The B Word

Does anyone else come home from baby showers and cry for that time in their lives that is gone?

The Pachyderm is: OUT

The thing they don't tell you about the elephant in the room is that when it leaves, it leaves an elephant shaped hole.

This doesn't change the fact that nobody talks about it. It's still the big, uncomfortable thing that we pretend not to notice, only now it's the hole instead of the elephant that drags at your heart.

You'd think I'd be glad that there was no more elephant crap to pick up around the place; no more feeding the elephant or listening to it howl like a wolf and pretending that this was perfectly natural elephant behaviour.

You'd think that I'd be relieved and freed up to enjoy life a bit more. What they don't tell you is that the elephant shaped hole is a black hole of resentment and anger
and still
nobody
talks about it.

I talk about it of course. I talk to anyone who'll listen: at school, at church, on the end of a phone 12,000 miles away but all these hollow words do is feed the elephant shaped hole. They feed it until it is a dragging, stabbing mass of sticky, black anger and resentment beckoning me to swim in its warm, comforting, sucking morass. Because anger can be comforting. Self righteousness, indignation and martyrdom are a thin, brittle shell around the heart. They protect you from the hurt and rejection and they allow you to wallow in the unfairness of it all.

What I really need to do is to talk to the elephant but elephants have a nasty way of shifting suddenly and stepping on you and to tell the truth, I ain't fast enough to get out of its way nor strong enough to hold it on my shoulders. And anyway, it's not even my elephant. I expect we'll all just go on stepping around the hole for a while.

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Puck Wars

We went to see the Small Boy play his second game of in-line hockey today. I wanted to try and get some shots for him but we were up on a balcony in the gym and I had to use the zoom on my pathetic 3.2 mp PAS and I was shooting through the safety net. Still, I got a lot of photos.


Look at no 19!!!!
There he is again! That one's a bit blurry but hey! It's a fast game, hockey, you know!

I could pick him out though because of the blue bottoms on his trousers.



For those who are interested in that sort of thing, the team is called The Wild Hogs and their motto is'100% Ferral'. Hmmm






Look, there he is again!
Not sure what he's actually doing in any of these. There seemed to be a lot of whacking at a puck with sticks.


I really like that one on the left. It's a great action shot. He tried really hard but he wasn't really fast enough most of the time. Still, he was all over the court.

We were waving frantically from the balcony but he was waaay too cool to wave back. Totally absorbed in his game.
Boy we cheered though. When his team scored, even if he was nowhere near the puck we cheered and cheered.








Here he is again. I got quite a few half decent shots really didn't I?
There are more too.

Which is a shame really because, this isn't actually The Small Boy.

We didn't make this discovery until 5 minutes before the end when his Mum arrived and filled us in. I think this is someone called Matt.






The Small Boy, it transpired, wore No 35 and played for the opposing team. Here he is.




That's him side on, smack in the middle at the back. Once you know you can see it's him right? I was a bit shocked by how small he looked really. Considering he's 10. That little girl playing on the right? She's 6.


So I can't really tell you about how he played. We had a quick look at him for the last few minutes but it was difficult to tell what he was capable of in that time. I did get a few shots of him though. Before the siren went.











Oh well. There's always next week.

Alles Ist Besser Als Mathe

The German Fairytale thing was yesterday. In a stroke of brilliance and luck I had discovered that there were two performances: lessons 3 and 4. I negotiated with the amenable (and talented) German department to bring my small group in the second lesson, thus giving me time to administer the mini test that I need for report writing (coming soon to this computer). They would work hard for 35mins and have a fun second lesson followed by some well earned cake.

That was the plan.

Of course all the other maths classes told them we were going in lesson 3 so after recess I had to go and extract them from the rabbling hordes assembling outside the recital room. After marching them back to the classroom, we then engaged in 10 minutes worth of argument.

Firstly I had to convince them that we WERE going to the play (after all I am JUST the sort of teacher who deliberately prevents them from having fun), they would just need to wait for the next lesson. Actually, I found it quite interesting that they assumed they were being prevented from going altogether. Some sort of Freudian guilty complex perhaps? I'm still not sure if that's a good thing because it means they are acknowledging their current poor behaviour, or a bad thing because it once more indicates their poor self image.

THEN came the argument that all their friends were going in this lesson and it would be no fun going with the next group (whoever they were) cos they didn't have anyone to talk to. After pointing out the obvious fact that one does not need to 'talk' to anyone through a play there were more protests about the unfairness of it all. Of course I went down the usual parent/teacher road which was 'if you don't stop complaining we won't be going AT ALL'........aaaand eventually we settled to our test.

The bell went. Not one of the them moved.
Miss 'I have nothing better to do with my time than argue with you' looked up from the front row and said,
"We don't have to rush. It'll take ages for the others to get there and get organised," and bent her head back down to her test.
Mr 'I can't do anything and stop asking me and hit the back wall and swear at everyone', looked up and said,
"Do we have to go to this thing? Can't we just finish the test?"

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

For the record, the plays were very cute: Frau Holle and Konig Drosselbart(I think). I'm not sure how much the kids followed as they were unfamiliar stories but the German cake afterwards was GREAT!!!!!

And today is a pupil free day*happy sigh*



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Stand Aside: Low Quality Verbal Flushing Imminent

I don't know where I first heard the term 'brain dump'. It may have been my first husband's army reserve jargon or one of those cynical 'in joke' expressions people working in the same department use. It certainly emerged around the time that IT was becoming a major part of the education coalface, back in the days of Dinosaur Discovery and Granny's Garden when we all used real floppy discs, discs that were floppy, and had to back up systems nightly. I think it was related to the dumping of unneccessary data in order to increase speed and efficiency. Perhaps nowadays a defrag would be the most useful parallel.

