Everything you do is useful, however useless

This afternoon I taught art. I had been preparing for English and Maths til 2am last night so art never got planned. I managed to borrow a lesson plan from another student at lunch time and winged it like a migratory bird.

The art lesson was on Henri Rousseau.



We talked about the tiger patterns and how the stripes are replicated through the painting, and the camoflage colours.


Then I showed them pictures of wild animals, starting with a lion. "How would you camoflage a lion in it's natural environment, children?".
Slight panic as I realise I don't really know details about where lions live or the difference between an African and Indian elephant or the natural habitat of a hippopotamus. The children have to pick an animal and draw it camoflaged in it's natural environment.
The children start arguing about whether lions live in the desert. Somebody starts telling them about long savannah grass and rocks umbrella thorn acacia trees and huge baobabs and perhaps a small pool to drink and bathe from . . .

A panda? They're endangered, by the way children (how does this person know this? they must be a blue-peter fan) and they'll like elevated terrain, with lots of bamboo, a mixture of grasses, grey stone, and deciduous environments.

A Black bear? They love the trembling aspen tree, and would appreciate a mixture of coniferous and deciduous terrain, with lots of rocks and a cave to shelter in - you will probably want to put water near by as well.

Miss, what can you can you camoflage a penguin with?

What can I put with my aligators, Miss?

This person doing the explaining, much to my suprise, was me. Where did all this knowledge of animal habitats come from?
My computer came with a free version of Zoo Tycoon - you get to build zoos and have to keep the animals and visitors happy. I have spent many hours "wasting" my life away building exhibits for animals to live in. This afternoon I learnt that time wasting might one day help you to wing it like a particularly confident migratory bird winging its way accross the African savannah, Amazon rainforest or Antartic desert.

Mountains and corners

My blog has been very quiet recently.
There are two reasons for this.

One is that I have been too busy to wash my pants, let alone write interesting entries into this.

Second, is that this blog was designed to be a place to store up all the lovely memories I have of my first tentative steps into teaching; a deliberate, one-sided treasure chest of the fantastic things I have been fortunate enough to experience this year. Some of the bad days have been included; you can't truly appreciate the highs if you've forgotten the lows; (and, with a nod towards my "scienceisnotareligion" friend(s) it helped construct a more balanced version of reality).

Over the course of the last four weeks (which have felt more like four months) I have experienced precious little worthy of writing about in this blog.

Excpetions include:


A maths lesson last week. The look on the children's faces when I wrote in pen in one of their maths books (one child struggles to write, and as writing the date and title were not part of my learning objectives, I saved him 5 minutes of pain in 15 seconds flat. This led to gasps of horror from the other 3 children I was working with:
Child: Miss - you've written in PEN!
Miss : ?!?
Children in unison: You must write in pencil in maths!
Miss: Oh. Right. Ben, can I use your pencil then?
Ben: Yeah.
Miss: And your ruler?
Ben: Yeah.
I then quickly drew the child some margins and tried to hand his book back . . . met with more gasps
Children: MISS! You've not counted THREE SQUARES THEN TEN SQUARES THEN THREE SQUARES TO DRAW YOUR LINES!!
At this point, I was the one sat with my mouth agape. The children I was working with are particularly needy - it is a challenge to teach them anything and for it to stick for 24 hours. However, they have learnt by heart and were able to repeat it to me, without skipping a beat, that they must set out their books by counting little squares, underline their date and title, always use pencil, use a ruler to draw margins, which much be three squares width, - this process takes them ages. They have a heightended sense of anxiety about the whole process. Can one of them explain multiplication? No.


ICT lesson last week - child who had played up all lesson came up to me at the end and apologised. A heart warming moment, which for a second, made it all worth it.

Unfortunately, it was a very short moment amidst a sea of hours of desperation. This last four weeks have been some of the most difficult I have ever lived through. Despite being only 3 weeks away from finishing, last Thursday I was on the verge of quitting.

On Friday, I heard news from other people on the course. Most felt the same. They are exhausted. They are on the verge of quitting.

Other students at my school came to me that afternoon.
Hazel! I can't take it! I'm exhausted! Nothing I ever do is right!
You're learning, I tell them. That's the point of teaching training, I say. Don't expect yourself to get it right first time.

I'm considering setting up a teacher-training counselling service.
The problem is, no-one would have time to use it.

magic eyes

Kids seem to think teachers have magic eyes. When we see something wrong in an exercise book, our vision turns red. If it is right, our vision turns green. No need for actual thinking or knowing what the question was or having the foggiest clue about what the lesson is, our bodies sense right or wrong like traffic lights.

Par example (I've been teaching French, my God that was fun - I have never actually had a French lesson in my life and the children have been learning it since September). A few weeks ago, I had non-contact time to go and mark some books. I had to nip back into class to get something, and one of the kids hisses at me "Misssssssss, Is this right?" Of course, despite not even knowing what subject was being taught, or topic, or even what the question was, my auto-teacher-vision kicked in. Naturally.