Little life

I sometimes think about how, since retirement, my life has narrowed. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. As a college teacher, I was constantly interacting with many, many students and this was never-endingly interesting but also never-endingly exhausting. Now, I meet up with friends and of course spend lots of time with the grandchildren, but life is nothing like as varied as it was. Or, I suppose as stimulating, but then, stimulating = exhausting, so again, the change is good in a way.


Anyway, Grandson and I made pancakes, or as some people might call them, Scotch pancakes (but we wouldn't because... you know... they're what we regard as pancakes).

He was pleased.


We saw all the offspring at the weekend and it was Mother's Day, so that was lovely. Cruelly, I persuaded Daughter 2 and Son to go up on the kitchen roof to clean the outside of the skylights. Granddaughter found this very interesting. (She's wearing her brother's hat and Daughter 2's scarf. She loves accessories and is very loth to go hatless at any time, which is a pity since hats squash her curls.)

This is what she was looking at.

And here are my favourite people (well, most of them) on Saturday.


And, below, the grandchildren at the museum. Granddaughter chose her own outfit, hence the lack of colour coordination.


Though teaching was exhausting, looking after two little lively people isn't exactly restful either. But oh, how I love them.


(Oh, Blogger is being so annoying, making my photos huge (which is all right, but I don't know why it's happening), putting the first one through the About bit, and then not letting me write under the final photo. Anyway, I've just realised that my blog is 10 years 4 days old. What a lot of blethers have come out of the ends of my fingers in the last 10 years and, oh, how my life has changed since then. Not, generally, for the better, but the little people have compensated for a lot of sadness.)

Education and sleep and such matters

I don't think I have a lot to say. Life is pleasant enough on the whole but not full of thrills. But here is Grandson, this morning, looking at a German documentary with his dad (who has a degree in German. Discouragingly, though I did school German, the only word in this particular subtitle that I fully understand is "Menschen").

Granddaughter was unimpressed. But cute.

While we were in Wales, Son and Daughter-in-Law were catsitting and Son took a picture of Cassie on our relatively new garden seat. I hadn't thought of the sides as being a handy ladder, but she clearly does.

I had a dream last night which I remembered far more vividly than usual. I won't recite all the details but it concerned my having agreed to go back to teach for a month in the school where I worked from 1973-1979. The school had been evacuated from its normal building to temporary accommodation in a nearby small town. I got the bus (from the house we lived from 1975-1989), helped an old man pick up the groceries he'd dropped on the floor of the bus, asked the bus driver where to get off, asked for directions from a lady who was weeding her driveway in company with her small girl, walked up a hillside (which had a small shrine to Margaret Thatcher), got into the building and couldn't find anyone. It appeared to be deserted.

At this point, I woke up and was so relieved to find it was a dream. Not only do I not want to be a schoolteacher again (I didn't much want to even when I was one - further education was blissfully better) but I didn't know which classes I was to take, had done no preparation and was arriving at 12 noon to take an immediate class instead of - as I'd intended (but forgotten) to do, getting there at 8.30 am with time to get myself organised.

This is just the sort of anxiety dream I used to have when teaching, which was ridiculous because I always did plenty of preparation and would never have forgotten to turn up on time. I think this dream was caused by my having gone to the theatre yesterday evening with a friend who's still at the college, and hearing about all the stressful changes that are going on there.

Why the old chap with his dropped groceries, though? And the shrine to Margaret Thatcher? - it had a model of her head which got bigger and smaller in some magic way and was surrounded by toy vehicles (as you'd expect...).

Yes, well. As I said. Nothing much is happening. Which is all right, compared to the scenario of the dream.

School and other studying occasions

Nothing of any interest happened today until the evening, when I went to choir and we attempted to learn Kyrie II from Haydn's "Mass for St Cecilia". This is fiendishly hard but potentially lovely. It wasn't lovely as we sang it tonight but our rendering of it did improve slightly.

So instead of recounting how I made cups of tea and went to the supermarket, I thought I'd blog about Miss H, my primary 5 class teacher. We were 9 years old. There were three new girls in the class and I was assigned to look after one of them - W. Miss H was just giving an introductory spiel when W whispered a question to me. I think it was, "When's lunch?" Whatever it was, I whispered a reply and Miss H heard. She got me to stand up, asked me my name and then said, "I can see you're going to be a troublemaker."

And for the rest of the year, I was convinced that she thought I was indeed a troublemaker. Which I wasn't. I'm not saying that I was a saint, but my sins were discreet and never noticed.