A brain dump most frequently occured on Friday nights after school, at the local pub . When we worked in the bush, the local pub was the meeting place and the one across the road from the school offered all teachers their first beer free on a Friday. Thus followed many more far from free beers and a brain dump. These could be painful, and messy.

I actually met my first husband during a brain dump at the local pub. He worked at the primary school in the regional centre and I drove in, like a bat out of hell, on Friday afternoons to get away from the tiny hamlet some 80km out in the donga where I spent the week rubbing shoulders with people like this.

Not that they were all like that of course but there were enough products of overly friendly inter-family relations to make it essential to vacate the area on a Friday afternoon.

But back to brain dumps.

Today I feel a bit like the chap here. My head is being pulled in a number of directions by a number of issues.

There's the general aggro of working in Support Classrooms compounded with the lack of continuity and resulting chaos that is afforded by my having days 'off' to attend courses. This has happened twice in the last two weeks and renders the following two lessons alopaecia inducing as pupils wallow in the luxuries of misdirection and missing work.

Today one of them brazenly announced,

"Well, you can't expect us to do work when a relief teacher's here! "

Strangely, I also can't expect them to

* arrive on time

* bring a pen, pencil or ruler

* bring a book

* visit the bathroom prior to class

* speak to me or any of their classmates in a civil manner.

Then there is the business of arranging assessments for pupils within the school: phonecalls, schedules, distribution of information and collection of same. Fill in this form please. How often does the pupil pick his nose or attack other pupils in the course of an afternoon. Record the frequency of interactions with other class members.

Then there is E. For any of you who remember her from the post I did before I deleted it for anonymity purposes, you may remember that she is hard work. High maintenance would not cover it. Today she holed herself up in a classroom where I was giving pupils homework support at lunchtime (yes, lunchtime...I have no need for relaxation.....didn't you know that?) and refused to leave when the bell went. Wouldn't go to class, wouldn't go and discuss it with anyone else.....Ended up I had to go up to the office and fetch someone to coax her out as I had a lesson to babysit oops I mean teach. *sheesh*

Now I have to document all this. >:-( Just what I need.

So I guess this little blogging sojourn is a bit of a brain dump for me at the moment. I guess it's better for me than gin.

Don't mind me folks. I'll be fine in the morning.

Hail The Not Quite Conquering Heroine

I know many of our friends and family are wondering how the Baby Angel went in her netball finals. Well, firstly let me say that she has a wonderful group of friends. Look at the card they made for her on Friday!

It's quite amusing that they all call her Bee. I love the persona she's created for herself. Her catch phrase (email, MSN etc) is 'Bee is for beautiful' which kind of makes me well up and also suggests a reasonable level of self esteem I hope.

For some reason, somewhere along the line she has also become known as 'The Mexican' at school. Apparently she once said something in a funny accent and was accused by a friend of sounding like a Mexican. In the way these things evolve, she ended up buying a sombrero and coming home from a friend's party the other day with 'I am not a Mexican' written across her shoulder in felt pen! The running gag has become so entrenched that this is what the inside of her card looks like.

'Ace Gang' is the name her friends have given themselves after the fashion of Georgia Nicholson and her gang.

So, the match. Ah well. The BA played very well. Unfortunately in the first quarter she was about the only one playing and that little debacle ended after 15 minutes with things decidedly (12-2) in the other team's favour. The second quarter saw a massive comeback by The Parkers, outscoring the opposition 10-8 but of course that needed to be consolidated in the third quarter and this just didn't happen.

There were some great moments and a lot of the match was well fought with the BA playing like a cracker for the full 4 quarters. Unfortunately it ended rather lamely at 41-25. The goalies who had been brilliant the week before seemed to forget how to find the goal ring. *sigh*

So once more The Parkers were the bridesmaids. This is the third Grand Final the BA has played and the third they have lost. It would be nice to win one but after all we have to be proud of the fact they even made the final this season as they finished No 4 on the ladder!

Anyway, here she is, none the worse for her disappointment, enjoying a Swiss Shake at
The Pancake Kitchen (We never close: Lovely!)

We went on to enjoy a fun night at the Presentation Dinner where the girls got to dance the night away with a disco and practise looking pained and detached when their mothers got up and took over the dance floor!!! AC-DC forever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The big excitement of the night was The BA putting her name down for umpiring next year. She will do a course through the club and be eligible to umpire games at a lower level as well as making $10.00 a game!!!! This coupled with the fact that some of the sailors from Himself's racing team have asked her to baby sit their little 2 year old on the beach during the race season means she will be earning nearly as much as me. This is a good thing though as it's about time she started thinking about savings and income, a skill which will not go astray in the years to come.

So now we have a blissful few weeks off before the summer season starts . Well done BA. You are the netball Queen!!

In Which The Tables Are Turned

"How could you write that about your daughter?" enquired the Free Man at coffee yesterday, "BA, have you seen what your mother has written about you?"

She had.

"Mother," she sighed, exasperated,"You are such a hypocrite. ALL the things you did when you were young! Not to mention wasting your time blogging when you're meant to be working and then telling me off for not doing my homework!"

It's true. I cringed sheepishly accepting the full weight of her accusation squarely on both shoulders.

"Ah, but BA, being a hypocrite is part of being a parent! We know what it was like but time and experience have taught us to know better!" the Free Man came chivalrously to my rescue.

Yea BA, that's right! That's just what I meant to say; thank you A Free Man!

(So why am I sitting here in my free lesson blogging now?)

Hypocrite.