Clap Happy

This term I am having so much fun teaching music. I am aiming to have a singing playground and so have been teaching the children singing games they can play outside at lunch and break times.  We also have a stage and outdoor chimes and so I've been using those for composing lessons and I just love the freedom of lessons outside.  

Last week, watching 4 year olds run on the spot, panic and run round in circles while trying to decide which way to chase around the circle, while playing A Tisket A Tasket had me laughing so much my sides hurt.  I was still laughing when the 8 and 9 year olds were bouncing balls in time to a rhyme.  My favourite; One Two Three O'Leary challenged hand-eye and leg co-ordination to the point where more balls were attracted to eyes than they were to hands.  The children who went to first aid were very keen to explain that they had been learning something and not just having fun.  

This week I am planning clapping games and while I know they are excellent for children's development of a sense of pulse and rhythm (which since no one dances to live music any more is so important) do seem to have questionable morals.  I remember singing, "My mother told me, if I was goody, that she would buy me, a rubber Johnny, my Aunty told her, I kissed a soldier, now she won't buy me a rubber Johnny."  Now that I'm grown up I think her mother had it all wrong.  Once she'd kissed the soldier she really needed that rubber Johnny.  Looking back, I possibly went to quite a rough school because we also sang "Oh Sir Jasper" and "4 and 20 Virgins went down to Inverness, when the party was over there were 4 and 20 less."  There was also a song about rolling in the clover that I can't remember all the words to. Researching hand clapping rhymes on the internet today I found this gem:

There is a guy over there

Who's got one eye
He says he loves me but that's a lie
Cause his hair don't curl and his boots don't shine
and he ain't got the money to buy me.

Prostitution in playground games, seems to be a classic theme.  

I also found this one that I probably won't be sharing with the class.  They are too bright to take the risk, of them going home and saying that I had taught them to say the word ass or hell. 

Miss Molly had a steamboat, the steamboat had a bell,

Miss Molly went to heaven, the steamboat went to...
HELL-o operator, please give me number 9,
And if you disconnect me I'll kick you in behind
The 'frigeraator, there was a piece of glass,
Miss Molly sat upon it, and hurt her little...
ASk me no more questions, I'll tell you no more lies,
The cows are in the meadow, making chocolate pies.
Yum yum!

I am also sure that I can't handle the imagery of children eating cow-pats.

In my research I have also found some very complicated clapping patterns by American children who seem to approach these games as training for cheer leading practice.  They wiggle and pout and sing the rhyme so fast that you know the competition of being the fastest, loudest, with the sexiest wiggle is more important than the rhyme or the pulse.  

I've always known that these playground games are fun and great for development of musical skills but until today I was unaware of a piece of research done at Ben-Gurion University in Israel by Dr Sulkin, who studied the effect of hand clapping games on the development of cognitive abilities. They found that children who spontaneously took part in clapping games had neater handwriting and were better at spelling.  They went to schools and engaged children in a 10 week programme of hand clapping games, listening to Mozart, or with no musical input and they found that,"Within a very short period of time, the children who until then hadn't taken part in such activities caught up in their cognitive abilities to those who did," for those children who had been part of the hand clapping group.  Their teachers also reported that the children became more socially integrated and there were significant improvements in the work of dyslexic or dyscalculate children. I'm thrilled that it's better than listening to Mozart.  I like Mozart but games are more fun.  Dr Sulkin was particularly interested in the fact that these games naturally disappear from children's lives after primary school and wondered if they had a special developmental function.  So she asked adults to participate in these games too.  She found that,  "Once they start clapping, they report feeling more alert and in a better mood."  

I am looking forward to feeling more alert and in a better mood next week.

A virtual world.

Sometimes it's worrying that Apple appears to be controlling us and taking over our lives.  Sometimes I feel as though I am losing my grip on reality.  A new app appears on the scene and we're all clicking away, obsessed.  The latest waste of time is Candy Crush and everyone seems to be playing it.  I am no exception despite the fact that in my more paranoid moments I fret that it is some kind of mind-control experiment.  I even dream about moving little coloured blobs and I know that isn't healthy. There was a film in the eighties (I think it was called The Last Starfighter) that suggested that space invader games had been put on earth by aliens looking for people to fight in space wars and I wonder what skill the aliens are testing us for with this app.

