Visitng the Student

It's half term, which seems to be when most parents feel that an acceptable amount of time has passed for them to visit their child (yes I do mean child - they will always be a child to the parent) at university. All my friends have managed to squeeze in a visit to their studying offspring and I am no exception.

In the first year the visit is all about putting your mind at rest.  As a parent, you have missed your child like crazy, you've had a cold that just won't shift and you've worried.  You've worried about whether they are doing their work, whether they are living with nice people, whether they are drinking too much, whether they are eating properly, whether they are managing to cook without burning the halls down.  You don't relax very much on the visit.  You go out to lunch and take them to the supermarket for a big shop.  You clean their toilet or kitchen because other people are just disgusting. You try not to cry as you leave them again. You think that you are being silly and should really try to pull yourself together and you do.  It's a good job that you do because when they come home at Christmas they are foul.

In the second year the first half term visit is still focused around food and mopping up tears.  This time it's their tears, as they admit that the quick decicion of who to live with made last October may not have been such a good one.  You take them out to lunch so that you can spend as much time out of the house as possible.  Besides, it smells odd with a curious mix of damp and stale deep fat frying oil that you remember from your own student days.  You take them to the supermarket and show them how to label or hide their food, luckily you remember your student days well enough. You clean their bathroom (but only when no one is looking so you don't seem like too much of a fussy mum).  The good news is that they will be much nicer this Christmas.

I have just come back from the third year visit and if you are a parent in one of the first two please be encouraged.  This visit is a delight.  It's like visiting some really nice friends.  Their flat is cleaner than your house and you get told off for not switching the plug off at the wall after you've unplugged your iphone.  You have really good conversations.  For me, this visit was still food based (although I didn't clean anything).  We had a fantastic curry, soup and cake and she even tried to pay.

As this could be her last year in Leicester I insisted that we went to Melton Mowbray to get a pork pie.  As a vegetarian, she wasn't too thrilled with the idea but we had such a brilliant day out.

Melton is a town a bit like home; the ratio of old men to everyone else is quite high, their 6th form college has a good performing arts course, so that student who have snuck out at lunch time for a Costa fix, serenade you at traffic lights, with a version of Don't Stop Believing by Journey, where they have changed the words so that you know exactly what they have done and are going to do today.  Melton Mowbray is the place where stilton comes from and so I also managed to buy and obscene amount of cheese.

 It has a beautiful Art Decco cinema and very clean public toilets, although a wee does cost 30p.

Toy soldiers in Melton Mowbray are very special.  You might imagine that they are magic, coming to life on a Wednesday night for band practice.  There must be lots of them and they must be quite good too.  Why else would they need their own band room?

Maybe this is the start of an adult relationship with my daughter. Even if we don't see each other too often we will always share a love of the bizzarre and cake.

Made in Dagenham - A Review

This musical should do very well. It's funny: with big block-busting-ear-worm songs, a huge cast, a story people know, amusing choreography and a star in Gemma Arterton that people have heard of.

The Long Suffering Husband works for Ford and the company had several free preview tickets, which they asked their employees to enter a ballot to win. He won.  We sat with other Ford Employees in the dress circle in the Adelphi theatre marvelling at our luck. Several people had checked the real price of their tickets and been amazed that they were mid-price tickets, rather than the cheapest. I'm not a huge fan of the Adelphi theatre. I think that unless you are in the front of the stalls the angle is odd and I think some of the sound gets lost. I saw Chicago there and hated it. I didn't hate Made in Dagenham, so it must have lots going for it.

This musical played with my emotions. 

The first thing it did was make me laugh. It is intentionally funny. They have made caricatures of the characters. Harold Wilson is turned into a bumbling fool, who can't take his coat off or find his way out of a room and every single one of his dances had me crossing my legs with laughter. The American boss of Ford is turned into a gun-toting bully, who sings like Springsteen and arrives on an army helicopter/truck and Germans were seen doing Nazi salutes.  It was all quite Panto.

By the interval, though I was feeling quite upset. I wasn't the only one. I overheard a woman at the bar in the interval saying to her husband, "I'm just so emotional at the moment.....I don't know......it's difficult....I just feel like crying." She wasn't being over-emotional. This is difficult subject content for women. To know that the Equal Pay act was only put into place in 1975 and that some of the issues raised are still issues today (such as work that women do being undervalued) is hard to deal with. The misogynistic jokes that were allowed because they showed how women were seen at the time were still uncomfortable. I found hearing Harold Wilson say, "Women? Why are women working? The war is over!" distressing and just a little bit unfair. The Wilson government spent more on Education than on defence, which had the effect of allowing more women to go to University, they brought in maternity pay and had more women in the cabinet than the current government's last cabinet. One of the characters made the whole female audience gasp when she said, "the reason that women don't have equality is that they put their children first."

