The road to Blackberry Hill

We had our first science lesson today, we even got to play with frozen water balloons, brilliant! Unfortunately we also got to hear about the 9 science “audits” we need to do. I don’t know why they don’t call them tests or exams, that’s what they are, fail them and you’re out. I guess it’s because people can get scared by the whole exam thing. Call it something else, and the fear goes away.

I wonder if this can be extended to other areas. The mother of my children (MOMyC) was quite scary when I suggest going on a boys weekend to New York. I wonder if she would be less scary if I started calling her something else, maybe Angelina. I doubt it. And, used at one of those particularly sensitive times, it may have the opposite of the desired effect. I just can’t see “I’m sorry I called out Angelina, but it’s a recognised technique for improving psychological well-being” cutting it.

These audits are very much science audits, you fail if you misspell the sciance words, but it’s explicit that no one cares if you get the other spellings wrong. Considering that the lecturers are meant to be modelling good practice, and that we’re meant to be all “cross-curricular” (as far as I can figure out, this is the educational equivalent of cross-dressing), this surprises me a little. However, it’s also a bit liberating, it gives me as much justification as I need (not very much at all) to sit in a class extolling the merits of healthy eating whilst eating a bag of ready-salted.

Definitely a good thing about them is that they force you to learn stuff. I was reading about breathing and respiration (yes, they’re different, if you’re interested let me know and I can now provide a full explanation), and it’s amazing what you find out. For example, did you know that worms breathe through their skins? Or that frogs have lungs and can breathe through these, but can also breathe through their skin? I was so impressed that I immediately told everyone.

However, I’m a bit nervous about telling a class this when I’m a teacher. You’re bound to get the obvious questions like “How does a snail breathe”? (It’s a good question, you ever seen a snail with nose?) To which I wouldn’t know the answer, but would be tempted to say something stupid like “Why don’t we look that up on the computer”. This I would proceed to do, inevitably be the last in the class to find the answer, and not be able to understand the answer when I find it (I did look it up, after 30 minutes I found “Snails breathe by taking air into a visceral cavity that is richly supplied with blood vessels” – you understand that?) – a good way of simultaneously demonstrating my ineptitude in science, IT and English. As a trainee teacher, you’re acutely aware of the level of your own incompetence, you just hope it takes the children a little longer to figure it out.

Symbols. I’ve not got a doctorate in communication studies, but I reckon when you create one of these things, you’re aiming to maximise recognition, and the understanding of what they’re meant to convey. On any objective basis, McDonalds is beating God hands down.

I’ve seen research that showed, at the age of four, 98% of American children recognised the Golden Arches (this not being an academic piece of work, I don’t have to cite the source, which I’ve forgotten. In fact, I may have just made that up). However, sitting in my first lecture surrounded by 21 year old Irish Catholic girls, you would kind of hoped that God had this audience sown up.  Not a bit of it.  None of them on my table got the Lamb of God, and it was left to my recollection of singing Jerusalem in the local pub as England won the rugby world cup (yes, it was a long time ago) to come up with the Lamb of God- well, this is RE, and there is a sheep in the middle of it, it’s not rocket science (that’s next week). Of course, they all know the Golden Arches. McDonalds 2, God nil.

For anyone who’s interested, check out this site, which has the pretty pictures, and relevant bits of the bible (Gen22:19).

http://home.att.net/~wegast/symbols/symbolsa/symbolsa.html#agnusdeireclining 

I don’t mean to get all heavy, but it wasn’t until this lecture that anyone in the room really got this whole sacrifice thing – symbolised by the flagpole like thingy (not quite) spearing said sheep. And when I say sacrifice, I don’t mean the giving up ½ a slice of your toast because your youngest (Mini-Mini) is hungry kind of sacrifice, I mean real, spilling blood to appease your God kind of sacrifice. If you read that website you’ll see that the Old Testament is full of it. In fact, the term scapegoat comes from one particular sacrifice where a goat is burdened with all the sins of goat owner and sent into the desert as food for vultures (or whatever ate stray goats in the desert in those days), to compensate God for their sins. And there is a direct link between this and Jesus dying on the cross, he is God’s son, he died for all our sins, it is the ultimate and last sacrifice, no more were needed after this (obviously a goat-friendly God). It is the context that people reading the bible in those days would have understood.

