Exam Gems (100th Post)

Marking exams is not a fun activity. With assistance from Debz, I managed to wade through the 200+ essays, and the 50 short answer papers, and I’m done! Hooray! One of the few consolations of marking English exams is that teenagers doing their best to express themselves often make mistakes – and by random chance, some of those mistakes are pretty funny. For example:
From the story Thinking of Bagheera, there is a reference to the narrator being able to whistle to get his cat to come running. The narrator does not say:

‘I was a royalty I often abused’

as one of my students thought. ‘It was a loyalty I often abused’ is a lot closer.

Spelling is a challenge too:

‘She is instrugle with him’
‘rapedatation’ or ‘reption’ or ‘repourtition’

And finally a rarity, a student with an impressive grasp on the English language:

‘These ideas are paramount and central to the stories in which they are respective to and dictate how the actions occur.’

Not perfect, but impressive nonetheless for a 16 year old!

Matty Junior

At school, I tend to draw a fair amount. During staff briefing I often draw on the back of my copy of the notices, and I draw during form time and lunch-eating (when I'm not chasing students for notes, or nagging them to pick up their rubbish). I started learning to draw anime style last term, and drew a series of anime heads on the back of the notices for a couple of weeks.
One of the boys in my form class (who sits at the front by my desk) started quietly taking the notices after I'd read them to the class each morning, and drawing bodies on the heads. He did it every day for a couple of weeks, and it was pretty cool. It kept him quiet and occupied, and I like the idea of kids developing their aristic skills. So last week on Monday I drew a head with no body, which Matt Jnr (it is cool that his name happens to be Matt) added a body to. On Wednesday, for a change, I decided to draw a body without a head. Sure enough, Matt filled in the blank - with a slightly improved version of the head from Monday!





Today he produced a drawing of his own (I was too busy to draw before school), and it was a pretty good anime profile drawing. Maybe I'll start training him up to be a comic artist some day...

Further musings on student fashion

Once again, I was trapped in a quiet exam room with a number of students. Once again, I found myself needing to do something to prevent me from falling asleep. Once again, I roamed the exam counting students with sideburns.
To recap: Y11 exam, 79 male students, 5 had sideburns.

Y13 Exam (seventh form), a mere 19 male students, and 6 had sideburns. Does this mean that it’s a fashion trend that’s catching on with the older crowd faster than the young, or does it simply mean that most 15-16 year old boys are incapable of growing sideburns? I know I started shaving around 4th form (though I should have started earlier). Hmmm, a mystery to ponder indeed…

Seventies hairstyles seem to be taking off too (around these parts anyways). Hair combed over ears, the occasional budding mullet, shaggy hair for boys - I've mostly noticed bad 70's hair on boys so far.

The hours just fly by when you're supervising an exam.

I'm out, and I'm gorn...

I seem to have a Beastie Boys song playing in my head. Nice. Of course, how exactly to spell the word gone to convey the pronunciation is a tricky issue. Is gorn better than gawn or indeed goarn? I suspect that I will make do... Of course, gorn has the advantage of being a Star Trek race:

And a mighty cool looking one it is :)

I am now half way through the mountain of essays I collected on Monday. This is a little sad, as I'd much rather be all-the-way through, or any amount more than half. Stll, progress has been made. Somewhere in the vicinity of 100 essays now have grades and comments written on them.

Last night saw the end of Season Two of Luke's excellent Exalted game. We had our wayward Aselsi back, and it was a character intensive session, getting hooked back into all the madness that was happening at the beginning of the season, starting to experience some of the consequences of our deeds. A great deal of fun, and a fitting end to the season, and to the weekday roleplaying of this hectic week. Not having to drive anywhere, as the game came to us, was also greatly appreciated.

After a long week, I am now pretty brain-fried, and find that whilst I can sit in front of marking, and force my eyes to look at it, I can't concentrate long enough to read a whole essay, let alone assess it. Hence, I shall throw in the towel, get away from this place, and (sadly) take some of the marking home over the weekend. I didn't want to have to take any work home, but as the deadline for marking is Monday, it doesn't look like I have a choice.

More gaming to look forward to tomorrow, and 2 chances to sleep in. Plus, the third episode in the new HHGG series. And chillin' in my crib! w00t!

More Photos!

The Armageddon site site has been updated, and there's even a cosplay photo which includes me! It's from the prizegiving bit, so it includes everyone. Rachael looks a little surprised to have won :)


Now if I could just find someone with a video of the skit - I'd love to see what it looked like.

