From the category archives:

teaching & learning

Regular readers may remember that I started my employment in the wonderful world of bridging education (or, as it is known more kindly and more gently in Australia, enabling education) teaching a compulsory paper called New Zealand Studies, designed for international students.  Alas, this carefully-crafted paper was largely reviled by those who took it, its spectres perhaps too much like the less savoury aspects of their socio-cultural education back home.  These reservations were shared not only by some of my colleagues but also by powers that be, and eventually the paper, like the way of all flesh, was restructured out of existence.

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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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.

At the moment, however, I feel as if I am necessarily talking in asides, analogies and ciphers as the restructuring of my workplace moves into my own area of work and my union and teaching roles converge.  I am not of a mind to put at risk my professionalism by talking in specifics here, although a search of the education archive on the Stuff webpages should reveal for those who are interested a little of what is going on, and on what, in my union role, I am frequently asked to comment.

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I honed my essay writing and editing skills on Wallace Stevens, Shakespeare and Katharine Susannah Pritchard at a time when I didn’t expect to use them for anything except the most esoteric of pursuits. My explanation to my students of these skills’ value has never pushed much beyond these boundaries, except to say that if you are well-trained in writing and editing, you can turn your hand to most writing tasks, including those of future employers that you can’t imagine yet. The primary function for me, however, of the ability to write and edit has been for my own enjoyment, with the latter, more recently, also for sale in the service of others’ work. [Hustler's aside: my business welcomes your recommendations and referrals].

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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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My reflective time is at the moment constrained by a different range of duties at work.  Concerte University, as you may know, has this year a new leader, which inevitably brings restructuring.  In my union capacity, I am in the thick of things, to the extent that the university has seconded me to do this work.  I still have my teaching, but for the next few months there will be less of it.  My days are what I would call surface-busy: lots of meetings, a great deal of planning and strategising, much communication with members, and little time as a result to sit and think.

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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.

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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I’m working solely with weekend creativity at the moment, as my cold proves difficult to shake and I complete my workplace tasks in a slightly zombified fashion.  Or not: I came home sick on Thursday and spent most of yesterday in bed.  I dislike minor illness with a passion.  It fails in its role as memento mori, since it places one in the class of walking wounded only, but at the same time it incapacitates the body enough for the mind to get on to some really first-class worrying.  Thus my catarrh and neuroses feed each other and Arthur gets woken in the middle of the night as I run my hands along his sides to make sure, for no reason, that he’s still breathing.  From the same location, the señor orders me not to sleep on my back, so he isn’t woken by my cold-related sleep apnœa, wondering, should I wake her and tell her to breathe, or not?

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