When worst comes to worst...

Dear readers,

Ah, it has been long. So long. I hope you are all well and life is treating everyone in a most excellent fashion.

I have been quite busy of late, with uni and prac and what not. In fact, this post is not so much a tale of woe and misery suffered by yours truly, but a brief look at the wit and wonder students have to offer. Enjoy!


Situation #1.

Context: Students had been studying intertextuality for some time. This snippet of conversation takes place in an English classroom.

Warning: You may need to be as ridiculously interested in language as I am, for this to be amusing. I’m not sure.


Students are discussing a music event coming up.
Teacher: Are you talking about a subject other than English in my classroom?
Students collectively mumble.
Bright Spark #1: Yeah… but we’re talking in English!
Bright Spark #2: It’s like intersubjectuality!


Situation #2.

Context: Students had been studying Genesis as an intertextual link to Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.

Teacher: So what did Adam and Eve do, that was bad?
Student: They ate the apple.
Teacher: That’s right. And what was bad about the apple?
Bright Spark #1: It was imported.



I love my (future) job. I do.

Peace.

Dear Readers,

Hello, hello! How are we all? Carefree and casual? Wonderful.

I myself am relaxed… calm… serene, even. I relish the minutes upon minutes that reach out before me. Hours, even. Days! Forever! A seemingly never-ending stretch of time.

All good and well, but to what end, you may ask. Why, to write to your good selves!

Equally, you may be wondering why this is of such importance today, compared to any other day. Well, I’ll tell you.

I had an exam this morning.

And as anyone who has ever had an exam will know, there is never, never enough time to say all you wish to. Especially, might I add, if the exam goes for 45 minutes, and you have 6 questions, almost all of which are broken into two, three, and even four parts.

45 minutes? Pah! That’s not an exam, that’s a brief test, barely registering in importance! I hear you say.

Perhaps, perhaps. I would urge you though, not to judge on time alone. I know that I, for one, am far more concerned about the fact that these 45 minutes were accountable for 60% of my final mark. I feel a sense of drama needs, nay - deserves! to be brought to the situation due to this.

Point being, I’m calling it an exam, and I’m not gonna stop.

Anyway.

This exam dealt with various factors that may influence a student’s performance at school. Gender, socio-economic status, race, language background, family background, remoteness, and so on. It also insisted that we approach the matter of educational policy, both at a national and international level.

Now, I don’t know how anyone else here goes about exams, but my general technique is to start at question 1 and work my way through to the end, skipping any I don’t feel I can answer - with, naturally, the intention to return to them later on. If I have the time. And inclination.

A perfectly reasonable approach, one may think. With a minor flaw. I do not simply write question 1 on the first page, flip to page two and answer question 3, then conclude the exam with question 2 on page three hundred and seven. Oh no. I just… leave a couple of pages, then move on.

I like to keep things in sequence, see.

Which is fine, in terms of space. I don’t find myself trying to cram all my knowledge of the skipped question into two pages, by the time the exam is ending. At that stage, I’m usually more concerned about blood flow to my hand.

What does concern me however, is the question I skip (there’s usually only one), will inevitably be cut short due to running out of time. Yet, not being at the end of the exam booklet, it will simply read as though I get ‘so far’ into answering, and give up, adrift, a helpless bubble of idiocy in a sea of knowledge.

Quiet at the back please, this is leading to a point.

The point being, today I skipped question 3. Question 3, in all it’s shining glory, ran roughly along the lines of: What impact does globalisation have upon Australia’s education policies?

(Which is frankly unfair, as it’s difficult enough to identify any of Australia’s education policies as is, without needing to then discuss them in light of Liechtenstein’s economic rationalism or some such.)

And so, to draw this winding passage to a slow but noticeable close, the heroine of the day (me), wrote about circumstances in Finland. Wrote about circumstances in the USofA. Wrote in general about some globalisation issues. And, at her moment of triumph, the moment of comparison… was spitefully informed it was time to set her pen down.

Thus, my connection to Australia was: These factors then flow through to Australia.

And question 4 neatly follows on from there. I do not particularly enjoy thinking about what sort of signal that sends, regarding my knowledge of globalisation and Australia.




Peace.

Dear Readers,

Hello, hello. How are we all? Quite well, I hope.

Today, a brief tale. A tale of woe, humiliation, and general idiocy. So much the same as usual.

As some of you are aware, I was recently on prac at a school. During this, I had to be filmed, so as to show my esteemed fellow uni-students the glory that is me teaching. They all had to do the same. (Yes, the Dip Ed is run by sadists.)

So. Even more recently, I watched this dvd of my - for lack of a better term - ‘teaching’.

But we’ll get to that.

Firstly, let me run you through the basics. This prac involved teaching EAL/D students. In other words, teaching English to students as an actual language, as opposed to general high school English which involves teaching metaphors and what have you. All with me? Excellent.

Now, my usual tactic would be to pre-teach any vocabulary I thought they may need for an upcoming activity. Then move on to the activity. This was working fabulously.

And so, of course, I chose to adopt a new approach on the day of my filming. Because really, it would hardly do to show I was in any way capable, right?

Instead, what I later watched was this:

Step 1: I wrote a passage on the board.
Step 2: As a class, we went through and I underlined any words they mentioned they would need an explanation of. (You can see this isn’t going to end well, can’t you. You can see. Apparently, I couldn’t.)

Step 3: We went through a few words. This was fine. I was watching with a proud tear in my eye. Until…

Student: What is attacking?
Myself: Attacking? It’s like… to attack.


I’m still trying to work out what on earth I thought that would achieve. I really am.



Peace.