In unrelated news, WARGs quiz night was much fun, though we came 4th out of 6 teams. The team that was ahead of us beat us by half a point - dammit! Very enjoyable, with large amounts of abuse of the quiz-master (who shall remain nameless). Some very, very rude comments were made, a window was broken, and at least one person ended the night bleeding.

A very successful evening.

Genre knowledge advantageous, not required

Last night Debbie and I had the good fortune to play in a Jane Austen RPG, run by Jenni. Debbie was cast as the dashing but terse Mr Darcy, whilst I played the strong-willed country cousin Alice. The game was hilarious, and very in keeping with the tone of the source material. At times it perhaps borrowed from the Red Dwarf parody of Austen, but it was screamingly funny, and terribly erudite and witty.
Highlights included:
*An evil, evil Svend. I never knew he could be so bitchy.
*A ridiculously excited and delightfully inappropriate Lily.
*A double wedding to end the game.
*Dice rolls for manners that totally served the game well. Jenni must have rigged the dice for maximum drama.
*Twisties. It's a while since I last had them, and they were great.

Tonight is WARGs quiz night, tomorrow Exalted, and then... THE WEEKEND!

Yes, I am very excited about the weekend. There's nothing like going back to work to make you really want it to be Saturday.

Once More Unto the Breach

Exam supervision. One of the more tedious forms of slow torture this term is inflicting on me. At least I'm in a classroom today, so I'll have a desk, and if the kids are nice I might even get some marking done. Of course, I shall probably have to spend the hour marching up and down and frowning at people - especially as it's the end of the exam, when most of them have finished, and are incredibly bored but not allowed to leave.
Yesterday, supervising the English exam in the Auditorium, was especially painful. 200 kids, many of them already exhausted, all crammed into a big hall for 3 hours. To keep from being driven mad, I decided to prowl about spotting kids with sideburns. Of the 79 male students in the hall, only 5 had sideburns. Whether this is because 15-16 year old boys don't appreciate sideburns, or they can't grow them, I don't know.

One student built a fort out of his colouring pencils, complete with a flagpole with a little flag blue-tacked to it. Many students tried to go to sleep. None of them were caught using their cellphones, so all in all they were pretty well behaved.

Four more hours of exam supervision to go this week. And of course, the marking. 200 essays, 50 short answer papers. So far I've marked 12 essays. Oh, and I should be receiving an extra 25 research projects to mark this week too.

The holidays really are over. Still, lots of fun planned this week - Jane Austen roleplaying, quiz night, Exalted, and then... the weekend!

Here we go again...

Going back to school makes me a sad panda. Any Sunday night has a certain amount of 'damn, the weekend's over'ness to it, but the Sunday at the end of the holidays is particularly bad - especially if you're spending it doing marking which you really should have done in the first week of the holidays.
Then again, it's term 4, which means it's nearly the end of the year. It will be good to get back into the routine of teaching, and it will feel like quite an achievement to reach the end of my first year of teaching. Just one short term to go...

Now I must decide whether there's time to watch a movie (which wouldn't finish until about 11:30pm, so would probably not be a good idea), an episode of Kindred: The Embraced (which is under an hour, and thus would finish before 11pm), or an episode of Angelic Layer, which would be silly and upbeat and fun, and would be finished within 25 minutes of starting, maybe leaving time for a 20 minute walk before bedtime.

Such an important decision! Whatever shall I do?

Impromptu

We watched the film Impromptu last night, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I had much lust for costumes, and enjoyed the romcomness of it, as well as the bending of gender roles. Having a tough leading lady persue a delicate, reluctant leading man was a refreshing take on the whole romantic movie thing. As is usually the case with historical movies, it made me very curious about its veracity, and acutely aware of my own ignorance of both history and general knowledge.
But it was fun!

Road Trip, Gamage and Theft

Hmmm, a strange day in retrospect. We had visitors in the morning (and thus did an hour or two of tidying when we got up, producing a clean and tidy lounge and a less scruffy deck), then travelled up to PN to visit M&D. We played Pirates' Cove, ate yummy thai food, and played The Miller's Children, a Little Fears scenario.
The game was excellent, very spooky at times, with a really good fairy-tale feel. We LARPed a little of it, turning out the lights and creeping around the very dark house during a blackout scene. That was spooky. Then we finished the game by candlelight, as our characters were carrying candles around. Very nice.

