Entries from August 2005 ↓

So this morning a teacher decides that the 8am staff meeting is the right time to get down on one knee and propose to another teacher he’s been seeing for eight months. She says yes, middle-aged ladies swoon. I guess you could do it that way…

I really could’ve used another half hours sleep this morning.

After two weeks of teaching at my new school, I’ve only been asked if I’m Catholic about seventy four thousand times, but I am getting tabs on almost all of my students’ names. The staff however are a different matter, my memory being sketchy most of the time except for the teachers I’m stealing classes from, the ones with desks next to mine and the attractive women between twenty and thirty-five. So sue me. It’s only the students who I need to be able to write toe tags for anyhow, teachers get a proper formal burial.

Teaching IT classes is a lot different from other subjects. I’d say it’s more akin to workshop classes than anything else, you get in there, teach some skills that are needed for what the students are doing, then let them get on with their project work and circulate around the room making sure no one gets stabbed or sets up a speed lab. It feels easier than normal teaching, but it’s not as much fun or as rewarding either. Not to mention that it still feels unnatural to constantly be looking over the shoulders of people using computers.

The science class I’ll be taking next week is also a bit of a concern, I’ve been attending their classes for two weeks now, and all that they’ve done is write up answers to questions from their workbooks and texts. One lesson the teacher used a data projector to show a Java applet of how an image is formed through a lens, but that’s the limit of demonstrations or practical work that they’ve seen. It’s a science department, seriously, how hard is it to pick up a freaking lens and show the students what splitting a beam of white light into a spectrum looks like or God forbid, let them play around with it. They’re doing the Energy & Change unit, which to me says cool stuff like playing with electricity, fire, light, forces and movement, sound and basically doing as much stuff that goes ZOOM! or KA-BANG! as possible, but apparently no, these guys read textbooks and write notes. Woo-ha. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to hog-tie the teacher and do something interesting with them. I practically fall asleep in the classes, they must be bored off their nuts.

I really shouldn’t blather so much about work, but aside from that and sleeping I haven’t been doing a whole lot recently outside of the staple routine. Bucks party tomorrow night, no idea what that’ll be like. I should probably take a book in case there’s too much mahjong and cross-stitching happening and I overdo it on the spring water.

High school staff office. Interior. Day. A loud argument between a student and a number of teachers continues on the outer side of the partly open door. “Oh my God, I’m not on PILLS!” the young girl cries out from the corridor, eliciting quiet chuckles and wry grins from the staff inside the room. The debate about whether the girl is harboring drugs or cough lollies continues to escalate while pens scratch and keys clatter inside. A university prac students flicks through papers and makes notes between bursts of typing on a notebook computer, attempting to masquerade over the fact that he has nothing to do. Idle hands are devil’s play things, and the devil loves to give prac students marking to do. It begins to rain outside.

My first day at the new school was fairly gentle, and I can assume the same will be true for today. I am only asked to observe classes, and this morning I have the first periods of the day free to myself. When I am teaching a full load, highly caffeinated and stressing the tether between myself and sanity, this will be a great spot to take some time to myself and to do some lesson planning. Right now however, it is time to do approximately jack squat and type up some notes on my experience so far.

My mentor teacher at this school is, at a guess, roughly half the age of my last one. Considering my last one was sixty however, it’s not as bad as it sounds. I hope. The idea of mentoring is that the senior teacher uses all of their years of experience and wisdom to help the student teacher become a better educator, so I’m not sure of the implications there when the mentor teacher is still relatively green themselves. It also doesn’t bode well for my impressions that he marks his students on ‘ergonomics’. As he put it “if you have to tell them to sit up straight all the time”. This is one of four categories on which the students are marked , the combination of which makes up their grade for a project. This seems quietly ridiculous to me, but hey, I’m not the one who is going to have to say “Well Ms Johnson, little Timmy would’ve made the cutoff for engineering, but he has bad posture.”.

Judging from some of the IT classes I sat in on yesterday, one where the teacher read out definitions of ‘lurking’, ‘netiquette’ and ‘emoticons’ from a computing textbook, I don’t think it’s going to be an arduous task getting these kids on side by giving them something half-way interesting to do. And I’m pretty confident that the same logic applies to the science class I’ll be teaching, where yesterday the teacher handed out some heat transfer worksheets and at the end of the lesson passed on to me the little gem of knowledge “Another day, another dollar.” Truly inspirational stuff. But it’s not all bad here, the staff toilets are very fancy, even the Gents has tiles, fake marble vanities and large mirrors, while the staff room is roughly the size of the Dominican Republic and is referred to by staff as ‘the QANTAS lounge’ due to unsettling parallels in decor.

It doesn’t feel as all-round warm and friendly here as it did at my last school, and there seem to be more of the ‘living dead’ style “When’s my retirement?” variety of teachers here as well, but it shouldn’t be too bad. At least there’s free coffee. And from what I could gather from the lung capacity trials outside, it turns out that the girl did, in fact, have a roll of throat lozenges and her teacher is, apparently, a “grumpy cow”. I miss out on all of the fun stuff.

So my blogging of late has been sporadic at best, non-existent at worst. The short version is that I’ve been tacklng unpleasant quantities of uni work and I start six weeks of prac on Monday together with having to get assignments done, so things probably won’t get much better in the near future. Due to some administration screw-ups and my being forced into doing a double-major for my Dip Ed due to an earlier administrational screw-up, I’m now thoroughly overloaded and at the end of this year, I’ll have done a 1.375 course load (where 1.0 is a normal complete years work) so if I look a little frazzled or unconscious when you see me next, save your surprise for something else.

