It's a Potato Mine

I realise that my blog is in severe danger of becoming 'Grumpy Old Woman on Holiday," but I am going to have a little rant anyway. Who knows, I might have a daily rant just to make myself feel at home. 

I'm not very good with the 'swarm' instinct, it tends to make me a bit uncomfortable. I like to believe that I have free will, that I don't have to  follow the crowd. A lot of people love to swarm and I confess you will find me joining the swarm on the dance floor at a party when YMCA is played. Package holiday swarms, however, are quite another thing.

We are currently sitting on a bus, which has stopped for a 'comfort break', an hour into our 1 1/2 hour journey to our hotel. I wouldn't feel at all grumpy if someone had needed the loo but we were told this would be happening at the start of our journey. Cynics that the LSH and I are we have interpreted this break as, "we will now stop somewhere where you can buy food, drink and fake handbags from a kind relative of Ischmal the driver, who gives Thomas Cook a percentage of everything sold." This information about our stop wasn't given until after they sold us water, phone card, currency converter charts and told us that we HAD to attend the welcome meeting, where we could be sold a whole range of trips. "We literally have something for everyone," droned Maureen.

In truth, Maureen, you don't have what I want. A quick journey and peace an quiet to read my book. "Let me tell you about Dalaman. It's a potato mine," continued Maureen. Slightly interested and beginning to forgive Mo for her incessant chatter I leant over to the LSH and said, "A potato mine, that's interesting. I wonder why the mine them and don't just grow them like everyone else?"

" I think she said pet hate of mine," he replied with a smirk.

Teleportation

I'm sitting in a bar in an airport drinking Peppermint tea, while all around me  sit with huge glasses of larger, already a little squiffy from the free vodka shots they were given in duty free. The LSH and my son have not succumbed to the alcoholic temptation but are tucking into a full English fry up. 

I don't know if airports gave always been such huge commercial experiences but if you liked shopping and drinking you could spend a whole week here without getting bored.  Personally, I just want to get tony destination. We have checked out the departures board and discussed all the places we would like to go. Reykjavik and Kiev look interesting.

We are only going to Turkey but will lose a whole day travelling and so I've decided that I will travel the world when they invent teleportation.

Facebook Etiquette

There should be a guide for facebook etiquette.  There probably is one.  It probably says, "DON'T USE FACEBOOK."  It seems to me that there are endless opportunities for offending people with social media that you didn't intend.

The 'like' button is a real problem.  I've been playing far too much Candy Crush and so between lives I see the newsfeed and find myself liking everything.  I must look like some crazy stalker.  Can I really like everything?  Actually, I probably do.  I am an inherently nosey person.  I like to know what is going on.

Sometimes, I find myself liking something and then immediately unliking it because the sentance is not something you can like. Hitting the like button becomes a shorhand for saying you've read the status, understood it, empathised with it or it made you laugh but if you are not careful you can like the fact that someone's cat has just died.

Today, I may have overshared (another fatal social media error) and then was promptly faced with all sorts of like/dislike dilemmas.  My status was, "It's concerning me that my anxiety dreams feature being chased by women in floral skirts with elasticated waists and hairy chins."  This is because I have a music competition to attend today and last night was filled with anxious fretful dreams.  I know these dreams are just my mind's way of working out everthing that might go wrong, so that it doesn't.  I know that words won't be forgotten, all the electrical equipment will be working, it won't rain so much that the car floats away down the lane before we can get out, it won't be so hot that the judges melt before we get there and I know I won't be chased by an angry woman in an elasticated waisted floral skirt with a hairy chin.

This particular woman, or versions of her, appear in my anxiety dreams with increasing regularily. I know this woman and she terrifies me (and another music teacher, who commented on my status).  When I was having coffee with a friend we watched people go up and down the High Street and I noticed that all the ex-music teachers that I knew had hairy chins and wore long floral skirts with elasticated waists and a top that didn't match. Quite often they were in sandles with socks and had their vest showing and sometimes had a bit of food dribbled on their chin.  I know that this isn't a scientifially representative sample (3) but it still got me worrying about my future self, which somehow keeps slipping into my dreams.

