Entries from June 2005 ↓

I have to admit that I’ve had a hard time reading Dostoyevsky. While I am now achingly close to finishing Crime and Punishment, it has taken me, at an estimate, just under eleven months to get to this point. I have read no other novels in this time. It’s not that the book is particularly dense, or that it is difficult to get a grasp on, but sometimes you feel as if you have read the same thing a dozen times. Of course you probably have, seeing as how it’s a novel about this fellows inner turmoil and psychosis and he thinks about the same things an awful lot. But also it can be a little disarming trying to remember which character is which, as half of them seem to have extra names. The main character is called Rodian Romonych Raskalnikov, but half of the book refers to him as Raskalnikov and the rest as either Rodya, Romonych or Rodian Romonych. Another character is called Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin, while there is also an Ilya Porfiry Petrovich, both of them referred to as Petrovich, and Raskolnikov’s sister is called Dunechka, Dunya and Avdotya Romanovna. It doesn’t help that there’s another R character called Razumikhin, and almost everyone elses name in the book goes on the same. There’s Zamyotov, Svidrigailov, Semyonovich, Pulkheria Aleksandrovna, some Ivanovna’s and a Lebezyatnikov. Bible names have nothing on this puppy.

Of course with it taking me so long to read this book, I have a rather indiscreet stack of novels piling up on my bookshelf that I have yet to read. A couple I purchased myself before starting Crime and Punishment, and a more sizable wad that I have received as gifts and not yet got around to taking the time to read. I’m seriously looking forward to my upcoming 2 weeks off and a lot of vegging out with books and movies I’ve been too busy to get onto.

Getting out of bed gets no easier as the days go on, but I find that my level of consciousness and reflexes are more with it when I part ways with the bed covers than they used to be. I don’t find myself dying for caffeine to stay awake and basically once I put my things down at work in the science office, it’s all smooth sailing from there on in. Getting out the door at home would normally be the mark between battle and glory, but the time at which I get on my bike and ride eighty miles an hour down a frostbitten freeway means that most of the agony involves my hands and facial features becoming snap-frozen on the commute. However the ninety seconds each morning which I spend in the Graham Farmer Tunnel is pure and simple bliss. While most folks wouldn’t notice, as they are holed up in cars and buses, the moment you cross from outside to the tunnels dreary interior, the temperature raises what feels like a dozen degrees. The sweet, sweet warmth of cancerous carbon monoxide gas fills your lungs and you cease to care how slow and inept the driver in front of you might be. And as you might have noticed, even in a car, it also does not rain inside the tunnel, another mark in its favour.

I have also rediscovered the modern miracles of both the electric blanket and cup-a-soup. You can keep your sliced bread and flying machines, soup is where it’s at.

I love this.

Google Will Eat Itself

We generate money by serving Google text advertisments on our website GWEI.org. With this money we automatically buy Google shares via our Swiss e-banking account. We buy Google via their own advertisment! Google eats itself - but in the end we will own it!

There’s probably some wanky term for this kind of thing, but since I don’t know what it is, I’ll just stick with saying that it’s awesome on some weird level of humour.

So my lesson today didn’t go to plan. Of course for good measure, I was being critiqued by a supervisor from the university for this mornings 110 minute double period of year ten physics. I have three pages of her notes. Most of these involve scathing criticism for deviating from ‘the plan’. As a uni student and a prac teacher, I am expected to produce, for every lesson I teach, a document no less than two pages that details the knowledge I expect the students to gain, which ’student outcome students’ they work towards, which ‘overarching statements’ of the curriculum council they relate to, what year, class and intelligence level it applies to, any prior knowledge required, but most wonderfully, a breakdown of every single thing I expect myself to do and students to do, listed in sequence and with timing of each task, movement or thought broken down into a minute by minute elaboration.

It isn’t that no one, at all, does anything resembling this outside of university prac students that really bothers me. It’s not that it’s a pain in the ass to have to write out in boring detail each and every thing you intend to do in a day. It’s not even that it sucks the life or any kind of spontaneity and opportunity out of the situation. It’s that if I deviate from ‘the plan’ or rearrange the order of some of the tasks because some questions that were asked led in a certain direction, I get sledged for my ‘bad planning’. This makes no sense to me. If I have a plan, then choose not to follow it, how does that make the plan the bad thing? Should my plan be practically perfect in every way so that no one would ever consider deviating from it, regardless of circumstance? What annoys me even more is that we’re constantly pressured to centre the lessons around the students and to tailor things for individual students and classes, but at the same time they expect us to have everything planed and penned beforehand.

