Facebook, here are your twenty-five things

My fellow Norwich Terrier breeder and Facebook friend Magda has included me in the “25 things” exercise that is currently meshing with the tag option on Facebook’s notes.  This is the rubric

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

I am modifying this a little: since my Facebook notes are syndicated from my webpages, I am making the original post there, and since my Facebook friends are from so many different times and facets of my life, I am going to write five paragraphs for five things.  Those of you who’ve been my students will know my mantra “an academic paragraph is usually around five sentences”, and it’s time for me to test it here.  I will reserve the option to tag, knowing that many among you dislike it.

Childhood

As a child, I had a fairly limited range of pleasures, but I enjoyed them very much: making up stories with paper dolls and their three-dimensional counterparts, reading or having someone read to me, watching cartoons, walking and talking with my friends, and, later, playing the piano.  I didn’t enjoy sports because I wasn’t physically coordinated, or at least, not to the levels that the school curriculum required, and I didn’t like letting my team-mates down.  I preferred solitude and imaginary games to playing with large groups of children, and I preferred cartoons and animation more generally to live-action television dramas.  I read extremely widely and my parents read to me, including almost all of Enid Blyton’s novels for children, which were often spurned by libraries and librarians at that time.  From the age of around six, I wanted to be a writer myself, and wrote and illustrated a novel called “A Night in a Tent”, perhaps eight pages long, that was a high drama of robbery, kidnapping and escape.

Teenage Life

I pass the secondary school I attended every day on my route to work; its buildings and facilities are unrecognisable to me now.  I well remember my thought on the first day of high school, following a tour of the main buildings led by two final year students: it was, “how am I going to spend every weekday of the next five years here?”  Despite these feelings, most things settled down after the first three months or so and I managed to get a fairly wide-ranging education both at school and beyond its borders.  One regret I have from that time is how long it took me to realise there was a sensible upper limit that could and should be placed on how hard one should try at the things in which one wanted to succeed.  Although my secondary education was not without happy times, I can’t say I think about it with much nostalgia, even though I remember with fondness some of the people whom I then knew.

Music

I don’t play in public any more but I think of myself as a well-informed listener.  Piano was my first instrument and with it music theory.  Later I took up violin and shortly thereafter viola; it was from the latter that I earned most of my money from playing, post-youth orchestra days.  I also played pipe organ, directed a church choir and did some singing, helped by my sight-reading skills, but never really reached the required vocal standard for the choirs into which my sight-reading enabled me to get.  My years in the local and national youth orchestra were, shall I say, socially formative, the bridge from secondary school into all the complexities of adult life and the root of many of my friendships today.

Teaching, Writing and Research

I was so busy as a student being determined not to become a secondary school teacher that I failed to notice I had fallen into all kinds of other teaching from which I’ve since made my career.  I started teaching viola in small groups and one-on-one when I was eighteen; from the point of view of experience now, I’m amazed at the resilience of my then-students to all the pedagogically “wrong” things I did.  Now it’s hard to separate my thinking about the three things in the title of this paragraph: I do all three and each informs the other.  That said, it’s a struggle to find the right balance and it’s often writing that I feel is suffering.  Much of the richness in my working life comes from building learning relationships with students; the trust that’s necessary for such a relationship to succeed seems to me both unique and highly valuable in the professional world.

Dogs

I have five Norwich Terriers, three of which I have bred myself.  This distinguishes my household from your average suburban dwelling, and demands a certain fortitude on behalf of the visitor.  I cannot quite tell you why I was not content simply to own one dog, except to say that multiples are common among people who own Norwich Terriers.  Through this breed I have met intriguing people and their dogs from all over the world, which has led to some wonderful travel adventures.  My dogs are my great delight, as is the love and good humour bestowed on them by my partner.

Tagged as: a short biography, for Facebook