cold discipline for solo travellers
From the category archives:
Life is busy and heavy with both utility and novelty, but in a manner that borrows all the time and energy that was used, before February, for what seems now to have been easy leisure and creativity. The pleasures of the old life have been marginalised by the duller demands of getting through each day in a city that is itself all margins, no centre.
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Teenagers are right to be embarrassed at the love of their parents. Its affect is everything they aim, in the name of cool, to spurn: without relent, oblivious to fashion, and perhaps even increasing in intensity with passing of time. This is not so much what we heap upon the harvestbaby, now three months old, but what her merely being elicits out of us continually. Call it oxytocin, call it the baby crack, but its power as nurture is a force of nature. These days I find it hard to think past it.
Falling bricks and ruined façades are the public outcome of the earthquake (not to mention some hard heritage questions, of which more in another post), but at home its effect has been to sweep aside any lingering ambivalence about my new role, the intensity of my commitment becoming clear in the sunshine daylight hours during which she and I sat on the shaking family bed and her father prepared a succession of emergency escape kits. What it means to be in this together has been brought into the sharpest of relief, an understanding at which I would have arrived anyway but whose passage has been sped by the thought that our house might have tumbled around us.
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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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Little Boxes
20 May, 2011
in commentatrix,in Aotearoa,teaching & learning
There are nine boxes stacked in the garage, their contents the sum total of my ten-year work archive. They took perhaps ninety minutes to pack up, under the instruction that all our goods were to be packed for storage then shifting, then another ninety minutes across two different days to shift into my car, when the instruction changed to culling all but an under-desk set of drawers and two further drawers in the communal filing cabinets. In a large institution, inside which we are all in varying degrees of displacement, the instructions change frequently and sufficiently that the same task gets done over and over again, minor variations on the same theme. Even with the majority of buildings cleared for occupancy, there is not enough viable space, and a hierarchy of needs sees many of us moving or ready to move.
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