So how are you meant to teach/discuss this with primary school children? It kind of freaks me out, no idea what it is going to do with a bunch of pre-teen children. I can see some of them taking this concept on board a bit too literally and assorted pets disappearing (come to think of it, there have been a lot of notices on lampposts recently about lost rabbits).

Working in the city this would have been no problem, I can almost see how the conversation would go. “I’m sorry to have to have to tell you that we are re-engineering the team to better align it with the critical needs of our business sponsors, and your role is no longer required. There will be a 28-day consultation period, but you should also be aware that the banks redundancy package has been replaced with human sacrifice. Have you got any questions?”

I just can’t see it working in school. Looking at the symbol a bit more closely you will see that there appears to be what looks like the cross of St. George. I think a bit of re-interpretation is what is required, and Jerusalem is my inspiration. The Lamb of God does indeed make the ultimate sacrifice, it’s the England Rugby team’s last supper before a world cup final. But there is no need to worry, it happened once a long time ago, and isn’t going to happen again.

For a course that is meant to be unbearably intensive, it starts pretty lightly, for the first couple of months we’ve got a full day and half without any lectures. I’m wondering if I’m misinterpreting “intensive”. In my previous life, if someone said something was going to be intensive, you didn’t know if you were going to get home that night. At St Martha’s, it would appear to mean, after 3am maybe you should think about whether you really ought to open that other bottle of vodka.

 In fact, the first few days have been anything but intensive, they’ve been all induction. The only thing approaching a lecture was a couple of hours on how course work should be presented. This was very dry but pretty useful, and possibly more useful to me than anyone else. I haven’t written an academic dissertation for 20 years, and things have changed a bit in that time.

 Given the amount of time since I last was in the college setting, it was most helpful in facilitating me developing strategies for completion of the course. For example how do you get through a dry lecture when you’re surrounded by 130 twenty-one year old women, how on earth do you keep focussed? The answer is remarkably simple – sit at the front of class. This is a bit of a turn of events, when I were young, we all used to fight to sit at the back. Sitting at the front, the only person you really focus on are the lecturers, and although, from the limited experience I’ve had of them so far, they appear to be excellent, just looking at them doesn’t present you with the same concentration challenges that looking at the class does.

 So although the timetable does appear to be a little light on first sight, it is at least there. My first 2 lectures are RE and Music. When I take this home and present it to the mother of my children (MOMyC), she openly laughs. Well, maybe it wasn’t a laugh, maybe it was something more of a snigger, whatever, it was an impossible to suppress expression of her impression of my ability to teach music, ridiculous to the point of comedy.

 For time immemorial, writers have played on the fragile nature of the male ego, especially in relation to parts of the anatomy. However, as a trainee teacher, I can tell you that this applies equally to the ability to teach different subjects, including music (and, by the way, I contest the validity of her reaction). The consequences of this are difficult to fathom, thought I would consider the following sequence of events would be highly canalised (yes, I’ve read my “Bluff your way in Developmental Psychology”)

1.      Vindictive and baseless (my interpretation) comment on musical ability – its never actually been proven that I’m tone deaf, although my dancing to Reggae does give some indication of my innate rhythmic appreciation

2.      Subsequent depression and social withdrawal

3.      Resort to use of alcohol, and, eventually, other consciousness changing substances, as coping strategies

4.      Reliance develops on such substances

5.      Moving outside of mainstream society due to this dependency, including the breakdown of relationships, unemployment, and homelessness

6.      Finally, early death. Slow, painful and alone

The moral is, be careful before you criticise what a man can do with his recorder.