Sadly, when we went to leave (at around 11:30pm), we discovered that our car had been broken into. The driver's side lock had been forced, and the key no longer works. You can lock and unlock it from inside the car, but can't turn the key in the lock any more. The theivey types had stolen a discman, a cd wallet with about 12 CDs in it (mostly copies and compilations burned onto blank CDs, so not too expensive, but quite inconvenient), Debbie's sunglasses, and the lovely goods we'd purchased from Lindale on the way up :(

The lovely goods were 2 delicious bottles of wine, and a cool wine-bottle holder that was destined to be a birthday present.

As far as we know, that's all that was stolen. Thankfully, my Mum's jeans, which I had put in the car just this afternoon to be mailed, were not stolen. They are no closer to being mailed, but they weren't nicked :)

A bit of a dampner on the evening, but it could have been much worse. It's unlikely to cost us much, no windows were broken, and the car itself sustained only minor lock-injuries.

So, all in all, a pretty good day. Just a shame about the wayward behaviour of some selfish person(s) at the end of it.

Little Fears was great though - and if I ask nicely, I should be able to read through it, as it was an SDC entry. w00t!

New Hitchhiker's

It's out, and it's good. Very funny. I've been listening to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy regularly for many years, and it is fantastic to have some new episodes to listen to. I had almost forgotten that they are laugh-out-loud funny (I tend not to laugh on the 10th, 20th or 30th listening, even though they're still great). Each episode is available as an on-demand realplayer file for 7 days after the Thursday night repeat. This means you have until 11pm Thursday Britain time (10am Friday here in NZ) to listen to the first episode, then it'll update to the second, and so on.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/

w00t! Next up, the movie and the 4th and 5th phases!

Busy busy busy and girls...

Whew, these holidays sure have been action packed. Today is the first quiet day we've had in a long time. The holidays started with a bang, with awesome InSpectres on Friday. Then there was a cultural evening of foreign food and foreign films at Aslan and Shiva's house on Saturday. Then there was much tidying up, and pirate snacks and a slide show of Norm's trip to the USA on Sunday. Monday was quiet.
On Tuesday we drove down to Debbie's parents' place for costume sewing, with the cat in her cat-box on the back seat. She talked a lot, and didn't seem too thrilled by the trip, but was fine once we arrived. We stayed the night at Debbie's parents' house, then were very kindly driven to the airport by Debbie's mum at 5:30 in the morning. Onto a plane, and down to Christchurch we went!

Back on Thursday night, very late as the plane had been delayed in Queenstown. We decided to drive home straight away, even though it was late. We arrived home around midnight, with the cat slightly less disgruntled about being in the car, and quite relaxed and happy about being home. She seems to travel pretty well between here and her old home, which will make future travels much easier, as long as Debbie’s folks don’t mind babysitting our cat.

Friday saw us down at Debbie’s folks’ place again, sewing and seeing to horses, then going out for delicious Japanese food with cosplayers and con attendees. Then we went to the girlflat + svend and sang Singstar. It was huge fun.

Saturday – more sewing (we made the costume in small bursts of activity, and I was making a green robe as well, which I made adjustments to), then partying in celebration of Svend’s 31st birthday. It was cool! We stayed until about 1 or 1:30, then meandered back up the coast. I cooked chicken when I got home as I was way too hungry, so ended up staying up until 3am.

Sunday – Armageddon Cosplay day! More details in the next post, but we had to get up early, do last minute costume stuff, and get to Armageddon. I was hungover, which was less than cool. Everything went well, and we won. Yay!

Matt learns all about Cosolay The Conceptual Phase

The Conceptual Phase
So, Jenni and Giffy asked us a few months ago whether we’d be keen to cosplay at Armageddon. We both said yes, since it sounded like fun, we both like costumes, and we thought we might be able to convince people with actual sewing skills to make cool costumes for us, which we could then keep.

I really do like cool costumes.



Things were quiet on the cosplay front until about 2 months ago. Giffy informed us that there was a secret, awesome costume idea that she was going to tell us about. It turned out to be TEEN GIRL SQUAD. Not what we’d been expecting, but cool. I considered making a Strongbad costume, but lacking the know-how or the make-do, I decided just to do voices for the skit instead.

