Still fewer parentheses than Mog!

There are days when the teaching profession is the best in the entire universe, days so filled with joy that they make even the delights of being captain of the intergalactic space survey vessel The Wabe pale into insignificance. With the light from Fomalhaut barely penetrating my cabin (on the infrared spectrum it can only be referred to as the Eye of Sauron Nebula) today is one such day.

I remember a conversation with a young learner with ADHD and ASD and my heart swells. He told me that he loves taking his medication because he will have a much nicer day with it than without it. He also said that one of his coping strategies is to escape for a while into one of the worlds inside his head. There’s a peaceful one and an exciting, colourful one. If he seems, he said, to be somewhere else in class, he probably is. I love that.

(Insert beautifully crafted paragraphs here, expression, lexical dexterity, and wit a joy to behold. Note to self. Make sure to click “done” otherwise, when you put your phone in your pocket, you delete them and get the following:

(He told me of his mmmm mom mnm mnm mmmmmmmmknki lkkkkkko. Alas, it truly was good but it is gone.)

Technology has been unreliable, to say the least, lately. My sheer professionalism prevents typing some of the language I have used when describing, variously, Excel, Word, genkior, SEEMiS, Sibelius, iTunes, Yahoo, gmail, and Notes. Why is it that, for everyday mundanity they perform as expected, and as soon as you have something important to do - usually time-sensitive - they decide to go their own way and do something other than is desired? A colleague and I were discussing the ubiquitous “they” the other day. Not in a gender neutral politically correct sense. Definitely in a conspiracy theorist sense. Are the Olympians fed up of being ignored and forgotten about, and exerting rusty deific power? (We’ll skip over my personal magnetic field that interferes with technology here because I want someone or something else to blame. Why else would I have had Amazon deliver a pitchfork? To keep it balanced, I ordered the burning torches from a local shop.)

“They” have decided that a program (via t’internet) can no longer be accessed from home. No notification. Just ceased. Cue part time colleague having to come in to school on a non-work day to complete a task that normally would be done from the domestic armchair. Delightful though it is to see Bilbo, I feel his pain at being denied second breakfast.

The latest technological wickedness is that - for a yet unknown reason - when another user has been logged on to the computer in my teaching room, the keyboard stops functioning. One has, if one wishes to log in oneself, to unplug the cord and place it in a different USB port (not the same one again - I tried that). Perhaps it is the goddess Até demonstrating that, although most people have forgotten about her, she has not forgotten about us!

In class a learner asked, without guile, if it were ok to use black to describe a gorilla or if it would be offensive. FFS! What, indeed, are we coming to?

I incandesced the other day when it was suggested that, in order to avoid offending someone, it was better to say “socially responsible” rather than “politically correct”! I know what I think of that idea.

Admittedly, the same class (silver-back inspired) gave me much joy as I was gathering knowledge of poetry terms we know. We’d celebrated stanza and simile and metaphor and structure and rhyme. We were not, I hasten to add, brain-storming, because that is a derogatory, offence-laden term. We’d talked of stanza and verse being sometimes interchangeable and sometimes not. We’d discussed the fight or flight brain-freeze of being put on the spot (cold calling if you’re up on pedagogical questioning techniques). And I moved on to the next space on my learning wall (nothing so prosaic and potentially dangerous as a black or white board) to write the letter “c”.

We’d discussed earlier (due to several curriculum-related outbursts) that sometimes calling out the answer is less than helpful if everyone needs time to think of their own answer. “Let’s use that, positively,” thinks I. “Feel free to shout out poetry words,” says I. (Having written the letter “C”) “Kangaroo!” Is shouted joyfully from the back. There is silence. All turn and look at the owner of the voice. “Maybe not,” he says much more quietly.

With a pleasurable wee meander down nostalgic primary school lanes, that led to discussion about curly and kicking “ks.” And, when you know we’re looking at the opening of “Brooklyn Cop” and the gorilla, having another zoological reference become less bizarre, but still fun. We did get back on track with the sought for ‘connotations’ and normal chaos was resumed.

Professor McGonagall pops in for the jotters of a class we share. Behind her mask, I know her beautiful smile is shining. We chat for a minute, more than the required two metres apart, and when she leaves, my world is brighter than it was.

I think ‘breakthrough’ is too strong a word for it, but the Brooklyn Cop works his magic as a young man says, “I’ve highlighted a bit because something is going on. I don’t know what it is but there’s definitely something.” I loved that he felt confident enough to say it. And, yes, there is indeed something going on. We can’t get into it today because it is close to the end of the period and I can’t get the PowerPoint to move on to the next screen. I swallow the profanity and decide instead that tonight I shall make a sacrifice to the gods. Perhaps those mushrooms doing their festering thing at the bottom of the fridge would be a suitable burnt offering. “Qorban”.

There was but one member of my Nat 5 class who knew who Spock is. That makes me feel very old indeed. Would it be wrong - for cultural awareness, general knowledge, and mental health check-in - to watch an episode in class?

Something has blipped on the interstellar radar so I must get back to the real world. It is a hard thing to ponder the road less traveled when you are gazing out at the vastness of space and no foot, metaphorical or metrical, has gone before. I’m off for a lie down before I split an infinitive.