Story-time was AWESOME!

Debbie and I had a great weekend, filled with many hours of niceness. Friday was pretty chilled out, with delicious cocktails and at home warm hibernation.
Saturday was also great, with High and Low (Frank’s anime flavoured SF game featuring angels and aliens in a pyramid in the Australian desert) followed by yummy Thai food with Debbie’s parents followed by chilling out with L&S and watching A Touch of Evil, with the grottiest imaginable Orson Welles. So creepy! The film itself was pretty cool – entertaining, with some great lines like:

“1400 miles of border without a single machine-gun emplacement!” – Charlton Heston (a swarthy Mexican cop) laments the ease with which filth can move between Mexico and the States.

Sunday featured chores and sunshine and coldness, but its best feature was storytime. At Jenni and Lee’s, several excellent kids books were read to us by a super-librarian (she even knew some of the words off by heart!). And there was cake, and strawberry milk and cookies. Sigh….

We all kind of wished we could emulate the cat in one of the stories – choose not to work, and just lie in the sun all day. I particularly enjoyed Olivia Saves the Circus (I think that was the name), for its great realistic dialogue and excellent artwork.

So nice. And now I’m back at work and have actually done a whole hour and three quarters of marking and marking related activity. So a 5 minute blogging break was pretty much mandatory.

ONLY 3 WEEKS UNTIL THE HOLIDAYS! W00t!

PPTA Meeting

Yesterday I attended my first ever PPTA meeting. It was a big shin-dig in Wellington at the Queen's Wharf Event Centre. There were lots of PPTA members, from many schools in the Wellington region. It was to discuss and vote on the new collective agreement - mostly just to vote on it. The meeting was a couple of hours long, with some confused milling around at the start for my school's teachers due to a problem with the bus. I am sworn to union secrecy, but I can leak the following document, created by me, during the course of the meeting. I trust it will not fall into the wrong hands, or bring me into ill favour with my hard working and upstanding union comrades.

I can only hope that the more private details of my record of the meeting do not expose any secrets to the mainstream media ;)

Note: The date of the page on which the record was written does not match the date of the meeting - a most cunning ruse on my part.

Those crazy kids...

I had the great pleasure today of having a couple of students get upset with me for getting them into trouble. Me getting them into trouble.
Apparently I used some kind of mind control ray to make one of them pull a lighter out in class and try to set fire to another kid’s jersey, then used hypnotic suggestion to force the 2 of them to attempt to forge a uniform pass in class-time, using the window for tracing purposes. I am a very bad man, and it is my fault that they will be in trouble with the deans.

I was well pleased with their advanced understanding of action and consequence, and their skill at apportioning blame. I am sure they both have a promising career in politics ahead of them ;)

Here we are again

That was a very pleasant weekend, followed by a tiring, but good Monday. And now I’m back at school, in the midst of yet another week of classes. The term is whizzing by, and classes are ticking over nicely, for the most part. If I didn’t have a headache, I’d probably be quite content.
Friday night was a lot of fun – delicious curry, fine company, and anime about psychoactive mushrooms, followed by hot drinks and conversation with family. A nice way to start the weekend – packing 2 social engagements into the one evening.

Saturday was also highly enjoyable. I wrestled with a sewing machine in the morning, and was defeated. I don’t have a good track-record with sewing machines. It seems that this time I had indeed done everything right, it just didn’t like me. Luckily my good wife returned from horse feeding in time to fix everything, and my mother-in-law ironed and sewed the hem I was adjusting for me, so the tale has a happy ending. In the evening we watched more anime with friends – the excellent Escaflowne movie – ate pizza, and watched The Third Man. Once again, projectors are good.

Escaflowne was very cool – a rollicking film, with excellent animation and a good pace, and more than a few things which reminded me of Luke’s Exalted game. Very nice.

The Third Man was hilarious, and very cool. The crazy mandolin soundtrack, random appearances of small dogs and small children, and the fantastic cast of NPCs… er… supporting actors, made it a fun movie. I’m sure there’s a Kapcon scenario in there somewhere.