A couple of weeks ago we had a cosplay meeting, where we discussed ideas for costumes. It was pretty simple really – get stiff white fabric, and make the costumes look as flat as possible. People were to create their own accessories, however they saw fit. We toodled off to Spotlight, and bought 7 metres of curtain backing type material. I was also strongly tempted by some of the teddy-bear print cotton and polar fleece, and by therma-drape curtain material, which was hella-cheap. This turned out to be for the best, as I returned a couple of weeks later, and bought curtain material ($2 a metre), pirate print material for bandanas ($15.50 a metre), and 12 metres of black cheesecloth at a dollar a metre. Some of this fabric turned out to be very useful…

Making the Costumes

Over the last week or so, we started making costumes. Debbie’s mother’s sewing machine saw a lot of use, and was privy to more than one rude word uttered by me when I made mistakes. Debbie sewed a simple A-frame dress, and did a very neat job of it. Unfortunately, when she tried it on, it was just a little too tight. I had drawn the pattern on, based on Debbie’s shape plus some room to account for 3-Dness. Not enough room, as it turned out – probably about 2 sizes too small? And with no zip, that made it kinda impossible to get in and out of.

Never fear, gentle reader, for a solution was at hand. Therma-drape curtain material to the rescue! Not the exciting green stuff I’d bought the week before, but rather some material we bought last year, to use as a screen, or a backdrop for photos, or whatever. We made a new, bigger dress, and it was way better. In fact, it was too big, and we had to redo a couple of the hems, but that was cool, and way more possible than biggifying a dress you’ve already cut the fabric for.


We got the dress made, but didn’t have gloves, hair, or a black top to go underneath. Shopping on Saturday took care of the top, and Sunday morning (after emergency burgers to fight off the worst effects of drinking the night before) we got hair-making supplies and gloves.

We arrived at Jenni’s at around 12, only an hour late. Lee and Svend put their awesome wool wrangling skills at our disposal, and Lee constructed ponytails for Debbie. Meanwhile, I made the magazine, and drew on the front of Debbie’s dress. With the hair complete, next step was makeup. White face paint, black lips, and eye-liner had the team looking like scary Japanese horror characters, or mental-patient mimes, or a crazy 80s band. It was awesome. I refrained from wearing makeup, as I was not in costume. In retrospect, I think this was a wise decision.





The Convention

We were dropped off by valiant driver types (the aforementioned wool wranglers), and got to wander around Armageddon for an hour or so before the competition. My stomach was sore, but there was lots of shiny stuff around to distract me. DVDs wanted me to buy them, as did magazines and swords and comics. I bought drinks instead – powerade and coke, to keep me functioning.

I took a few photos of the Squad wandering around at the convention – it was cool seeing them next to regular people. The best reaction they got was from the NZ comics table, who recognised them instantly, took photos, and wished them luck for the competition. Later, the people at the Squirt table were also excited when they saw my Stinkoman t-shirt, and one guy literally jumped out of his seat when I told him that there was a group cosplaying TGS. He had his photo taken with them – it was way cool.



The Judging

At 2pm, we went into the anime screening room for the judging. They tried to stop me coming in, as I wasn’t in costume, but a quick word about the skit, and that was all sorted out. It was a little strange at first, being one of the few people in the room (security, judges, me) who wasn’t in costume. There were quite a few people there (30ish?), in a variety of costumes. Some were pretty amazingly made (Michaela’s Eowyn costume being the most impressive for me), and some that were hilarious (the crazy Cactus was probably the funniest). It was a nice vibe in the room – lots of people who’d gone to the effort of making costumes, and were hanging out being excited. Very supportive, and lots of people recognised each other from previous cosplays, so there was a reunion feel too.

Each person’s name was called, they went up to the front and introduced themselves to the judges. They had to say who they were, and give a little info about their costumes. If they had a skit, they performed, and then they got a number on their hand (the order for the on-stage parade thingy), and had their photo taken. Some people sang songs, others acted out skits, some just introduced themselves and did a twirl. At first, the judges (mainly the Uber-judge, Zeb) asked a question or 2, such as “what was the hardest part of the costume” or “tell me about _____”, but as time grew short, the questions stopped.

We were up twelfth. The Squad introduced themselves in character, in TGS voices, which was hilarious. They gave useful information about their costumes, such as:
Puggle (The Ugly One): My dress has pipe-cleaners!
Giffy (Whatserface): I’m wearing pants!
Jenni (So-and-so): My hair is pantyhose!
Debz (Cheerleader): My hair is wool…

Then it was time for the skit. We had rehearsed that morning, but the room was hella-stuffy, I was hung over, and a little nervous. I took a deep breath, and began the script. All the Squad did an excellent job with the physical acting, my voice sounded OK (but echoed in the small room, making me wonder if I was super-loud), and the other cosplayers laughed like crazy. We got our number, and I mentioned as the girls were getting their photo taken that the TGS were drawn and voiced by one character from homestarrunner, which was why I was doing all the voices. At least one of the judges knew what TGS was, which was something of a relief.