The problem with posting a status like this is that I want to hit the like button for comments that people post that make me laugh.  When someone posts, "It wasn't me!" or "I must remember to shave today!" it's funny but I worry that if I hit 'like' it appears as though I think they look like the woman in my dream, which they don't and they must know they don't but if I don't acknowledge the comment does that make it look like I don't think it's funny?  

It's all so difficult that I might just roll over and go back to sleep but I'm scared of the woman waiting to chase me.

And Relax.....

The start of the school holidays mean different things for pupils, teachers and parents but however they feel about it,  it is a change in routine for all.  There is no longer a timetable to follow and this can be both liberating and a bit scary. It can be very difficult to relax after being so scheduled. Children complain of being bored because no one is telling them what to do next.

For many teachers the freedom of no routine causes a rebellion.  They lay in bed until 11 or 12 reading books or writing silly blogs, they go for coffee with a friend and come back 3 1/2 hours later, they go out for a meal with colleagues and get told off for being too noisy in the pub after and they go to the loo whenever they like.  They go swimming every day, they have a beautiful weed-free watered allotment and they cook decent meals for their family every night.  Their house is clean and they have conversations with their long suffering husbands that don't start with, "Can you just wait until I've finished marking this piece of work?" They even stay up past 10 o'clock at night.

This disgraceful behaviour should be stopped.  Someone should get the government onto it.  Long school holidays are clearly not good for anyone.

Awards, Rewards and True Love

This week I've been thinking a lot about motivators; rewards and punishments.  Towards the end of my first year at University, our course tutor sent a note which said, "Sticks and Carrots.  If there's a reason you can't get your arse in gear come and see me."  I don't know if it worked.  It made me laugh and made a friend go to see him to switch to a creative writing course.

Many schools have complicated systems of rewards and punishments.  My son's school, this week, had an awards ceremony, where my son grumpily accepted an award for Geography and we parents sat, sweltering in a boiling hot hall, listening to an ex-pupil (aparently a success) who bored us about his work for BT and how he had learnt about perserverance from failing his A levels at the school. The headteacher gave his  usual, although uncharactaristically short speach about how wonderful he was.  The next day, I heard many parents complaining, "how did that person get that award?  My child is top of the class, why didn't they get it?"  There was a feeling that such random awarding of rewards was actually a demotivator, "why should they work so hard when it's just given to the scruffy oik, who only managed to hand his homework in once and that was on the back of an envelope?"  My son was more phlegmatic about the whole thing.  He felt that he'd already worked hard by the time of the Award Ceremony and if you got it it was......well, just something for your mother to dust."  They also sent a letter, this week, stating that pupils now had nine lives, like the mangy moggies they are, which they can lose by being late, ill, scruffy, etc.  The letter said that there would be cash rewards for well behaved children.  My son, was equally scathing about this, pointing out that we had a letter about uniform last year and how the school were "definitely losing the uniform battle." My daughter had worked it out at 4 years old.  When I visited the school I saw her name on a golden apple on a tree display and said, "Oh, well done, you've got a golden apple reward." She looked at me as if I was possibly the stupidest person alive and said, "Mummmmm, everyone gets one by the end of the year!"

I tend to agree with my children.  The best reward is the feeling you get when you know you've done a good job.  I've had this feeling a lot this week, with concerts, a church service, pupils doing really well in exams and the phone call from Sing Up.

My school found out that we have received the Platinum Award from Sing Up this week.  This is the highest award they give and makes us an ambassador school for singing.  Although, I have driven us getting this award it was a true team effort and so I had to find a way to reward the staff who had worked so hard to get it.  My reward of choice is always cake.  I think people like cake and it shows that you've put a bit of effort in.  