This afternoon I was about to go swimming, to carry on with my Splashpath Swimming App challenge to swim Loch Ness.  Obviously, you don't take your i-phone in the water with you; you have to trust yourself to to honest about the number of lengths you say you have done.  Even though, I get excited that I've nearly swum the length of Loch Ness I do know it's not real.  I do know that I couldn't  swim 1455 lengths of the pool in one go and so I would  drown unless Nessie herself allowed me to rest on her back.

Then I remembered that the pool is being used for the Swimathon so I couldn't go.  I did think about doing the Swimathon this year but in the end that seemed far too real.

I settled on the sofa, checking facebook, twitter and playing as many games of Candy Crush as I could before I had to wait for new lives, ate a piece of the worst cake I've ever made.  I knew I needed to get off my backside and do something but I seem to have lost the ability to make any decisions for myself.  Luckily, I noticed a facebook posting of a MapMy.... variety and thought, "I know I'll take the dog for a walk and I can measure how far we've been and how fast we walked."

I walked for 7.8 miles along the seawall into the middle of nowhere.  It was bliss, miles away from anyone else, just me, the dog and a strange American woman's voice in my pocket telling me that I'd been walking for 20 minutes, 40 minutes and so on.  What I love about walking in this way is that you have time to think.  You can make things up in your head and nobody is there to tell you not to be so silly.   You can look at clouds and imagine dragons and knights and when you see a stile in the middle of the path for no reason you can go into flights of fancy about what used to be in the field behind to warrant a fence on the footpath.  I eventually decided on Bulls, bread for the local weekly bullfight in the High Street.

When I saw these 21 square water-filled pools I wondered if they were Oyster beds but that would have been far too sensible for the kind of walk I was having, so I imagined they were water-sprite swimming pools.

The dog even imagined with me.  When we saw this egg, he was terrified, skitting around it.  I asked him what the matter was and in his husky, Scottish accent that he only uses when we are alone he told me that something evil had come out of that egg and that it smelled of death.

As I walked back I started to see more people.  There were the teenage boys, gamboling along towards the causeway to the island in their swimming shorts and t-shirts.  One was wearing a T-shirt, proclaiming a huge cock, and checking with one hand that it was still there.  They seemed to be planning a swim but changed their mind when they saw there were two girls nearby.

Then I saw a couple with a metal detector and I started to think, "I quite like people because they're funny but I'm not sure I want to be one."

Kleptomaniac lets down town

I have a confession.  I am the weak link and it's time to own up.

Today the news broke that the town I live in is in the top 5 most peaceful places to live in the Country.  The whole Country is becoming more peaceful and suffering from less violent crime and fewer murders (except Lewisham).  I have always known this because I am a fan of our local paper. When I first moved here I loved reading the most dramatic story of the week, "Plant Pot Stolen from Garden Shed."  The paper is always changing because they change their staff every 6 weeks (or so it seems) and at the moment there are a few would-be Daily Maily journalists working there.  Today's headline,  "DRUG DEATH DRIVER FACES PRISON" is about a truck driver who has been convicted of causing death by dangerous driving and was found with a small amount of cannabis in his backpack.  In the rest of the paper the worst things to happen were an eleven minute powercut at lunchtime, which meant that customers couldn't pay for their shopping in Morrisons; theft of a caravan, a generator, two solar panels and a quad bike and a victory for the community as the man who thought about opening a sex shop has decided against it.  In the letters page there is a cute picture of a dog wearing glasses.

The local police station is open from 12 until 6 every day except Sunday and from this picture I took today of the station, they seem to have plenty of time for gardening.  

How idyllic it is to live in such a place but the pressure is huge.  If I lived in Lewisham I wouldn't need to confess my  crimes.  I would be the best behaved person in the town but I don't. I'm not intentionally bad, in fact I don't even know how it happens.

It all started in a Church about a year ago.  At the end of the orchestra rehearsal there was a pair of brown leather gloves left.  I asked around and no one claimed them and as it was cold I wore them home that night. They were really comfortable gloves and still no one claimed them so I carried on wearing them.

This week I cleaned out my handbag and I found a few things I wasn't expecting.  First was a dinner band from school that I put in my pocket after we had used it to play A Tisket A Tasket, as part of a music lesson on playground games.

