done outside school hours. Oh, but school manages to eat into that time as well. There's a meeting every Monday till 5pm and basketball training every Thursday after school. There’s a basketball game every Saturday, and last week there was one 7.30-6pm day and one 7.30-7.30pm day at school, so I didn’t really have much time outside school hours to do any of my school work then either. I can't run on adrenalin any more, coz I used it all up.

I am so tired by the end of the day that I can’t think straight. Mindless, I can’t even enjoy reading a good book before bed. Besides, if I had any mental energy left I would have to spend it on marking, not reading a book for pleasure. My eyeballs are full of sand. I wake at 5am with lead in my veins, and organise my lessons for the day so I can at least survive one day at a time. Still no time to do my marking. Did I mention my head hurts?

Shopping? I try to sneak in a bit of time for grocery shopping. A zombie shuffle along the supermarket aisles is almost therapeutic, except for the guilt induced by the fact that it's eating into my marking time. Last Friday, having run out of food and energy, I bought breakfast from *gasp* the McDonalds drive-through, on the way to school at 7am. Nice one.

My house is a pig-sty. My garden is overgrown and neglected. I spend my days and nights paralysed with tiredness and frustration, and have to conserve all my strength to get myself through the days at school, teaching one class after another in a relentless bloody grind. Mark your essays, I tell myself. Fuck off, says my overcooked brain, fighting for its life by retreating into avoidance mode – because that's all it can do - and the problem is compounded. My life is an endless vortex of overwork and guilt. It's hell on earth.

I’m living the dream all right. The one where I am heading inexorably towards my doom (falling from a cliff, driving an out-of-control car, that sort of thing) and I can’t do a damned thing about it. I just watch everything unfolding, a sense of silent desperate helpless hopeless frustration gripping me. There is no escape.

End of Term Madness

Remember my ‘off’ three weeks ago on Macquarie Pass? Well… the doctor in Accident & Emergency back in Canberra – the one who sent me home with Nurofen, a pat on the head, 3 days off work and a diagnosis of a ‘pulled muscle’ was WRONG. What I actually have is a stable, undisplaced fracture (yes, fracture) of the superior & inferior pubic rami. A minor pelvic fracture, certainly, but something a little more serious than a pulled muscle. Still gobsmacked that a person can show up in A&E after a motorcycle accident FFS, complaining of severe groin pain, and the bloody doc doesn’t bother to have the pelvis x-rayed! Am I wrong to be a bit worried about the standard of A&E doctors? Thank goodness for a switched-on GP!

So – I had a whole week off school. And what a shitty week it was. During that time I had my poor old cat euthanased. I cried buckets, tried to get as much rest as I could, borrowed an automatic car from Mrs Boomerang Boy, to get myself to x-ray & CT appointments, and felt pretty sorry for myself. My bike was officially written off by the insurance company. I went back to school for the very busy final 2 weeks of term, on crutches, unable to do stairs, and set up camp in my downstairs classroom.

The school, the staff and the kids were brilliant. A small and evil, but essentially, rational part of me says “well so they should be – it wouldn’t have been unreasonable for me to spend the remainder of term on sick leave!”, BUT – I'm also incredibly grateful for the way people were able to shuffle things around and step up to help me out. While bits of my body may have been a little bit broken, my brain wasn’t, and typing up lesson plans to send to school for someone else to teach, when I felt mentally capable of teaching the lessons myself, was driving me batty. I wanted to be at school with my students, dammit! Things like playground duty, however, were out of the question - and my busy colleagues covered my duties and swapped classrooms with me, and were absolutely wonderful.

It’s true what they say about adversity often bringing out the best in people - and I learned a LOT in the last fortnight!

Apart from having it reinforced that I work with a wonderful bunch of people, I also learned that:

• Year 10 boys get a big kick out of taking a turn around the room on the teacher’s crutches – and will queue up for the privilege!
• It makes students feel important if you ask them for help – whether it’s carrying stuff or scribing on the board for you – and they actually worry about their spelling when they’re writing it up in public!
• Ex-students and students you don’t even know very well are keen to touch base and make sure you’re ok after something like a bike crash. I seriously felt so ‘cared-about’, there were times when I struggled not to get all teary!
• Photocopying makes us lazy, and you don’t realise it until you can’t get to the photocopier and have to resort to low-tech or no-tech!

Having said all that – the last two weeks have been difficult, and the last week, with Basketball Presentation night, a Parent-Teacher evening and three full days of marking Yr11-12 Oral presentations was actually a sort of hell. There were times that I didn’t think I’d manage to hobble to the end of term – but I did! And now - thank goodness for school holidays! And thank goodness for Mallacoota – my equilibrium is in severe need of equilibrating (is that even a word???)

It's happened! (Actually, it happened a couple of weeks ago, but I've been so busy I haven't had a chance to blog it, so let me try and drum up an air of spontaneity anyway, ok?)

It's happened – wheeeeeeeeeee! I have a new job! (It's not strictly a new job, coz it's where I worked for 8 years before I took a break from teaching – but it's sort of new, so let me pretend, ok?)

My return to teaching has been a bit of a mixed bag. The biggest change has been trying to get used to the ACT college system, and while it certainly has its good points, things like the BSSS website have done my head in.

Canberra is a Public Service city, and the BSSS is a kick-in-the-guts reminder of that. The bureaucracy that underpins the college system, and the website that is its government-to-teacher interface, is the most user-unfriendly, totally unintuitive, faceless, soulless juggernaut in the whole of the National Capital.

The school where I currently teach began as a small community school. It's now a lot bigger than that, but it still has a warm fuzzy small-community-school feel that is at odds with the hard-edged bureaucratic bullshit that it has to work within. (sorry – “within which it has to work”.) Its clientele isn't sure whether it wants to be 'small-town' or 'big city' – but, trust me, the two make uncomfortable bedfellows.

So I'm moving on. Or rather, moving back. Going back to the place where I taught for eight years. Back to a system I know and feel comfortable with (with which I feel comfortable. I know proper grammar lol).

Am I going round in circles? Is it ever really possible to 'go back'? Well - I'm about to find out, and I'm quite excited in a sort of bittersweet way. One of my lovely students gave me choccies and a card yesterday. It read "Thank you for being such an awesome, down to earth, friendly teacher. I will miss you heaps but I wish you the very best in your new school."

Watch this space.

Marking Hell

Poor blog. I wanted to tell you all about my new bike, my new job, and the metamorphosis of Miffy – but it will all have to wait. I'm in marking hell.

This is a twice a year phenomenon. Exams must be written and marked, reports must be written, deadlines must be met, nervous breakdowns must be had. At the moment I'm still in the exam phase. Over the next two weeks the rest of the process will be gone through, by hook or by crook. Holy crap, there aren't enough hours in the day (or night!) and I'm sooo tired already. Remind me why I wanted to be a teacher again? Clearly I have a masochistic streak a mile wide.

This is the time of year when, theoretically, all my hard work comes to fruition and my lovely students prove what a wonderful teacher I've been. This is when they make me proud by doing so very well in their end of year exams, and I head into the holidays basking in the rosy glow of accomplishment. As I said, that's the theory.

Sadly, in reality, my fruit crop this year is a little bruised and full of fruit-fly. Sigh. Bad apples and too-cool bananas abound. Some are just immature and unripe by exam time. Peaches and star-fruits, bless 'em, are few and far between. My rosy glow is more of an embarrassed blush as I read some of the young scholars' answers ('Where did they pull THAT one from?')and I am more likely to limp into the holidays shattered, battered and broken.

And I'll go back for more of the same next year. What was that I said about masochism?

See you next time I surface!.