The judging took about an hour and a half all up, and the room was stiflingly hot. I began to feel very seedy indeed, which was a worry. In future, I think it will be a bad idea to stay up drinking and cooking chicken and watching Black Books until 3am the night before Cosplay.

There was a brief break between the judging and going on stage, in which we went to the bafroom (2 bafrooms?), met the aforementioned guy from Squirt, and breathed in some more oxygenated air. It was a huge relief to be getting back towards regular temperature, and my seediness abated for a while.



On Stage


Then we lined up beside the stage, and prepared for our big moment. There was a pretty decent sized crowd, with some people we knew in the front row, which was very cool. I started getting nervous (What if my voice goes? What if the microphone feeds back like crazy? What if I pass out from heat exhaustion, or my stomach lining attempts to escape!), but it was pretty much OK. I figure if I hadn’t been hungover, it wouldn’t have been so bad. As it was, it was bearable.




Once on stage, I grabbed the mic, and took a deep breath. As soon as I started talking, 90% of my nervousness evaporated. I love microphones and PAs, and it was cool that I was able to be loud enough to be heard by most, if not all, of the audience. Apologies to Jenni for any hearing damage – she was standing right next to a speaker when I started. The script was very simple, and it was about the 5th time we’d done it, so I was pretty confident about the timing. The cool thing was that everyone’s performance came up a notch on stage, with hilarious physical acting to accompany the dialogue. This made my job easy, as I could watch their moves and time the dialogue to their actions. I also enjoyed the fact that I had to leave a pause after everyone was on stage for the applause to die down. Applause is great.

The on-stage performance was definitely the best, in all ways. It was the most fun, the most rewarding as we had instant feedback by way of laughter and applause, and it was the best executed. I was well impressed by the performances of the Squad. If I could see a video of what it looked like from the front, that would be excellent – once again it was a performance I only got to see from the back.




After we performed our skit, we lined up with everyone else and grinned and applauded others. It was way cool seeing all the people we’d been hanging out with for the past couple of hours getting their props from the audience. It made me very happy.

Then we piled onto the stage, another slightly awkward moment for me as I wasn’t in a costume, and thus felt like I was somehow spoiling the image. I decided to sit on the edge of the stage in one corner, as a compromise. When they announced the winners, there was one name that was read out wrong. There was a pause where we all went – who’s that? Then the penny dropped, and much happiness ensued. None of us were expecting to even get close to winning, but we were damn happy to do so. We checked with Zeb afterwards, to find out how we’d won (and make sure that it was really us who’d won), and it was all on the up and up. Awesome.

All in all, a hugely rewarding experience, even if you take out the winning part. It was fun, and had a great energy and vibe, and it was silly, and it was SOOOO GOOD!

My thanks to all for their awesomeness ;)

Cosplay Champions!

Debbie, Jenni, Margee and Giffy cosplayed as Teen Girl Squad at Armageddon today, and they won!
I did the voices for the skit, which was hella-tight. It was mad fun, and we got cash-money for a prize! We turned it into magazines, DVDs and pizza pretty promptly, but yay! SOOOOO GOOD!

The posts are few and far between...

The holidays have begun, and they look to be busy. As such, updates shan't be frequent over the next two weeks.
Last day of term
Lots of fun, strangely. Mainly because Debbie made an excellent pirate language word-find, with instructions on 'how to be speaking like a pirate' on it. I gave it to both of my year 11 classes, and had only 2 students opt not to do it. Most of them were very keen and very happy to seek pirate word-booty in the jumble of letters. And we had snacks in my afternoon class - chocolate biscuits and so on. Very nice way to end the term.

Friday night's all right for InSpectres
Huzzah! Svend ran InSpectres for us with almost no warning. Hooray! There were former Dunedin and current Dunedin types there, and the motley crew of characters we assembled was most excellent. I played a former hairdresser with a massive quiff called 'Sergio' (the character was called Sergio, not the quiff). Debbie played an ex-History teacher (a-la-The-Wave), Giffy played a high school drop-out toaster repair-person, and the two gentlemen J's played a manly fireman and a fearless builder. We solved the mystery of The Laundry That Ate A Dog, and had a hilarious time doing so. We also drank delicious fruit wines. Mmmmm, fruit wines.