This musical also caused me some confusion for me. There are huge letters that appear on the stage from time to time.  I was hoping that all would become clear at the end and the letters would spell out something profound but that never happened. They also missed a huge trick.  The LSH pointed out that when the tea lady wheeled a giant C across the stage it would have been so much funnier if it had been a T. We liked the tea lady character a lot and think that Kath Duggan may be someone to watch.

The music in this show is really good.  The band are just amazing.  The LSH said that the flute had been really good when we were travelling home and although I'd misheard him and he was talking about our lunch I completely agreed with him.  Gemma Arterton can sing.  She's no Idina Menzel or Ruthie Henshaw but her voice was really appropriate to the character and there were some stunning vocal performances. Adrian Der Gregorian (Eddy) had a lovely sweet tone in his middle register and Sophie Louise Dann (Barbara Castle) was just amazing.  I was particularly impressed with Emma Lindars (Pauline) and in such a huge cast to notice just one supporting actress for her singing must mean that she is really something special.  I have one small criticism that some of the female cast sang slightly sharp and some of the male cast were a little weak, leaving some of the chords sounding like slightly scrunchy open fifths.  I say that it's a small criticism because in some ways it enhanced the performance.  At moments when the plot line was uncomfortable an uncomfortable chord just added atmosphere.

It was an interesting experience to watch this musical surrounded by Ford employees.  In general I would say that they were not too impressed with the characterisation of the company they work for.  Ford America as a gun-toting bully didn't fit with their experience of working for this company.  I was sat next to a female engineer who thought that far from being discriminated against was given many more opportunities than friends she graduated with who worked for other companies. There was also a palpable bristle when the storyline suggested that Ford bullied the government by saying they would move operations to Belgium.  At the end the LSH explained that this was because Ford has recently decided to close it's Belgium plant and they all knew loads of people who were losing their jobs there. They were all very amused with the set design, which seemed to imply that making a car was rather like putting together an airfix model.

I ended up feeling guilty.  Guilty that I wasn't standing up for equality more, guilty that I didn't stand up during the Stand Up song and guilty that I had some criticisms of it, when I want it to do really well and I want everyone to think about the subject matter.

What you should do, though, is go and see it yourself and make up your own mind.

Furious

The teacher emerged bleary-eyed from her study. She'd spent most of her Sunday planning (except for a trip to the cinema to see Gone Girl - work/life balance) and thought she would catch up with the news. 

First, she checked what her friends had been up to on Facebook, which consisted of taking pictures of their pets, watching TV and getting angry at politicians.

Then she checked Twitter to see if the people with more exciting lives that she stalked had experienced a more interesting day. Apparently not. Even more people had watched television and the whole world seemed cross with a politician.

The teacher felt guilty. Guilt is something teachers are good at. She thought that she must be a very bad person because why else would she need to swear an oath to do a job (a part time job at that!) Swearing an oath made her think of criminals in the dock with their hand on the bible swearing to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth when everyone knows that they will be lying through their teeth to avoid punishment.

After guilt came confusion. She knew the Politician was a Historian but maybe she had it wrong and he was actually a character from history. She knows about the Hippocratic Oath. It was devised by Hippocrates around 400BC and is not still taken by doctors. Doctors do follow a code of ethics, as do all professionals (including teachers) but they do not swear the oath because they would have to promise to first do no harm and not perform abortions. 

Then she became amused. She thought of modern doctors swearing the Hippocratic oath, which starts with, "I make a solemn promise of solidarity with teachers and other physicians." They also had to promise to never gossip. She chuckled to herself.  She amused herself for a while by reading some blogs suggesting what a teachers oath would read like.

And finally she got angry. Teachers were suggesting an oath that promised to work too much, be underpaid, give up their pension rights, not to have a drink all day or go to the toilet. "NO!" she shouted, "I'm not signing up for that! If I'm doing it already then I'm a fool!" She wondered how an oath was going to help anyone do a better job. She was becoming furious. "That Tristram is one sick Hunt," she thought.

The fury starts to fade and she thinks an oath that promises to support and stick up for teachers, an oath that promises to do the best for children (rather than for targets), an oath that grants teachers the professional respect they deserve might not be such a bad idea after all but she thinks that Politicians might need to take it, rather than the teachers.

It's just a very nice number

As age is just a number I decided to pick one.  I like 42.  I haven't picked it because I'm worried about getting old.  I honestly don't care how old I am.  I picked it because after the age of 40 I struggled to remember how old I actually was every year because it didn't seem important anymore.

The children at school were all very excited about my birthday today.  "Happy Birthday. How old are you?" they all asked.  I didn't want to say 42 because it's sort-of wrong to lie to children and although I think it's getting close to 50 I couldn't be bothered to work it out; 2014-1966 is a big sum for a music teacher to do in her head. I decided to just say, "How old do you think I am?"

If I had any sense I wouldn't have posed such a dangerous question but luck was on my side today.

In the first class there was a little argument between two boys.
"Twenty four.  You're 24."
"Twenty five.  I think she's 25."
"No, you idiot, I told you 24."
It nearly came to blows.