During the inspection visit my headteacher said that if we got the award we'd have to celebrate, maybe have a Platinum themed party.  I said that I was thinking that a small piece of platinum jewelery would be nice and she said she was thinking more of platinum coloured paper plates.  I'm still waiting to see which she chooses.

$240,400.00

£1.75 for 8

This is the time of year when I usually get a weed letter from the allotment nazis.  The stick that is meant to make me keep my allotment in better condition.  I am now resigned to the fact that the letter will arrive because end of term concerts, assemblies, church services, weddings, award ceremonies all take up valuable weeding time.  I am also resigned to never winning the 'best kept plot' award so I think that getting the letter is at least something.  After all, who wants to be average?

When I arrived at the allotment today, I was surprised to see that I appeared to have been awarded a golden heart.

On closer inspection it turned out to be a balloon that had got caught on my 'protect the cabbages from the birds' frame.  It is quite a sad little gold award, as it has messages attached to it to a recently deceased grandfather.

I was even more surprised to find that my allotment looked as though it deserved an award.  It was lush and watered and almost weed free.  The Long Suffering Husband said that he knew I was busy and so had been popping over every evening, while I was teaching or practising to water.  That is the best reward I could have asked for and a sign of true love. 

Change is bad

One of the Long Suffering Husband's catchphrases is, "change is bad." He really suffers from change. He enjoys a routine and even the smallest change puts him out of his comfort zone. Today is the first day of Ramadan and so his usual lunch partner will not be joining him and this thought has not started his day well.

I've always been a much more chaotic sort of person and so change feels like more of an opportunity to clear out some of the clutter than a bad thing. I try to see the positive side of change; that it allows for something new and exciting. But this is not always easy. With change comes a grief for what you've lost and grief has to be respected. 

This time of year can be very difficult. As schools break up all those little losses mount up. The children you won't teach next year. The teachers you won't work with. The friends your children won't see any more. The fantastic teachers that won't be working with your children anymore.

This year, I am feeling the loss more acutely than ever. The year 6s I teach are the most talented musicians and the school will really miss them, my school band will be different without the trumpet player, the amazing grade 4 flautists and our only 2 guitarists . The choir will not be the same without the brilliant singers who are happy to perform solos with almost no practice and do it brilliantly. At the Youth Orchestra, seven members are leaving this year, as they are off to University, to join the army or to travel the world and although we insist you can never leave our orchestra (once MYO always MYO) we will miss them. One of my colleagues is leaving to go to a new school and I will miss her. She's bonkers and gets my sense of humour and always makes me laugh. And yesterday I found out that a brilliant teacher from the music department will be leaving my son's school. 

The problem with the school life is that everything stops (honestly I'm not complaining. I love school holidays) and you have to sit with that grief and loss for the next 6 weeks. In September, when everything starts again there is a natural replacement. In the orchestra, band and choir the loss of the leavers allow others to step up and show what they had been hiding. I will get new colleagues, who may be just as bonkers. The sign of a good school is one that continues to be just as brilliant if one amazing teacher leaves and although my colleague will be a great loss she will be replaced by another great teacher. 

I hope my son's school is just as good because at the moment I am struggling to get past the loss. This particular teacher is totally responsible for him wanting to go there. She runs the school's award winning choir and gets amazing results from her choirs. We have been attending the school Summer Music concert for 10 years and at the very first we saw, when he was only 5 years old, he watched the choir and the grand finale in awe and turned to me and asked when he could start that school. She taught my daughter, as the only pupil in the year, A level music and she has been a quietly encouraging and supportive mentor for me and we share a passion for the Great British Bake Off. She will be missed by so many and as her Facebook page will, no doubt show her over the next few weeks, she has made an enormous difference to many, many people's lives and that is the true sign of an outstanding teacher.

So, for the next few weeks I'm going to agree with the LSH and think that change is bad. September will, I hope, bring new exciting things for everyone.