The Saturday that Matt Forgot
Ummm, yeah. We went down to visit Debbie's family? I bought fabric from Spotlight, and started to sew the worst cloak ever? Seriously, I didn't use a pattern, and the only scissors I could find were nail-scissors, so I cut out all the fabric with a craft knife. And I sew like an arthritic monkey on a 3 day booze-up. The cloak is not yet finished, but progress is surprisingly good, all things considered. This still means it is likely to end up as an abomination of a piece of clothing. After that…

Oh. I remember now. My brain had tried to block it out. Poutine.

Poutine is a traditional French-Canadian meal, consisting of french fries (cooked in lard), gravy, cheese, and whatever else you throw on top (such as bacon and sausage, or chicken and peas). L&S made us giant plates of Poutine, which we then attempted to eat. It was delicious - like a whole roast meal, all thrown into the same bowl, with crazy amounts of gravy. The quantity, in true poutine style, was enormous. My stomach flinches even now when I think of it. Fantastic, but so… heavy…

We then watched Tokyo Godfathers, which was very weird, but very good.

Arrrr Mateys, Sunday it be!
Pirate shenanigans be planned for Sunday, and some be happening. Visitors we had, and much booty be placed on the table. Cupcakes, arrr, and munchables of many kinds. People be visiting, and talk of travels overseas be had. Later, as the sun be sinking beneath the watery horizon, Harsh Realm be watched, and a slideshow of Norman’s trip to America be seen. Arr, ‘twas a fine day, though pirate content be lighter than planned.

After guests be leaving, Revenger’s Tragedy be watched. A fine film, based on a Middleton play, directed by Alex Cox it be. Eddie Izzard be glorious as Lussorioso, and Chris Eccleston be most sinister as the revenger. Language be mostly Middleton’s, with the occasional line of modern dialogue thrown in. Visually sumptuous, musically excellent (soundtrack by Morcheeba), and very, very cool. Arrrr!

The week of not-work, number one
This week looks busy. Costumes need to be sewn and scripts written for Armageddon. We’ll be in Christchurch on Wednesday and Thursday (hooray!). We have a fair amount of work to do around the house, and work for school. We will be kept busy, but not nearly as relentlessly busy as we are during the term. We went out for a walk in the glorious sunshine yesterday, and even managed to read for a while in the afternoon – a rare and excellent pleasure. I finished A Wizard of Earthsea, and started a book by Roger Zelazny – Lord of Light. A strange opening, refreshingly different. Debbie and I are hoping to get a goodly amount of reading done this holidays, as well as some writing. It would be excellent to get at least 2 Kapcon SDC entries finished this holidays - I'm 80% through one, and about 50% through 2 others, so it's possible. I shall have to tear myself away from the projector to get it done, so it will be tough...

Aaarrrhhhh! Avast, 'tis the end of term mateys

Thank god, it's over. The winter terms have been and gone, and happy holidays are here. Two weeks of nice sleeping in, and resting, and not teaching kids. I expect I may even get some planning done this holidays, though I did bring home a certain distraction device - namely a projector. Work seems way more boring than, well, just about all of the alternatives :)
Debbie the magnificent made a pirate-talk wordfind last night, and appended it with a short (borrowed) guide on 'how to be talking like a pirate'. I had intended to give it to my Y9's first period (and thus irritate all their other teachers for the rest of the day), but they were cocky and demanded to play games and not do work. So I made them work instead, just to prove that being pushy and impolite doesn't always get you what you want.

This left me with 2 class sets of the wordfind (due to a running-out-of-paper, pretending-not-to-be-finished, then making-2-class-sets incident with the risograph copier). And 2 Year 11 classes. So we did some exam revision, checked to see if anyone had any questions, then I gave them a wordfind. Some of them were very happy about it, and it produced an excellent working quiet (not actual silence, but pretty quiet and what noise there was was work related).

And in the afternoon I let my kids play Cow and Dig, and we ate cookies. It was very... educational. I told them to pretend to be doing English work if the principal came in - they giggled about that.

And now it's the holidays. Awesome. After a few solid days of sleep, I hope to be back up to regular human type functioning. And I get to spend the whole time with Debbie, since we have the same job! I knew we went into teaching for a reason!