Yesterday was pretty much my last day off that I’ll have for quite some time, so I went for a day ride with some friends. So if it tickles your fancy, I give you… Thursday’s Ride.

The Inaugural “Trev’s Idea” 10hr Blacktop Enduro Special
A blow by blow report.

7:45am - 24.1km - BP SOUTH PERTH
Talk crap with Stuart and Craig while we wait for Warpie. Warpie turns up. Then we wait for Warpie to check his tyres. And fill up. And use the ATM.

8:35am - 55.2km - SHELL THOMAS ST.
Weather is almost perfect, cool, clear and fine. Meet up with Miles, Pete and Matt while Trev posts a letter and brings motorcyclists into general ill repute. We start off crack on 8:45 and take some back roads out to the South Western Highway, turning off at North Dandalup to do the Del Park Road.

9:35am - 121.1km - DWELLINGUP
Quick stop to check route before heading towards Quindanning so Trev can get some photos of the pretty flowers =P

10:00am - ???.?km - OUTSIDE OF DWELLINGUP
Coming around one of the hills, some smoke seems to be coming from out of the bush up the road. Not really bushfire weather though, doesn’t smell of smoke either. Fog. I’m sitting behind Pete at this point and we back off the pace as visibility changes from a hundred yards to sweet bugger all as we go around each bend. We stop at the Quindanning turnoff to regroup, so I take a couple of quick shots of the F4i and the ZX6

I’m telling you, there’s a road there. No, seriously.

10:30am - 202.6km - QUINDANNING
Trev gets some spanky photos of the Superduke and Craig parks in front of the pub.

10:54am - 238.5km - WILLIAMS
Stop to get fuel, the reserve light on the KTM seems to be desperate for attention and is going off all over the place. Take a photo of Warpie’s shiny exhaust.

11:43am - 327.2km - COLLIE
Manage to use nine litres of fuel from Williams to Collie, a new personal record. Check tank for fuel leaks. We head off, stopping briefly near Balingup before doing a 40km loop of lovely twisties, complete with gravel traps and mutant road fungi.

2:27pm - 451.9km - NANNUP
After stopping at the pub for lunch and having a yak while Pete calls us all pansies for not getting hammered, we fill up again and get ready to head off. Take a couple of photos including one of the sevenfiddy.

3:11pm - 530.3km - KARRIDALE
Stop to feed the KTM again. Meanwhile the F4i has ticked over 30,000km on the last leg, and the Big Bird took out the other bird when a parakeet and the CBX1100 attempted to occupy the same part of the space-time continuum.

4:11pm - 597.7km - MARGARET RIVER
We hit Caves Rd and have a nice blat on the way through to Margaret River where we feed the bellies of the monster steeds again before getting out of town and starting to head back towards where we came from.

?:??pm - ???.?km - NOWHERE
On the way out of Margs we hit along the longest, straightest road I have come across in a long time. Tucking down as best I can on top of the tankbag and pinning the throttle to the stop, I reach a top speed of (as best I can estimate) Mach 90. We pull over to let Matt catch up on the naked 250.

Where’s Wally?

5:30pm-ish? - 734.0km - BRUNSWICK JUNCTION
After clipping through Capel and Bunbury, we pull in for our final scheduled fuel stop. We wait a while for Miles and Matt, but we seem to have lost them in the bypass of Bunbury. It’s beginning to get dark.

?:??pm - ???.?km - PINJARRA
By this point we are guided completely by artificial light. It’s dark, I’m cold, and I’m starting to wonder how Stuart is holding up with the tinted visor, considering I can see 3/10ths of sweet bugger all through the wildlife samples smeared on my visor since the last fuel stop. The bugs were no worse than usual during the day, but when the sun goes down, it gets ugly.

The stars come out and Stuart & Craig have pulled in at North Dandalup, presumably to do something about the eyesight situation, and we’re also sans-Warpie to boot. Meanwhile I continue to chase the two quivering red lights from the back of Trev and Pete’s bikes that I struggle to make out through the unwelcome haze of bug flesh.

We turn off the South Western Highway onto Mundijong before waiting at the tracks for a ghost train for several minutes. The suspense is too much for us, so I get off to stretch my legs while Trev and Pete take a sojourn away from the saddle to briefly commune with nature.

6:57pm - ???.?km - KWINANA FREEWAY

We finally get back to civilisation’s most boring construction, where Trev and Pete peel off at the next exit. Ten minutes later, I finally see the city again. Entering the Graham Farmer tunnel, I see two idiot motorists narrowly avoid collision while fighting for the front position where two lanes merge. I am definitely back in Perth.

I fill up at the East Perth BP before rolling a few more k’s home, finally arriving back at 7:40pm after leaving 7:30am this morning.

A decent day’s ride.

Bugs.

Was a great day for riding.

In other news, because it rocked I saw Sin City twice. Fantastic Four was ok bordering on not bad. The Island was cool. Code 46, while not completely what I expected, I really quite liked. But I wouldn’t spend money on seeing the Flight of the Phoenix remake if I were you.

An awful lot of books.

Time to write that letter to Santa…