Others plumped for a more sensible number in the 40s.  Only one child got the right number so I asked him why he thought that.  "It's because my Dad is 50 and you're much younger than him."

Only one child picked a number older than I actually am.  "You're 89!"
"Oh, that's a big number," I said
"Yes, you must be 89 because that's a sort of Granny age and you have grey hair."
ITS BLONDE!
Actually, I don't mind being 89.  I think that the children think of any age over 11 as being old and any age over 20 being staggeringly old and probably past it.

One class decided that they would sing Happy Birthday.  As soon as they entered the classroom they started singing.  They had obviously planned it because at the end of the song they started to count and clap.  I'd forgotten that children in schools give each other the number of claps that correspond to their age.  The clapping kept going for a very long time and I was getting a bit worried that they might never stop when they finished at 30.
"Did you run out of numbers?" I asked
"That's how old you are." I was told and who am I to argue?

Parents

It is World Teacher day today and instead of complaining about planning or marking on a Sunday or telling you about the teachers that inspired me I thought I'd make this blog post about the people who make teacher's lives easier.  This is a tribute to good parents.  Every staffroom will have heard the constant complaints about the parent that makes life difficult for the teacher but for every one of those there are many more who have supported their child and brought them up to be well behaved and have a curiosity for the world.


Now, when I tell you about these good parents they probably don't include the man who was shouting, "You only had to sit there and bloody look at those words.  How hard was that?  If you weren't so stupid this homework wouldn't take you any time at all!" that I overheard from an open window as I walked the dog on Saturday morning.  They probably don't include the single father who threw his child at me in the swimming pool today.  This is something that irritates me, generally, because I just don't understand why Saturday Dads have to throw their children around the swimming pool.  Small children are like particles of gas in a swimming pool anyway; moving in random patterns so they will bump into you in a reasonably empty pool and they really don't need their Dad's help.  But this weekend's child catapult was summed up so eloquently by their own child.  "Dad, will you help me with my homework?  Oh well, we might as well go to MacDonald's, Mum says we only like you because you take us to MacDonald's because that's all you're good for."

This is for the parents who stand on the edge of football pitches and shout encouragement or nudge the person next to them and say, "Look at that!  I'm so proud of him."  Its for the parents who take their children to clubs: kickboxing, tennis, and to the swimming pool. It's especially for the parents who had a child each on their back and were playing 'Kangaroo races', while the children shouted, "faster, faster, higher, jump bigger!". Particularly for their mum, who had one of her false eyelashes stuck to her cheek. It's for the Dad who was trying to show his boys how to do the butterfly stroke (lots of flailing and splashing) and for praising his younger son for, "speed swimming", despite the twinkle in his eyes giving away the fact that it was more like synchronised drowning.

This is for the parents who take their children out for walks, or to the allotment. The parents that point out the beautiful sunrise or the dew on the grass. The parents who let their children throw the ball for the dog, even though the dog would much prefer it if the ball went further. The parents who let their six year old dig up the old sweetcorn plants because, "holding the bag is a seriously boring job for a small boy!" and wash the raspberries before the children eat them to remove any "snail juice" despite the fact that their child assures them that it would be OK because, "some people eat snails." 

But this is especially for the parents who bring their children to orchestra practice on Friday night. The parents who fund lessons, buy instruments and nag their kids to practise. It's for the parents who stay and help and for my parents, who despite not being teachers by profession, taught me how to teach.

Our orchestra practices are always fun. It's Friday night. There's a bit of a party atmosphere. Children arrive via MacDonald's with their balloons and hope to tie them onto their violin bows. We rehearse in a church, which we like very much because it has great acoustics and they give us a very good deal on rent. It can sometimes be tricky finding the balance between fun and respecting the church building but we always try very hard to make sure we leave it exactly as we found it. This week, however, the balloons decided not to stay attached to the bow and made their way up for a private party on the ceiling.

We knew that they would come down eventually but not in time for us to leave the church as we found it so a plan was devised. Three tubular bell tubes a wooden pole and a penknife were attached together with cable-ties, although before the balloons could be popped there had to be a quick historical enactment, which is what you get when you work with a Time Lord (history professor) and big kid who refuses to even let a heart attack on Monday stop him coming out to play on a Friday.

While the children were playing tag and eating sweets in the lobby (we're not completely useless at the health and safety stuff) our tallest parent helper worked to pop the balloons.

The rest of us watched, holding our breath as the balloons refused to pop. Eventually though, they were hooked by their string and pulled to the edge.

Although, one balloon was popped (we did rescue it and I will give it to myself as a birthday present if I'm still feeling a bit Eeyore) the other lived to go home and get tied to a violin bow in a room with a lower ceiling.

Thank you, parents. 

National Poetry Day

Yesterday was national poetry day

With words I like to play

I'd love to be a poet

But I'm bad at rhyming and I know it

And I've heard that it's terrible pay

So here's a Wendy Cope poem instead. I love Wendy Cope. She's obviously a woman who appreciates ginormous veg.

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.