Reports, Debates and Lunch

It has been an interesting day so far. It started nicely, with a non-contact first period. A nice opportunity to catch my breath, get a bit of marking done, and make sure I was sorted for the day. It also turned out to be an opportunity for me to wander over to the main office and sign Appendix 2 of the English HOD's report. I'd talked about how cool it would be to get home theatre + projector set-ups for watching movies, and had demonstrated the fun of using the projector to the HOD. She asked for a proposal in writing to go into her end-of-year report, and I had to sign the bottom of the bit I wrote. Very nice. I will be surprised if it all goes ahead, but it will be a very pleasant kind of surprised.
After interval my class participated in round 2 of the interclass debates. They did OK - not as well as in round one - and lost by a narrow margin. Most of the kiddies were nice about it, but one or two got a little silly. I had to give them a stern word or two at the end of the period.

Sadly, I realised about 5 minutes after I arrived at school that I'd left my lunch at home. Fortunately, I had the period after lunch free, so was able to go home and visit the cat, and pick up my lunch. Now only 4 lessons stand between me and the holidays. It feels like 4 too many. I am on the horns of a dilemma - do I give my students quiet-make-busy work, which will result in lots of marking for me over the holidays, or do I give them noisy group work, which will yield very little actual output and thus, no marking. Hmmm, migraine or marking? A tough choice...

Friendship Books

A fairly popular phenomenon with the youngsters these days, I see increasing numbers of students passing around hardcover books, into which their friends write their details, a short letter to the owner, and add whatever else they see fit.
I got fairly sick of seeing them at the start of the term, as kids would spend whole periods furtively writing in them, with much more gusto than they'd ever apply to a lesson. I confiscated one four weeks ago, and the poor kid won't get it back until the end of this week. Still, it meant I didn't have to look at it, so I'm happy.

Then on Friday, one of my Y11 students approached me at the end of class. He passed me a book and asked me to draw him a picture. It wasn't until I opened it after class that I realised that it was his Friendship book. Needless to say, I was very flattered. He's a very nice kid, has played some of our card games in class, and liked the artwork. The drawing I did ended up being pretty weird - a humanoid bird (in a shirt and tie) with a briefcase full of beak cleaning brushes, a dog with a monacle and a pipe, and a student having his brain sucked out by aliens. Maybe I shouldn't have drawn it during period 5 on a hot Friday...

Anyways, today I confiscated a book from another student in the same class. I gave it back after class, with a stern warning, and she gave it back to me and asked me to sign it. I'm sure it's not helping my 'stern, serious teacher' stock to agree, but my 'crazy English teacher' stocks are going through the roof!

I even had a random kid from another class point through the window in my door and say "that teacher's crazy" during a class yesterday. I have no idea why.

Great Weekend

Just wrote a lengthy post about the coolness of the weekend, in much detail, which Blogger decided to eat. The annoying thing is, it ate the post whilst I was in the process of copying it, just in case it got eaten. Sigh...
In short:
* Cranium is a great game. Jenni and I made a very good team. I like to sculpt T-Rexs. I want to play as Debbie's partner next time.
*Svend cooks nice food.
*Singstar is fun, though I still can't get a good score for Ace of Spades, no matter how loud I sing it.
*Marking is painful, but goes a lot faster with 2 people.
*The Henry the 8th mini-series was very cool, creepy, and informative, as I know next to nothing about anything.

Imagine this post was written in a more interesting style, maybe with witticisms. While you're at it, why not imagine that there's a photo of the purple T-Rex I sculpted. It was awesome, incredibly lifelike, only about 10cm tall.

Good Vibes

I'm pretty happy right now. A number of pleasant events are converging to make me a happy Matt. The sun is shining, the week is mostly done, and I actually feel like I'm doing a good job at school. I have a relaxing afternoon with only one lesson, and that's in the computer lab. The weekend is looming, and is likely to contain costume sillyness, maybe some delicious alcoholic beverages, and time with my wonderful Debz.
Ahhh, the sigh of a happy man.

A couple of things have contributed to my 'not feeling terribly hopeless at my job' sentiments. My junior classes performed admirably in the interclass debates - one class lost, the other won. The important thing was that neither class embarrassed me, by being unprepared or by being a poor audience. I was a little worried about that.

Secondly, my observed lesson went OK, and the 2 minute version of the feedback (I'm getting the full version tomorrow) was positive.

Add to this roleplaying tonight (w00t!), the arrival of Harsh Realm on DVD in the mail, and the proximity of the holi-holi-holidays, and smiles are inevitable.

PS: Stay tuned for the inevitable lesson from hell which destroys all this genki. Will it be a fistfight in the computer lab which destroys thousands of dollars worth of chairs (the PCs are probably very cheap to replace, cheaper than furniture)? Will it be a secret hidden piece of paperwork which I've missed, which prevents me from getting a pay rise? Will it be an attack of rabid year 9 metal tech students, with sharply lathed spears and crude shields? Who knows, only time will tell...