I realised long ago that, in fact, Miss H probably never gave her assessment of me another thought after that moment. I don't suppose that she did really think I was a troublemaker even as she said it. And yet, 52 years later, I can remember the room, and where I was sitting, and where W sat at the desk to my left, and the exact tone of Miss H's rather posh English voice.

Now, I'm not claiming that my childhood was completely warped by this experience. I wasn't even terribly traumatised that year, though I was wary of Miss H because of what she'd said (and, I assumed, what she thought of me). But it was a lesson to me that a teacher can do a lot of damage by an unconsidered remark. She was actually rather good fun (if a bit sarcastic) most of the time.

I imagine that most people have such experiences; and I just hope that I don't feature in a similar role in any of my pupils' or students' memories.

It was a year ago exactly that our darling Daughter 2 went to live in London. This has been very much not the best year of my life - though lovely Grandson does bring a warm glow.

Wise sayings

"It's a pity," said my colleague J, slightly late for class because he was searching frantically for the handouts he had photocopied just minutes before, "that there are only a certain number of times you can say: I'm usually very organised ... ."

(The picture is not of J but of Daughter 1's guinea pig Pumpkin. Look at the light of intelligence in her eyes. )

Another successful lesson

We were reading a newspaper article and considering the writer's style. We discussed his word choice, his use of sentence structure and imagery, the effect of the headline, the impact of the opening paragraph, the neatness of the closing paragraph, his use of repetition and humour and allusion and so on.

"Now write a paragraph on how effective you find his writing," I said.

And I got, from one student: "The language of this piece is short and simple but worth every penny."

Profound analysis.

Totally irrelevant picture of Sirius and a box

Below is the agenda sent to me today for a meeting next week. The names have all been changed but you might be able to detect a touch of blarney. Which item do you think I'm looking forward to most?

Good Practice seminar

Agenda

1. John Bloggs – welcome and rationale for Good Practice events
2. Sheila Smiggs – ‘Synergy in action (core skills)’
3. Harry Higgs – 'The College YouTube site’
4. Barry O’Potts – ‘Using communication delivery to prepare students for external exams in their vocational subjects or why I like to re-invent the wheel every time I get a new class and how that ages me prematurely’ *
5. General Good Practice discussion
6. Agenda for future meetings
7. AOB

* Let me assure you, I know exactly how he feels.

Two emails

Well, here’s the Life Christmas tree. Mr Life nobly did his stuff (aided by Daughter 2) with a saw and electricity and water – not the best combination for a man who had already erected his mother-in-law’s tree and now had a sore back and a desire to sit and watch “Scrubs” on tv. However, he lived to tell the tale. Three cheers for Mr Life!

Excuse my boasting (I don't get much opportunity really) but I got a lovely email from the mother of one of my students the other day. Further education teachers don’t have much contact with students’ parents – no nice hand-made-by-mum cookies for us - and this really made my day/week/term. After writing that his high school had been a bit unsatisfactory, she finished her email,

In contrast, he comes home from your English class full of enthusiasm and with a very positive attitude towards the English coursework which is markedly different to last year. He now knows that he CAN work to the standard required and, in our opinion, this change in attitude is entirely because of your teaching!

Once again, many thanks for being so good at what you do.

The result will be, of course, that I shall make even more strenuous efforts to be interesting and stimulating and get him through his exam. This lady understands the psychology of teachers… or indeed of most people. It’s a good thing for teachers to remember too: praise students and they work harder. (Sometimes.)

I’m now on holiday. (Little joyful dance.) My brother and his family arrive on Christmas Eve from their home in the deep south (of England), which will be lovely, but before that, on Tuesday, our darling son comes home for Christmas from his current abode in the slightly shallower south. (Enormous, jubilant dance, involving whoops of delight and the shaking of pompoms.) This morning I bought some of his favourite foods, including mangoes, which it has pained me to walk past in the supermarket since his departure. The rest of the family don’t eat them much since they taste a bit like soap, but he’s very fond of them.

He’s on night duty at the moment and emailed me after I had expressed concern that the population of Dumfries who had been celebrating not wisely but too well might be causing him extra work and trouble. He pointed out that he wasn’t on the emergency ward at the moment, but on Surgery. He wrote,

Happily the people who come into A+E having indulged in a little too much alcohol don’t come my way. Unless they develop pancreatitis, I suppose, then they’re all mine. So far it has been q-u-i-e-t (you’re not allowed to say it out loud by hospital law, just in case). [Girlfriend] was on late for Surgery and seems to have got the wards sorted out. She finishes at 9pm (when I start) and starts at 9am (when I finish). So essentially, we’re in charge 24 hours a day.

Oh, how delighted I am not to be in charge of anything but the Life Christmas.