If I were sewing together someones Nikes in Vietnam somewhere for three bucks a week, I’m sure there’s a practical, efficient way of stapling dead goats and plastic together that produces the most shoes an hour. But I’m not working on shoes, I’m working with people, and people aren’t a constant or totally predictable entity. If I could predict the thought patterns of students and the questions they were going to ask, I sure as hell wouldn’t be getting up at 5am to go teach.

All that I can really gather is that they want me to write a lesson plan in such a way that it looks like a student-centred lesson and involves performing several hundred buzzword tasks, and then do exactly what I have written down. What that seems like to me is the same bollocks as a teacher reading from a textbook, except it’s something they’ve written instead of someone else. They’ve just written it down in a form that’s looks acceptably like whatever education concept that they’re being pushed to use.

I find it annoying that I know I could re-write the plans I have already done so that they are in an acceptable format, but the actual content of the lesson and what the students do wouldn’t change.

It all feels like a sign in a chain store that says “Quality, Service and Customer Satisfaction”. It’s a lot of pretty words, but it really doesn’t mean shit.

Well I’ve successfully managed to totally neglect my journal for over three weeks now. You’ve missed a lot, most of which consists of Uni turning from a pleasure back into a more familiar pain as every unit declared open war upon my life in the form of assignment projectiles. I have taken seven, count ‘em, seven units this semester on top of my prac, and all of them have big nasty assignments involved, some worth (get this) 100% of my semester grade. One assignment, entire units mark. You screw up, you fail. Lovely, huh? So I’ve been hacking and screaming at odd hours of the night and day, which means that coincidentally, most of the time me and Chris have come into contact, one of us is asleep. It’s actually been really draining on me and I’ve felt pretty battered and tired for the past couple of weeks now, it’s one of those feelings that no amount of sleep is going to get rid of, it’s just too much work and not enough play (or pay for that matter).

But it hasn’t been all misery and suffering, aside from having to formally type up lesson plans, prac has been working out pretty well. There are only two real other downers at the moment, (a) That I’m working full time and not getting paid, and (b) that the day starts before noon. My regular morning routine has been usurped by a new, more unpleasant, early version. Basically it mimics my previous itinerary, except the sun doesn’t exist, less consciousness (and thus more incidental injury) is involved, and there are an additional forty thousand or so extra things I have to take with me.

Although this does mean that I am now deep in the belly of the beast that is the Western Australian education system. Aside from the occasional outliers which sustain themselves entirely on rice crackers and lettuce leaves, the staple diet of our average teacher seems to consist of coffee, chocolate biscuits and toasted sandwiches. This works out just fine for me, as making lunch in the morning can be done while almost entirely asleep, involving grabbing two pieces of bread, building a cheese castle on one piece and then inserting as appropriate whatever other condiments or leftovers I have in the fridge from the past month (I find it best to eat the growing/moving items first, before they begin to establish a leftovers hierarchy). All that’s left to do is whack the other bit of bread on, wrap the thing in gladwrap, realise one hand is still attached to the sandwich, curse worthless appendages, throw out gladwrap, use a new piece of gladwrap large enough to hold a pool party, and throw mercilessly into the abyss of your chosen backpack.

I’ve taught a good dozen classes now, and there still haven’t been any fatalities or mortal woundings. The only casualty so far in one of my lessons has been one girls jumper getting smeared with carbon buildup when she picked up some old metalware that was actually more carbon buildup than it was metalware. The same can’t be said for my mentor teacher however, who managed to drum up business for a nearby hospital after a state teachers conference when he was demonstrating what he refers to as a ‘tennis ball launcher’. Personally I refer to said item as a ‘goddamned potato cannon’, but it’s all in the phonetics I’m sure. He intended to show how he was using different methods to teach projectile motion and asked the group to come outside to see a demonstration, but of course, being people in suits, they opted to stay inside, and my mentor teacher decided to fire the device inside to suit. Being bureaucrats and obviously unfamiliar with the phenomenon of the ‘goddamned potato cannon’, they also thought this was a top idea. A bit of butane gas and the click of a flint later, and the tennis ball found its mark, striking a woman directly in the head. In the eye. Knocked clear of her chair, she was quickly moved to emergency at Royal Perth, where she probably sat for some hours contracting all manner of new and exciting diseases. But she was intending to go back to see her doctor again the following Tuesday, you know, when the swelling had gone down.

I considered going defence forces before this diploma, but it just didn’t seem violent enough.