Helicopters, lesson observations and cheese

The computer network was down yesterday, so this is a delayed post...
The amount of noise that 6 low-flying helicopters make is rather impressive. On my way from the admin block to the English department today, I saw a group of helicopters flying over the school. There were 2 black, then 2 white, then 2 more black choppers. It looked like the black helicopters were acting as escort for the 2 white helicopters. It was interesting that I could hear the thumping of the chopper blades, and feel the disturbance in the air, before I could actually see them. By the time they were over the school, the noise had changed to a less bassy thrum, and the air disturbance seemed less. Very interesting, and fairly mesmerising too – I stopped and watched them fly past, and couldn’t help but think about how incredibly freaky it must be to be on the ground and hear that sound, knowing that the helicopters are coming to kill people. Makes Apocalypse Now seem all the more terrifying, let alone real life war type situations.

I had an observed lesson today, which I was kind of expecting. “Some time this week,” was as specific as my observer had been, but from looking at his timetable and mine I’d guessed that today was quite likely. In the end it was a different person who came in, so I shall probably have another observed lesson later in the week. Yay. I so love having someone come into the class with the specific purpose of critiquing my teaching. The kids were pretty good though, for which I am grateful. They were my nicer Year 9 class, and they behaved very well for them. Not that I’d get in trouble for having a poorly disciplined class, but I’d feel stink about it.

I’d sent 3 kids to the library to prepare for a debate, and they came back at interval to report on their progress. It was very nice of them to do so – I hadn’t asked them to, and it was their own time they were using up. They have done some excellent preparation, but I have a sneaking suspicion that they’ve prepared for the Affirmative, when they should be arguing the negative. Eep. The debate is on tomorrow, so they shall have to do some work tonight. I’ll try to get a note to them during period 3, let them know the error of their ways. One of the crazy things they’ve done is a very, very wide definition of children. It includes cheese. I’m not really sure of the link, but they are quite excited about their definition. I’m quite glad that they have to change to the negative (as my initial note specified), as they won’t be able to use this silly definition. Cheese…

Random pointless bribery

I'm about to head off to 2 different Pizza Hutt stores, to pick up food for my form class and a colleague's soccer team. My form class are a charming bunch of Y10 students, whom I only see for 25 minutes a day, most of which time they're chatting to each other or stuffing their gobs. I only agreed to a pizza day on the condition that one of them organised it - I'm happy to drive down and pick them up, but wasn't about to suggest it.
The soccer team coach is also having a pizza day today, and asked if I 'd mind picking up his pizzas as he has a class before lunch. I agreed, but sadly he'd ordered from a different Pizza Hutt. It is closer to school, but was more closed at lunch time yesterday than the one I visited, hence my order being placed 2 minutes drive away. They are both in a direct line from school, so it shouldn't take me more than an extra 5 minutes to pick up the second lot.

I may need to press gang some students into helping me carry them though - I think it's 28 pizzas in all!

I will get to try a hot'n'spicy pizza with a satay swirl as a result of all this chaos, so it may prove worth it in the end ;)

Sorry, but your brain is out of service

Debbie and I had planned to go to WARGs last night, to catch up with friends, hang out, maybe play in a game. Our regular Thursday game being put on hold this week made for quite an enthusiastic Matt and Debbie. Sadly, school went on just a little too long for my brain to survive. An after-school meeting on how best to study did me in. It was quite a good session, with some very interesting material and enthusiastic presentation. The problem was my blood sugar levels, not the meeting itself.
When I was a lad, I used to have to eat glucose type supplements to stave off migraines. Well, being a skinny boy I was often given chocolate too, which did the trick. As an adult, I tend to look after myself, and have learned to recognise the start of a migraine and stave it off. For a long time, I took extreme precautionary measures, and ate bucket-loads of chocolate any time I had to do anything unpleasant like work.

I have moved on from that plan, to a more healthy one. Sadly, when you're trapped without food in an hour long meeting at the end of a long day, the best laid plans of mice and men aft gan aglay. Or something.

So I went to bed last night and had a very sore head, instead of going out and being social. Nurofen and junk food and sleep combined to overpower the headache, but I'm wary now - it might return at any time, and incapacitate me, or just make my day at work extremely miserable.

I feel the urge to pack my bag with chocolate, as an immunizing precaution...

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.