Work Experience

What I know about work experience for year 10s is:

1. It's about time they stopped pretending that it is a good thing.

2. It's too stressful for the school, the parents and the companies that employ them.

3. No one (except teachers) enjoy having work experience pupils with them. Most people think that if they wanted to become a teacher they would have done.

4. The current year 10s and all those following them have to stay in education for another 3 years, so what's the point?

5. Lots of people get put off their intended career by work experience. If you want to be a brain surgeon and you get work experience in a hospital doing fetching and carrying and cleaning up bodily fluids when you are an immature nerdy, clever 15 year old with poor social skills you might not understand the 'experience' is totally different from reality.

6. Some people love their work experience but I haven't met anyone who think it helped them get a job later in life.

7. Some companies use work experience and internships as free labour (particularly after Uni in the arts) and that meeds to stop.

8. It's time to understand that the best experience of work is about the wage packet at the end of the week or month. Even people who love their jobs don't do it for free and we should be teaching children how to properly value themselves.

What's in a name?

I love names. They are a constant source of amusement for me and always have been. When I was younger I would sometimes go to work with my Dad when he went on 'mergencies' and while he was sorting out the fault in the telephone exchange I would sit with the operators and read the directories. I particularly love a funny name, the Drew Peacocks, Dick Heads, Teresa Greens and Oliver Klozoffs of this world make life worth living.  I believe that my dad worked with a Mr Kibbles, Donald who would answer the phone with a flourish, "Donkey Balls Southend Irish Sea."  I've never worked out what Southend Irish Sea was, though.

Yesterday, Twitter and Facebook exploded with the news that Katie Hopkins, self-confessed snob and ex-Apprentice candidate had made Holly Willybooby (I wish Keith Lemmon hadsn't made that joke because I can't remember her real name any more) lose her rag on air.  The cause of Heavenly Holly shouting, "Stop, just stop now," was Katie's insistance that she wouldn't let her children play with someone called Tyler, Princess or Charmaine.  Obviously, it didn't help that she then said that calling a potentially ugly child Bella was stupid.  (Holly's daughter is called Belle).  If you missed it or are reading this blog in 2093 (long after I'm gone) then you can watch it all here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edZjdgU0asM.  If this blog is still here, YouTube is still here and the internet hasn't crashed the whole world.

The woman is outragous, of course she is, but as she sat there smugly stating that she wasn't the only parent to do it I knew she was right.  No, of course I don't mean she was right to judge children by their names but she was right that lots of people do.  There was some research published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology in 1950 (Vol 45(1) Jan1950) that showed people have terrible name bias.  They showed 150 men 30 photos of girls, chosen for their ambiguous ethnic looks and asked to them to rate them on whether they liked them, thought they were beautiful, intelligent, ambitious and entertaining.  Then they repeated the test 2 months later, giving the faces names that were classically Negro (their word), Italian, Jewish or Irish.  They found that the results were significantly less favourable, particularly for the Negro and Jewish names, although the women labelled with Jewish names were thought to be more intelligent and ambitious. There were less changes with the Italian and Irish names.  But just because people do it doesn't make it right.

It is natural to be put off a name if you encounter a particularly obnoxious person with that moniker.  I know teachers who have struggled to name their own children (particularly boys) because of previous 'bad boys' in their class. My friend named her son Thomas because she had never taught a bad Tom.  Unfortunately, as soon as she did every Thomas she taught was a little so and so.

It's also natural to put an image to a name. If we didn't, every novel would be like reading Wolf Hall, where every character is called Thomas and you get completely confused.  When you read a name like Elsie, Olive or Gladys you think little old lady, grey hair, quite sweet and hailing from the East End having moved to the country to escape the 'immigrants' (or is that just me?).  My daughter's boyfriend had a comment on his F1 article from a Dorothy (which makes me think of Ruby Slippers and following the Yellow Brick Road) and he was surprised that a Dorothy could be an F1 fan.