Sunday was a more sedate kind of fun, very pleasant and relaxing and good. A mountain of laundry was reduced to a smallish hill, groceries were fetched, shopping was conducted (including the purchasing of some very comfy and slightly less slobby than skate shoes type boots), and Tekken Tag was played. And Singstar. And we watched Beyond Borders, a film about relief work. A student had recommended it to Debbie as they had been studying Cambodia, and a section of the movie is set there. It was a very beautiful movie, lots of stunning locations, some moving moments, some quite horrific scenes, and a nice tone. I enjoyed it, though I felt the need for some light relief afterwards, as it was quite depressing.

Luckily, Debbie and I are reading The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett at the moment, so that was very light and entirely reliefy.

Then Monday rolled around with tedious inevitability, and the working week started. I adjudicated a debate yesterday, on whether athletes with criminal records should be allowed to attend the Olympics. The debate was very good, some incredibly well spoken participants, and some pretty good arguments put forward. Enjoyable indeed, though the venue got mighty cold after 5pm, and it didn’t finish until quarter to six, so a long day for Matty.

Then further Singstar, delicious Satay, Tekken, and other enjoyable pursuits filled my evening, and I was a happy bear.

Weekend

Weekends are Good!
I do happy weekend dance. It is enthusiastic, but with little energy (batteries drained, need to recharge). Getting away from this building will no doubt boost my energy levels.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls, just be grateful that it's the last one of the day. WEEKEND! w00t!

Glad to be leaving

It has been a stressful (and long) week, so I’m very glad to be going out tonight. My weekly RPG session is a pretty fantastic time – a chance to play in some excellent games, catch up with friends, talk, and a chance to get 45 minutes drive away from school. Going out of town is very nice – seeing the lights get smaller in the rear-view mirror is a relaxing thing…
Debbie and I saw The Triplets of Belleville yesterday, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Quite a charming old school style animated film – it made me think that Karl Wills would greatly enjoy it (though whether that’s true I don’t know). It was certainly a bonus to have it projected onto a wall, as the very stylish animation was pretty much the point of the whole shebang. I can see what Luke meant when he said that it didn’t really matter if you saw it in French or English.

So, onwards and upwards! More than half the term gone, this week drawing closer to a finish, and an enormous pile of marking awaiting in the English department.

Sigh…

What goes around...

Hmmm, suddenly I don't feel so bad about being a bludger in my youth. I spent a few years (my University days, and those that followed) absorbing various kinds of benefits from the Welfare State. I wasn't exactly living in the lap of luxury, but I was happy enough with my slacker lifestyle. In total, I imagine I must have received at least $15,000 of tax-payer money (in dribs and drabs), if last year's student allowance is included.
I am now a hard-working member of the community (have been for a number of years). When I was a poorly paid cinema monkey, my weekly tax tended to be less than $100. At times, the amount of supplemental income WINZ provided me with was pretty much equal to my tax deductions. This week, my tax reached a new high.

I have never, in my life, seen more than $1000 go from my pay check to tax. Until yesterday.

Now, I know that lots of people pay that much tax every paycheck, and that in order to be paying lots of tax, you have to be earning lots of money, so there's no reason to complain. It just made my eyes bulge slightly - $1000 being more than I used to earn in a fortnight, let alone pay in tax.

Teaching has not become an incredibly lucrative profession, by the way. The final part of my Subject Allowance for training as an English teacher came through this week, inflating my paycheck by $2500. Sadly, this final payment was liable for tax (the previous 2 weren't), so a chunk of it went straight back to the government.

It was still a very nice paycheck, and I am very glad to have the extra moolah.

Do I hear a projector calling...?

A busy weekend!

FridayI borrowed a projector from school, and set it up in the lounge at home. Very nice picture, a decent size, and through the use of an ironing board and an RCA cable extension lead, managed to get the picture up onto a big white wall space. We watched Angel, a bit of Rah-Xephon, and a few other bits and pieces, but didn't have time to watch a whole movie as I had characters to write up for Confusion.

I had decided to run The Villain Wore Black at Confusion, a Penny Dreadful scenario I had previously run for my Thursday gaming group. The first time I ran it I had Debbie there as co-pilot: playing female NPCs, co-writing the scenario, and helping out with explanations. I knew that Debbie wasn't going to be around, and that we'd made a few changes since the playtest, so I knew I had to get those onto the character sheets.

After a couple of hours of typing things up (and adding a 6th character), I had things pretty much in shape.

