September 24th, 2005 at 6:03 am
Occasionally I don’t really know what to think about things.
On Tuesday night I was on my way home from watching the new Dukes of Hazzard movie with Glen and Robert, it was closing towards midnight, the weather quiet after scattered storms throughout the day. I look around the empty T-junction and turn onto my street, still smirking at the laughs I had from the film, when I see an old Magna parked in the road straight ahead of me in the No Standing area outside the block of shoebox flats on the left. Folks would normally pull into the carpark out front or at least not park in front of the bus post. As I’m coming closer the driver turns on their hazard lights, so I indicate to go around, I give a wide berth and as I slip past I hear the horn begin to blast. I’m rolling down the hill while they bang the horn and I start to wonder what the deal is. I can see my driveway.
Possibilities start to rush through my head, it’s dark and cloudy, maybe they need some help. I pull a U-turn through the roundabout and cruise slowly back up the hill. As I rise over the crest my eyes look to the car, now facing me and lighting up the road, but I catch a glimpse of something in the road ahead of me near the kerb. My focus changes, I swerve around it and look down as I pass. It’s a body.
I pull on the brakes and stop the bike after the next driveway, and take off my lid. My leg swings over the bike and I turn around. It’s not a very big body. There’s a nervous quickness to my step as I move towards the body shouting. No response. I stop, standing over him. Long pants and coat, short back and sides, a man no more than twenty with an Eastern appearance. He isn’t moving. Half of his face is planted on the bitumen and I kneel down to get closer, looking for where his jaw joins the skull, and I put two fingers to his neck. I hear the door of the car across the road crack open and I look up to see a woman, early forties, starting to move towards us.
“I’ve called an ambulance.”
“He’s got a pulse.” I call back. He’s still quite warm.
The lady approaches, and explains how things occurred.
“He just stepped out onto the street,” she says, “he took six or seven steps, then he just collapsed. I was too afraid to get out of the car.”
I try and rouse him again, but he doesn’t respond. I don’t believe he’s just drunk. I move closer, putting my hand towards his face, then my ear, trying to see if he is still breathing, when he moves his left hand a little and lets out a whisper of a moan.
Relief washes over me.
I shuffle his legs around to finish off the coma position he had mostly fallen into and huskily, he groans a few words.
“I don’t want to live.”
Another car pulls up, behind me this time, and another older woman steps out. She gets the summary of events and then goes back to her car, saying she has a blanket in the back. I notice how cold it is outside. I ask if she knows any first aid. “A little.” she says. No more than me.
She covers him mostly up, still whispering his preference to be left to die. The two ladies try to reassure him, telling him not to say things like that and that people care about him. I just stand silently, I can’t think of a thing to say. He coughs once or twice. A foamy spittle starts to dribble from his lips as his legs begin to shiver, and then shake. A moment later his whole body is fluttering uncontrollably. Fitting maybe, going into shock, I’ve not done a lot of this kind of thing before.
I start trying to remember first aid training. My certificate lapsed last year when an accident interrupted my plans to renew.
A moment later, the headlights of a Mercedes van turn around the bend up ahead. The ambulance has arrived. With the calmness I would expect from an answering machine and just as routine, one of the officers leans down and begins talking to the young man, now only twitching with an occasional shiver. The lady in the Magna goes back to her car and leaves, while the other Ambo starts to ask me what happened. I recount the turn of events, and the other things I was told. Finally she asks “Do you know him?”.
No. No idea.
She says they’ve got it from here, and I move back to my bike. When I’ve turned the bike around to head back towards home, the two of them have lifted the boy between their shoulder and are carrying him into the back of the van.
At the bottom of the hill, I roll into the driveway, parking behind the house. I step inside and put my bike clothes on the floor. I move into the kitchen and begin to boil the kettle. I start staring at the curtains. I don’t know what else to do.
September 20th, 2005 at 11:19 pm
Ever have one of those mornings when strange people materialise on your furnishings? I stumbled out of bed this morning at five am so that I could get some marking done before school. After finishing marking a Year 10 class’s test, I realised that I’d forgotten to turn on my music when I sat down at the computer. Winamp winds up and the first guitar strum wails from the speakers, and a strange echo in a montage of moaning and twitching comes back from the other end of the room. I turn around to see a wriggling clump of doona, presumably containing some life form or other, that has taken residence on the futon. I should iron my shirt anyhow, so I turn off the music and pack up the parts of my desk that I’ll need today. When I turn around from switching off the lamp, there is a pair of eyes staring at me from underneath the dark hood of a doona. I put on my boots, and leave the room without a word. I presume that the jawa on my couch is actually Chris’s sister and the two of them got back last night from Singapore, judging from the duty free liquor stacked in the dining room, but there’s no call to make conversation before seven in the morning.
September 16th, 2005 at 6:39 am
Yesterday at school was long. I was teaching solid from 8:40 and missed my recess break because of a problem with some students, and I had lunch duty. So when it was time for lunch and I was looking forward to at least getting something to eat, the emergency alarm goes off. I love fire drills.