The problem is that it's only one tiny step from, "That kid Travis in my child's class has just been expelled, I'm not surprised with a name like Travis," to "All Travis' are bad and should be expelled/ locked up/shot/kept in concentration camps." Bigotry comes in many forms; racism, sexism, ageism, name-ism and they're all bad.

Katie Hopkins sounds like a lovely name.  I imagine a wholesome, sweetshop owner who wears floral skirts and jeweled sandles and is slightly unlucky in love but for whom the right man is waiting just around the corner.  That just goes to show how wrong you can be about a name. This Katie Hopkins is a snob (who doesn't seem to have sent her children to private school so that they can only mix with Cosmos, Maximillians and Karenzas).  She tweets outragous things like, "Ginger babies.  Just like a baby  Just so much harder to love."  She is famous for having stolen both her husbands from their wives by seducing them at work and having sex with them in fields.   Some of this may be explained by the fact that her twitter name is KTHopkins as KT is a very different person to to Katie. KT is more ruthless, doesn't have time for being nice she wears power heels and teeny tiny pencil skirts with blouses that show her lacy bra.  She flicks her long blond hair and bats her eyelashes to prove that a woman can do anything.

It's her children I feel sorry for.  They are doomed.  They can't choose their own friends now and how sad is that? What she doesn't realise is that once they go to senior school, they make new friends and those friends don't wait to be vetted by Mummy.  They hang out at lunch, enjoy a spot of planking in the rubbish French teacher's lesson and pass notes about boys/girls they fancy when the strict Maths teacher's back is turned.  They make alliances with people who are like them.  They find other children with obnoxious mothers so they can compare how awful their home life is.

Looking at the picture of her gorgeous children I can see they are already starting a rebellion.  She recently tweeted that her son had expressed an interest in being an hairdresser and that her husband was currently beating it out of him (I'm paraphrasing, as I can't find the original tweet) but I am so glad that he is already rebelling against his long locks and his sisters' uncombed hair.  Next thing you know he will bring home his new boyfriend, Tyler and announce that they are going to adopt twins, Chardonnay and Budweiser.

A Full Time Job

The Speech Therapy to return my lost voice is in full flow.  Every other week I spend just over two hours in the company of 3 other croaky women, a trainee Speech Therapist with wonderful posture and a very experienced Speech Therapist who slouches in her choir, while explaining everything we have to do. 

Apart from the therapy sessions there is an awful lot of work to do in between.  From the first session, I worked steadily on my posture exercises,the jaw deconstruction exercises,  my breathing and the massage.  I am lucky that  I can do posture exercises with the children before each lesson and breathing comes quite naturally to me.  (A flautists curse - other people can breathe without thinking about it while we control every ounce of air that flows in and out) but the massage has to be performed twice a day and you should massage until the muscles go soft.  I have stopped  massaging after 5 -10 minutes because soft muscles and I don't seem to be compatible.

This week we have been given even more breathing exercises, tongue deconstruction exercises, pharyngeal deconstruction exercises, flow and resonance exercises that need to be practised as often as is possible and I found out that I should be steaming 4 times a day.  Add to that the amount of time I'm spending in the loo because I am now drinking at least 2 litres of water a day and there really isn't time for much else.  

It's not all bad though.  The flow and resonance exercises have you chanting MA PA MA PA MA PA, ME PEE ME PEE ME PEE AND MOO POO MOO POO MOO POO.  We were told that the American Speech Therapist who invented these exercises chose those particular words because 'she could'.  There is also a lot of tongue poking.

As I already have a job I may be doing these exercises as warm ups with the children tomorrow so if anyone passes my room and finds children pretending to be a cat, liking their arm acting like a stary-eyed Chinese lion with a sticking out tongue and chanting ME PEE MOO POO don't be too surprised.

I would write more but I have to go ME PEE and boil my head.