Posts tagged as:

reflection

The days of ‘92

16 September, 2009

in O internet, commentatrix, in Aotearoa, the social round

A recent article on the Fairfax webpages profiled a group of school pupils preparing for the annual ball.  Here they are, dressed up and excited, as featured in the main shot of the article.  There is also a series of four- or five-minute videos, which I confess I haven’t viewed. It would be an exercise in nostalgia, which, as you’ll see, doesn’t sit completely easily with me.

To the Ball

To the Ball

My high-school ball, or formal as we called it at the time (“balls” were for the posh schools) was nearly seventeen years ago, a literal half lifetime.  I wore a dress my mother made for me, from a wedding-gown pattern.  I chose the fabrics: crushed velvet for the bodice and sleeves and a black background with red rose-print for the skirt.  I wore my mother’s jewellery, and possibly her shoes too.  Though my skirt was full-length, I wore patterned black stockings which I saved for years, until they no longer fit.

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The author as researcher

16 May, 2009

in O internet, in Aotearoa, teaching & learning, writing & research

Simon at South America Bidsta has an interesting post on the relationship between the positioned individual and the ethnographic research they produce, noting drily that in “any other science, you might just call this ‘being transparent about one’s methods’”.

The post contains the challenge to reproduce the researcher’s exercise: to “write down ten things about ourselves–personal, political, demographic, academic or philosophical, that give an idea of who we are and where we come from, and that could influence how we carry out our research”. This challenge catches my attention for a number of reasons at present.  The main one of these is that I am involved in a group research project at work to which I am not contributing in the way I anticipated I would be able to contribute.  Tasks which I complete with ease in literary and cultural studies I find myself almost paralysed by in educational research.  Furthermore, a misconceived sense of responsibility towards my research partners also seems to retard the pace of my work.  (This is not to say that a sense of responsibility is in itself a bad idea, but rather that there’s something about the way in which I’m experiencing it that’s askew.)

So I’m up for completing Simon’s exercise with the slant that it’s a good time to reflect a little on how my own positioning as a researcher is affecting my contribution to this research project: I’m completing tasks quite different from those I thought I would when the project began.

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My thirty-four things

7 February, 2009

in commentatrix, memes & quizzes

Thank you again, everyone, for your kind birthday wishes, which appeared in the comments here, on Twitter, on Facebook, by text and superimposed by laser on the moon.  Only one of these is a lie.  It was a lovely day.

When Ms. Sas turned thirty-five last year she made the post “35 things learned the last 35 years”, which format Miss MeganWegan repeated yesterday for our shared anniversary and her years thirty-one.  Shameless appropriator of others’ structures that I am, I thought I would adapt the same for my own reflections.  I have tied each scrap of knowledge to the age at which I learned it; thus numbers 1-5 reflect what I know from the first five years of life, and each number thereafter corresponds to the age it signifies.  Let us see how well I can cast my mind back to a life of big hair and long skirts.

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A small room with large windows

30 June, 2008

in teaching & learning

A room in which I teach this intake, for just one hour a week, is one of several I worked in regularly five years ago.  The room is much as it was in that time past, decorated with old secondary students’ posters promoting the discipline, along with other images showing slightly awkward graduates leading interesting lives as a result of their studies.  These pictures are starting to date too; the women’s hair seems frizzy and piled unduly high and the male graduates’ haircuts are at odd, flat-toppish sort of angles.  Strange that I should measure the passing of time by the changing of hairstyles, but there it is.

What’s the most different for me, however, is the way the room itself seems to have shrunk.  When we moved there from our previous set of teaching rooms, which could barely hold sixteen students at a time, these rooms were spacious and filled with natural light in comparison.  I hadn’t realised how much my teaching spaces have grown in the subsequent years, and how groups by whom I used to feel dwarfed — perhaps 20 students — I now take in my stride.  My overall feeling is one of having aged, not in the negative way that word is usually bandied about (for women, especially?) but of having acquired something like working experience.  It’s nice to feel, in between challenges, that I’ve grown to fit better the classroom, without realising.

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