Then, I found a school pencil.  This is not something I would normally feel guilty about.  Keeping a school pencil in your handbag, as a music teacher is a good idea.  You always need to write things on music and it makes a perfect conductor's baton.  This pencil felt different though.  It is a comfortable pencil, nice to hold, slightly triangular and it doesn't have the tell tale red end that our school pencils have.  I racked my brains, "Where had it come from?" and then I remembered I'd been to another school for a training session on a free internet music resource called Charanga (check it out if you are in Essex - it's great) and at the end there was an evaluation form to complete.  I was in a bit of a rush to leave, as my first pupil was due to arrive at my house in 20 minutes and so I must have shoved the pencil in my bag.

The last thing I found came as quite a shock.  There were two pairs of leather gloves.  The first, sort-of stolen from a Church and the second pair......? Suddenly, I remembered.  I had also sort-of stolen these from a different Church.  At the end of the school Christmas service I couldn't find the brown leather gloves and it was really cold.  I was grumpy (as I often am after playing the piano in public) and I had lost my voice.  Despite the fact they had never been my gloves in the first place I secretly and silently
 cursed whoever it was who must have walked off with my gloves.  Then, as I was leaving, I saw my gloves and rejoiced that someone had found them and put them on the side.  I picked them up, pulled them on and walked back to school feeling happy with warm hands.  Over the next few months I thought how my gloves had developed into a really nice colour and didn't seem to be quite as brown as they were.  "Haven't these gloves weathered well?" I asked the Long Suffering Husband.
He now thinks that I am going to be struck down, "It's one thing to steal something but to steal it from a Church."

Now that I've confessed I'm wondering how I can stop myself being an accidental kleptomaniac and there is an item on the news about how they have stopped bike theft at Newcastle University.  By putting up posters of watching eyes, bike theft has dropped to almost nothing.  Where there were CCTV cameras bike theft stayed the same and where they had nothing bike theft had increased.  So, I was wondering if all Churches and Schools would like to put up posters like these they may be able to stop me letting down the town by being the worst criminal around.

Women's Magazines

Today More! magazine announced that it would cease  production. Sales of just under 10,000 are not enough to keep it going, 10,000 readers just aren't enough to attract the advertisers, who make the magazine profitable, giving enough return to pay it's writers properly and make a significant profit for it's investors.

I heard the news, when my daughter texted that she wouldn't be able to do work experience at More! now but that Suzanne Moore had done a good job of defending the magazine on twitter. A blog called Vagenda Magazine rejoiced.  They believe More! is responsible for misrepresenting how women look and therefore this is a victory for feminism.  Suzanne Moore pointed out that any loss of places that female journalists can be paid for their writing is definitely not a victory for feminism.

More! was one of the reasons that my daughter wanted to become a journalist.  When she started reading More! as a step up from Heat I wasn't horrified that she would become body dysmorphic, just as when she wanted a Barbie I didn't think she would aspire to a head 6 times too large for her waist and breasts that would make her permanently fall forwards off her impossibly tiny feet.  I thought she might read the problem page, look at the pictures of clothes, learn to use make up in a better way than I ever had and possibly even learn from the position of the week page that there really aren't that many to choose from.  I thought all this would happen because that's what I learned from reading SHE magazine (the magazine for women who juggle their lives, which in my head I always changed to women who juggle knives!)  SHE also had the best crossword.  What I didn't expect was for the magazine to help her find a political voice.  I didn't expect that she would aspire to write articles about difficult subjects for everyday women to read that would change their lives or even change the world.  I didn't expect that she would enjoy the articles so much that she would ask for a subscription for Christmas.

SHE magazine closed in 2011 when it's readership fell to 144,583.  So, if teenagers aren't getting their sex tips from magazines that are written by journalists who have learnt how to write in a clear, concise way, and have their facts checked by a team of lawyers, where are they getting them?  I know they aren't going to the library to search Jackie Collins books for the pages that fall open (although they probably have read 50 Shades) and I very much doubt they are looking up all the rude words in the dictionary and cross referencing them until they finally get to something they understand.  They are probably getting everything they need to know about how they want to look and act from the internet and anyone can write anything they like on the internet - l know, I'm living proof. These teenagers might stumble upon a feminist blog like Vagenda or the F-Word but they just as likely to stumble upon something dangerous, scary or misogynistic.  There are loads of websites and blogs that glamourise anorexia and bulimia (I know because my daughter showed me when she was 14)

As a feminist, I am sad that More! has gone from our magazine stands.  Women want to be able to read about things they are interested in, that represent their lives and I think the greater number of magazines that are factually checked with a diverse range of views and the occasional brilliant article that might change the world or just one woman's life, the better.    

I just hope the readership of Good Food Magazine doesn't drop too low.