Saturday
An early start, which got us down to Wellington by 9:10am. I had all the materials clutched in my hot little hands, and was rearing to go. Well, tired and a little hungry and a little nervous about the game. I like to be ultra-prepared, and whilst the scenario was in good order and had been run once before, I was still nervous. I only ended up getting 4 players, so had to do some last minute alterations to the love quadrangle (changing it back to a more conventional triangle). The 4 players I had were all brilliant, and the game went swimingly. It was a fairly brisk 2 hour game, which left a goodly amount of time for socialising between rounds.

Debbie had gone to tend to her horse, so she didn't arrive until round 2. The choices for round 2 games didn't look all that appealing (I always seem to end up running at the same time as games I want to play in), and the game Debbie and I ended up in - well, not the best roleplaying experience of our lives. There were 2 other excellent players in the game, and the occasional very funny moment (deciding what we'd all have on our signet rings, for example).

With newly acquired headaches (and empty stomachs), we left Confusion early, and did not return. We did have a nice dinner, drive back up to Kapiti, and watch Bulletproof Monk on the projector, so it was a nice day all in all.

Sunday
Got up reasonably early, did some laundry, then headed into Wellington for shopping and movie-going. Met up with friends and saw The Chronicles of Riddick, which I thought was pretty damn cool. I'd heard mixed reviews, some very negative, so was looking for the bits that weren't good. One or 2 of the action sequences were long, and one seemed just a little silly, but the movie as a whole was very, very good. Nice epic space action film, Vin Diesel was very cool in a comic-book character kind of way, and the look of the film was superb. I was impressed, very impressed.

After tea and much discussion of movies and conventions and other sundry items, we headed back home. I did some caveman style sewing, we watched some more Angel and a little of Lost in Translation (it made me want to go on a holiday to Japan!), then eventually surrended to the lateness of the hour and slept.

Monday
First period was a lot of fun. I put up an OHT of some notes, got my Y11 students settled and in a work frame of mind, then pulled out a bag of Matador games and got the kids to play those for the rest of the period. It was a reward for the kids who had worked hard and handed their assignments in on time. One or two kids sat out and finished their work, which was OK by me as there is no reassessment, and these kids need as many opportunities for literacy credits as they can get their hands on.

And so the working week begins...

You never can tell by looking

I just had a colleague ask me what me weekend plans were. When I mentioned that I was going to a roleplaying convention, her first question was "like theatresports?".
I replied that it was similar, but with funny shaped dice. She then made a sound of recognition, and proceeded to tell me about the character she played in a D&D game when she lived in a squat in London, and how fondly she remembered the experience. A very positive reaction indeed!

A memorable tale

Talk of stick insects over on Jenni's blog got me thinking about giant bugs, which is never a bad thing, and about a particular scene from a novel that I wanted to re-read. The book is H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, which I greatly enjoyed both in novel form and in cheesy 60's SF film form. The more recent, flashier film version was not quite as enjoyable, though it was pretty.
The section of the novel in question is the far future, when the narrator has pushed the machine into taking him well beyond humanity's span, into Earth's latter days. The image of giant, monstrous creatures moving about on a dying earth, scraping their living off the rock and algae under a baleful red sky, with one lone, vulnerable Victorian suddenly in their midst - fantastic. And courtesy of Project Guttenberg, here's the section of the novel I was thinking of:

`I stopped very gently and sat upon the Time Machine, looking round. The sky was no longer blue. North-eastward it was inky black, and out of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars. Overhead it was a deep Indian red and starless, and south-eastward it grew brighter to a glowing scarlet where, cut by the horizon, lay the huge hull of the sun,red and motionless. The rocks about me were of a harsh reddish colour, and all the trace of life that I could see at first was the intensely green vegetation that covered every projecting point on their south-eastern face. It was the same rich green that one sees on forest moss or on the lichen in caves: plantswhich like these grow in a perpetual twilight.

`The machine was standing on a sloping beach. The sea stretched away to the south-west, to rise into a sharp bright horizon against the wan sky. There were no breakers and no waves, for not a breath of wind was stirring. Only a slight oily swell rose and fell like a gentle breathing, and showed that the eternal sea was still moving and living. And along the margin where the water sometimes broke was a thick incrustation of salt--pink under the lurid sky. There was a sense of oppressionin my head, and I noticed that I was breathing very fast. The sensation reminded me of my only experience of mountaineering,and from that I judged the air to be more rarefied than it is now.