So after spending twenty minutes out in the sun getting a nice all-round toasting while trying to herd a thousand narky kids who want their lunch break, it turns out that there was actually a bomb threat (well, two actually. Just in case they didn’t take the first one seriously). So the whole school has been evacuated and the police are sweeping every building. Meanwhile there are kids doing their business in the bushes and starting to expire sitting on the oval. An hour and a half of waiting later, we get the all clear and I get to eat a pie while doing the rounds.
If that wasn’t enough, today the upper school coordinator has put out a contract on the head of “The Phantom Crapper”. Apparently one of the boys at the school has been piling large quantities of toilet paper in the toilet bowls and then placing his waste on top. The cleaner was already on edge, so when he almost stuck the coordinator’s head in the bowl when explaining that the culprit needs to be dealt with post haste, as you can imagine, the message was clearly received. Digital photos have been taken of the evidence, and the coordinator plans to present them to the parents of the student responsible as soon as the chase comes to a climax. Apparently from the remainders, observers have concluded that the individual in question has some suspect dietary habits as well. The coordinator was also considering putting the photo’s up using a projector during a school assembly to try and smoke out the villain, but thankfully someone managed to talk him down.
Personally I think they’d do better to enter it in some arts festivals. I know I’ve seen worse.
September 13th, 2005 at 5:25 am
Evidence shows that it takes me about a month to totally realign my sleep and general patterns of existence to a point where my new modus operandi is totally embedded. I’m now routinely waking up just before my alarm goes off in the morning and I’m no longer as quasi-unconscious and surly at that point as I was at the same hour a few weeks ago. Of course the irony is that in eleven days time, it’ll be totally obsolete because I’ll be going back into uni bum holiday mode from full time teacher mode. But at least it’s nice to know that when it comes time to get into this swing on a more permanent basis, it’s not going to entail the endless suffering that you think it will on the first morning you have to get up before the sun does.
For about the seventy-five thousandth time, Congratulations to Peter and Mel who got married on Saturday. It was a really nice occasion, and while I wasn’t a big fan of the Jaffa Chocolate Mousse, everything else on the desert buffet was brilliant. I am the scourge of desert trolleys everywhere. I have become Dwight, destroyer of buffets.
The next few weeks are going to be pretty full-on, even with two weeks off between prac and uni starting again. I’ve got a meeting tomorrow night about this, Wednesday night I’ve got a ride and a movie to go to, Friday I’m out for dinner and a social gathering, Saturday I’m out to Northam and the following day is the Charity Ride. Then it’s back to work. Of course it’s all fun, so I can’t really complain. Sometimes my life seems like perpetual madness, and other times I feel like I should take up some new hobbies or something to fill in the small gaps in my schedule normally filled with things like sleep.
But come November I’ll have stacks of free time, so I’m going to try and tee up some work and maybe some projects I can try and get done before I potentially get shipped off up the Congo river and end up becoming the leader of a tribe of barbaric natives and the company sends a steam boat down the river looking for me.
You know how these things can just happen.
the question isn’t if
the question is merely when
September 6th, 2005 at 4:05 am
I am somewhat disillusioned today. I’ve stared taking classes without the mentor teacher present for the full period, which, while it isn’t really protocol, I am pretty appreciative of. Having someone watching and critiquing your every move can get rather tiresome as I’m sure you can imagine. After spending a rather fruitless lesson trying to squeeze some discussion fodder out of students and then trying with even less success to get them to do some work (and I don’t mean they were mucking around or having a screaming match, they just zombied out) I decided to prod them until they caved in and squealed.
After getting the general consensus that they never did anything on Monday’s “Textbook day” period (It’s an IT class with no computers) except listen to the teacher read from the textbook, I told them I had two of these Mondays left to teach and if there was anything they’d rather me do a lesson on than the lowball text material, I’d see what I could do. After the suggestions of watching music videos, playing X-box or having me bring the motorbike into the classroom and do burnouts, I went one step further and asked them if there was nothing they were interested in learning about this topic, why did they take it in the first place.
Several of them were ‘put’ in this class, as they had just started at this school at the beginning of the year, came back when they expected to leave school or left their choices too late and were stuffed in wherever there were empty seats. Some others chose to do the “Automotive” course strand, which saw them put in classes such as Industry Information Technology (the subject in question), Woodwork, Tech Drawing and Furniture Design. The school has no metalwork or workshop facilities, so basically there is nothing automotive in the “Automotive” strand. Others thought IT might be their thing since they liked computers or games, but are now pretty well off the idea. I have one student who said he wanted to learn everything and anything there is to know about computers. Aside from him, nobody else really wants to be there. For a Year 11 subject, that seems kind of weak.
Now my mentor teacher explained to me when I first arrived that this was a fairly lazy and unambitious class who, for the most part produced a poor standard of work, and that was on the occasions that actually did any. I can’t say that I’m real surprised. Most of them are failing and the regular teacher has just sent letters to all the parents explaining that the students haven’t handed in assignments and are unlikely to pass.
I was teaching this class for three weeks and realised they weren’t into the subject for some reason. Their normal teacher has had three terms. Of course, it would be hopelessly idealistic of me to expect that a teacher might try and cater their content to the students in the class, and maybe it wouldn’t work anyhow, but if for no other purpose but to satisfy my own curiosity, I intend to see.