So, yes; I’ve been quiet at these pages for several weeks because I’ve been pregnant, and working under a twofold limitation: the physical self-obsession that this generates and the shadow of our July loss. The first shrank my usual range of narrative topics and the second meant that what remained could not be written about anyway. This may not have been such a bad thing, interest-wise, since I’ve been exhausted, emotional and, as Grinderman has it, “so thin and sick“. You may imagine me as a shadow of my bridal self, waking up with groaning and panic attacks, eating desultory handfuls of dry crackers and lacking, in every way, a sense of perspective or humour. I am grateful for the online honesty of others, particularly Brenda, in this regard; their forerunning of my own experience has offered, if not hope, then something like solidarity.
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My employment in my current position began in June, eight years ago, when I was grateful to have a job, a salary and a desk to call my own. Indeed, I still am. Since then I have taught continuously for anywhere between thirty-six and forty-five weeks a year, running parallel to, but not in sync with, the wider university’s teaching schedule. In the early start-up days, this included teaching from April to October with no non-teaching time, thanks to two overlapping twenty-four week programmes. In October there was one week’s break and then straight on until Christmas. In 2002, my first year full-time on the job, I went more-or-less mad. I had an office to myself behind the covered bike-stands, which was a fairly grim view but offered privacy for when I needed to cry between classes. You get the idea.
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While the commonplace belief that not much ever happens in this city may at times be true, on other occasions the social whirl picks up. The latest of these eddies has had a bittersweet quality. My exchange students completed their internships and yesterday graduated their programme. Some are staying on for skiing and travel, others are returning home to the last of the humid Kanagawa summer immediately.
These young women are modest and tend, I think, to measure themselves by a deficit rather than a credit model. One explained in her farewell speech how she had aimed in coming here to overcome her “weak points”, one of which she identified as speaking in public. I don’t think their teachers see them in the fashion: we notice instead their persistence and resilience, their willingness to take hard knocks and refuse to give up. I hope in their studies and work to come they have time to reflect more hopefully on what they’ve experienced and accomplished here.
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The inky salutation of Mrs. Russell’s sketchbook sweetie, at right, does not know the world of taxonomic confusion in which he and I live. Permit me to elucidate my obscure statement.
Last Saturday, Nanette and I made a cheerful sojourn to Craft 2.0 here in Christchurch, where we met the lovely Ms. Tyler and browsed the many crafty delights. The event, held here, was as densely packed as Shinagawa Station, with rather more pushing and shoving (albeit discreet pushing and shoving). As a result, I decided to take the business cards of the sellers whose work I particularly liked, and browse their online spaces at leisure, later.
A small spanner in the works was the number of sellers whose sites indicated a reduction in the amount of available stock as a result of preparing for Craft 2.0. Not particularly thwarted, I browsed further through the Felt shops, looking for necklaces (my jewellery of choice these days). Eventually I found three lovely pieces to my taste and budget, ordered them and waited.
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My exchange students and I had our last class together today, although they will be around town on internships until the end of August. We watched Eagle vs. Shark
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I suspect my end to the session was a bit perfunctory (pretty much “thank you and goodbye”) but I did not want any emotions to run too high. This is the fourth year in which I have contributed to this programme and regular readers know a little of what it means to me, particularly in terms of the friendships and experiences it has brought me abroad.
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While others who work in higher education use their twitter feeds for insightful and wry remarks about pedagogy and inquiry, mine — as even a cursory glance at the weekly archives here stored reveals — is largely a repository for anecdotes about puppies, pregnancy and coffee breaks. I don’t make too many apologies for this, since my internet presence is largely recreational and Twitter itself a valuable locus of relationships and conversations for me: the last year of happy days with @Ghetsuhm and @MeganWegan is just one example.
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Little monkey, tono ano
5 April, 2010
in commentatrix, in Aotearoa, teaching & learning, we are family
I don’t miss the daily grind of trying to facilitate the western-style critical thinking of students whose learning priorities were largely elsewhere, but I do miss the field trips. The visit to a mid-Canterbury dairy farm in which half my class and I had suddenly to leap out of the way of flying excrement (flying at speed, too, as the cows stepped on to the rotary milking machine) remains in memory, as does another day on which we alighted, two busloads of us, at Nga Hau e Wha marae only to discover we were a day early for our booking. That short trip ended with me running up to the entry to the marae, crying cease-and-desist to students who were running ahead of me taking photographs of the pou and wharenui, sans powhiri, and thus formed part of my history of absurdist problem-solving, if not pedagogy’s finest hour.
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