`Far away up the desolate slope I heard a harsh scream, and saw a thing like a huge white butterfly go slanting and flittering up into the sky and, circling, disappear over some low hillocks beyond. The sound of its voice was so dismal that I shivered and seated myself more firmly upon the machine. Looking round me again, I saw that, quite near, what I had taken to be a reddish mass of rock was moving slowly towards me. Then I saw the thing was really a monstrous crab-like creature. Can you imagine a crab as large as yonder table, with its many legsmoving slowly and uncertainly, its big claws swaying, its long antennae, like carters' whips, waving and feeling, and its stalked eyes gleaming at you on either side of its metallic front? Its back was corrugated and ornamented with ungainly bosses, and a greenish incrustation blotched it here and there. I could see the many palps of its complicated mouth flickering and feeling as it moved.

`As I stared at this sinister apparition crawling towards me, I felt a tickling on my cheek as though a fly had lighted there. I tried to brush it away with my hand, but in a moment it returned, and almost immediately came another by my ear. I struck at this, and caught something threadlike. It was drawn swiftly out of my hand. With a frightful qualm, I turned, and I saw that I had grasped the antenna of another monster crab that stood just behind me. Its evil eyes were wriggling on their stalks, its mouth was all alive with appetite, and its vast ungainly claws, smeared with an algal slime, were descending upon me. In a moment my hand was on the lever, and I had placed amonth between myself and these monsters. But I was still on the same beach, and I saw them distinctly now as soon as I stopped. Dozens of them seemed to be crawling here and there, in the sombre light, among the foliated sheets of intense green.

Beautiful!

Hate Crimes and mob mentalities

I had an interesting morning today. I decided to show my rowdy Y9 class a video of last night's news, specifically the lead story on channel 1. The police wanted to interview a certain National Front member in connection to an assault on some Somali chaps, and they were interested to see if he knows anyting about the desecration of the Makara cemetery. The article covered the suspect, the Makara crime, and a Holocaust denier who wants to come to NZ. This stirred up some interesting comments from the class.
Probably the best thing was that I prepared them for viewing the article by going over (in inredibly broad strokes) WW2, the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, left-wing and right-wing thinking, and the concept of consecration and desecration. I think it was unusual enough, and current enough, to spark some interest.

The Holocaust denier who was featured later in the item did not receive a warm reaction from the class, though of course several of them were lost by this point, having had more information crammed into their brains in 4 and a half minutes of news than they'd encountered in weeks. They were, however, aware enough to pick up on who they were 'supposed' to like and dislike, from the programme and from classmates, and there were some pretty strong comments made about racism and people being liers. Much fun, on a rainy Wednesday morning...

The leftover screw

Imagine, if you will, a desert. Or a dessert, it really isn't that important. Now imagine an object - any kind of object, slowly descending from on high, into the centre of that desert. Or dessert. And imagine the sound that object makes as it plops down, the shadow it casts, and the tiny ripples of consequence that spread out through the desert (or dessert) as a result of its impact.
Today, I am a confiscating machine. I am a creature of simple logic, who takes items and does not return them for 6 weeks. This will antagonise, and upset, and that is irrelevant. It is outside the parameters of the confiscation machine's programming. I am also a detentionising machine, and a castigation fountain, and many other things. I am a punishment and censure broadcaster. I am a uniform nagging device. I am a humourless automaton, dealing consequences to the uncomprehending masses.

At some point, I may also be an instructional unit, though this seems far from important under the weight of all this discipline.

The things we do...

Do you ever stop, take a look around at your life, and wonder how things got to be the way they are? It's not that often that I think about the ways in which I've changed over the course of my life, but there are some things that cause me to smile and shake my head in wonder.
First up, I now regularly get up in front of 25-30 kids and tell them what to do. This is something I avoided for a long time - my mother and many other relatives being teachers, it was always a job I was aware of, though it was not one which I felt I wanted to do. Mostly, I was scared of the job. It involves being a grown-up, for a start, and is not exactly ideal for shy-types, and is somewhat high pressure, and is perhaps not as glamorous as other fantasy jobs (like famous novelist, movie star, musician, jet-setting millionaire etc.). When I was younger, I didn't want any kind of a job, but teaching was a job I particularly didnt feel capable of.

And now I do it every day, and half the time I feel like I'm doing a reasonable job of it. Go figure.

The social things I do also surprise me at times - I have moments of anxiety before running RPG games, when I doubt not my skill, but rather my luck as a GM. There are so many things that make a game good, and only a limited number of them come from the GM. And yet, I haven't had any really bad experiences with GMing lately. Old anxiety sneaking back, from a Matt that only exists as a shadow now, a Matt who is lost in time.

And then there's getting up in front of 100 or so people and telling them stuff at Kapcon. One of the more supportive environments for such activity, but somehow out-of-character for the Matt that once was.

And yet, in large social groups, I still don't talk much. Hmmm...

Somewhere In Time

I didn't wear a watch on Wednesday, due to forgetting-ness. I found it really disorienting, especially when we were in a computer lab with no clock, and were all forced to log out by network problems. No time keeping device! Aaagggghhh!

Aslan

Let's end the week with a picture, shall we?

A feline of some friends', decked out for adventure...

CSI science lab

CSI comes to the Science Lab
I heard a great story recently. A kid had been given a detention in science, and the incident had been written up and forwarded to the form teacher. The form teacher read out the incident sheet, and I could not help but smile. It went something like this (names changed to protect the ridiculous):

"Jim got into trouble for squirting acid at another student today. At first, he protested that he had merely splashed water on Mark, but when we tested Mark's pants with litmus paper, Jim confessed."

A victory of science over childish imbecility! Hoorah!

On another note, I yelled at one of my classes today. Really yelled - hairline tingling, blood rushing to the brain type yelling. More than one kid said "whoa, scary". What I yelled was fairly polite, something like 'ladies and gentlemen that is an unacceptable level of noise!", but it got the message across well and good. Silence ensued, though the little whippersnappers weren't able to keep it up for long. I did enjoy the silence afterwards, and being able to use my gentlest voice to tell them off ;)

Parenting skills, empathy, year 9's

I saw the end of an excellent documentary last night. It was presented by Lord Robert Winston, and was all about how 2-year-olds learn self control, empathy, and develop a sense of identity. I enjoy a well made science documentary, and this one was especially good as it seemed so relevant.
Most of the 2-year-olds behaved like my Y9 students. Self-centred, no concept that other people have feelings, no idea that rules ought to be obeyed whether someone was watching or not. I found it fascinating, and felt that it gave a little insight into how my wee students were built, so to speak.

I gave my rowdiest class a wee pep talk today, explaining that their actions had consequences on other people. Those who wanted to learn were disappointed and frustrated by disruptive students, and it made me unhappy when students disrespected each other, the classroom, or me. I then started asking students to "stop talking - you're making me sad." It was surprisingly successful, and even more fun when applied to Y11 students who, for the most part, have a pretty reasonable sense of empathy. It raised eyebrows, but also elicited apologies.

Maybe I should watch more documentaries about parenting, and how to mould personalities or shunt kids along to a higher stage of development.

A Beautiful Dream, with Laundry

Sometimes I am amazed by my own brain. This is merely a case of me being easily startled, but I shall attempt to furnish an example. I occasionally hear talk of 'left-brain' versus 'right-brain' people, where one kind is artistic and imaginative, and the other is analytical and logical.
My brain did both at the same time last night, and while it didn't hurt, it was certainly a strange phenomenon to observe from a detached third brain position (also known as navel-gazing). It happened like this: I was talking to Debbie about writing scenarios, and drawing illustrations, and the fact that I really want to get a nicely bound copy of all the SDC entries to throw on the shelf (and carry around at WARGS and Kapcon and similar events), and that I'd actually quite like to take a night-class in book-binding (hardback books are just so pretty). My brain then wandered in its usual way, into realms of fantasy. There was a montage of images, Debbie and I with scissors and glue and little tools, binding books, a hand placing a hardback of scenarios onto a shelf alongside other RPG books, Debbie and I in a log cabin in front of a fire drinking red wine (possibly with snow outside).

And then there were towels in the washing machine downstairs, and I knew that they needed to be moved into the drier. And there were 2 montages, intercut, one with books and wine and lauging and the warm fuzzy sense of achievement that arts and crafts can bring, and the other with soft focus and warm light and fluffy towels coming out of the drier.

I obssess about laundry way too much.