Wear Sunscreen

Some more advice: don't talk to strangers and don't attempt to pick up spiky plants.


Hectic week this week, what with writing my essay/taking over my classes/writing enough job applications to satisfy the sudden mountain of vacancies; so although I've scribbled various posts I haven't actually finished any enough to publish them. So I'm going to compile some vague ramblings now into one mammoth post.


I deliberately didn't blog about school for the first couple of weeks - but it's getting better now that I'm actually teaching. I am SO excited about next lesson with year 7 - it's tomorrow, but I planned it after our lesson together on Thursday and have been looking forward to it ever since! I'm writing my own poetry SOW for them, which I thought would be tough but it's amazing. I love it! Best of all, they seem to as well.


I've also been getting lifts into school with a PE teacher, and consequently am now an honorary member of the PE dept. That's nice - they're far more sociable than the English dept (who are friendly, but prefer to work alone in their own rooms so the staffroom is permanently deserted apart from the half-hour lunch break). I did, however, manage to meet one NQT long enough to have a bit of a barney with her.

I'd like to say it wasn't my fault but it probably was. I'm not too good at the whole diplomacy side of things.

Everyone knows that when you meet someone new - especially when that someone is a lost and lonely looking trainee - common ground is a great place to start. However, a word of warning - make sure you know their opinion on said common ground before beginning to voice your own.

This NQT (let's just call her Liz) came to sit with me at lunch and began her conversation with, "I hear you were at [Hogwarts] before here, what did you think?" I opened my mouth to wax lyrical about said school when she subsequently launched into a slight tirade against it. Not angry ranting, just whingeing. I sat in shocked silence for a while, using body language/facial expressions to signal to her that she could shut up any time she liked.

She didn't.

I'm quite opinionated. I can be a real cow. I know that biting my lip is usually the best way forward, especially at work, but if you press the buttons in the right order then sometimes I can't help myself. Like when people remark that footballers actually deserve their wages (I can feel my blood simmering already). So when Liz moved onto people that I knew personally, enough was enough. I began with that awful cliche, "no offense, but I really think..." and began my own side of the debate. In what was, for me, actually quite a diplomatic manner - I think the worst I escalated to was, "well, no. I'm really sorry if what I've said has offended you in any way, but to be frank I couldn't disagree more. Maybe we should move on from this topic now."

There was a slight atmosphere for the rest of the conversation.




I also made a complete prat out of myself in the library on Thursday - I was walking past a shelf when I saw a display and something inside my head went "ooh! Shiny!"

So I stopped to look. 'Recommended Reads for Year 9' - "hmm, could be useful, I'll just grab myself one of those leaflets..." I leaned over to get one and promptly knocked the librarian's plantpot onto the floor in the process. Mortified, I bent to pick it up. The pot was still intact, fortunately, but when I picked it up and saw the plant still on the floor a momentary panic set in. A cactus? Seriously? Are they not poisonous???
But I couldn't just leave it - I had to get it back into the pot, preferably without year 7 noticing what on earth I was doing kneeling on the floor. So I gritted my teeth and grabbed it.


Please don't ever feel the need to test my hypothesis that picking up a cactus with bare hands is a painful experience.

Anti-snow/ice/garage repair men rant...

I gave my car a makeover a couple of days ago.

By which I mean I slid on some ice on a country lane and crashed through a metal fence. Then I drove a few miles to school whilst the fender worked its way loose. Finally, to add insult to her injury I parked her in a side street and walked the remaining way to school, leaving her looking sad and lonely and no doubt feeling very sorry for herself.

Poor baby. (Yes, I believe I did actually call her that out loud when I was driving home that evening and begging her not to collapse in a heap. She got me all the way to a garage and promptly fell apart).

This all sounds very dramatic, but I assure you that fortunately my car is a tough little cookie and actually, in terms of how battered she looks, I think she emerged relatively unscathed. A friend managed to fix her up a little on Wednesday night so that she held together, told me it was all just cosmetic damage and I decided that overall, the railings had come off far worse.

After D's handiwork with a pair of pliers and some duct tape, I expected this accident to set me back around £700. Inconvenient, annoying, but manageable. So when the nice man at BMW phoned me up yesterday morning and began our conversation with, “are you sitting down, Miss?” I knew the diagnosis wasn't going to be great. I wasn't sitting down, but I managed to balance my coffee so that I could grip onto a friend's wrist instead.

“You're looking at three and a half grand to start with, then...”
He did carry on, but I was too busy mouthing “WHAT?!?” to my friend and whispering the numbers so she could share in my fury.

Now normally I would be very careful about posting anything to do with who I actually am – I don't put pictures of myself, my friends, my horse up; I don't name my friends or school; and generally on the Blog Paranoia Scale I'm about a 6, usually. (No One Reads the Copy's BPS can be learned about here).
But this has incensed me so greatly that I'm going to show you part of my car so you can see how totally UNDAMAGED she actually is. I think I might take a sledgehammer to the bonnet and headlights, just to make sure I get my money's worth from the repair man.



It would actually be cheaper for me to write her off, as then Mini would replace her for free. It would also be cheaper to just buy an old banger to drive around until I've found a Saturday job to pay for the car/had time to take it back up north where it will be considerably cheaper to fix. In the meantime, I need to find a way of getting to school (which is handily situated in the middle of nowhere).

Horse and cart? (love this idea, Sion probably wouldn't).
Skis? (would work at the moment, but the snow is going).
Unicycle?

Application Number One.

Probably out of several, but I'm going to stop counting after 5.

So, this application has taken me one weekend plus four snow days to write. Ironically, the bulk of it was written within about an hour and a half and the remaining six days were spent persuading it to fit onto the application form and crowbarring in all the necessary lingo whilst trying not to sound pretentious.

Short of replacing my printer's ink with my blood and stapling my soul to the back as an appendix, there's nothing more I can do to it now.

So... Here goes! Sending... Sent.
I spoke to the Head's PA earlier as the upload link on their website doesn't work, and she offered to give it to the Head this afternoon if I emailed it over today.

EEEEEK!

I wonder how soon I'll hear back? Or whether I'll hear at all? Teaching might be one of those professions where they don't actively reject you, they just ignore you. In a 'no news is terrible news' sort of way. How utterly soul destroying that would be.

Fingers crossed for shortlist.

Not Waving But Drowning.

I don't know what's wrong with me, but I seem to be going in reverse.

I loved my first school; I had a great time. Even when my outside world was falling apart, school was something I looked forward to and could rely on.

I don't start my new school until Monday and my new mentor has already had me in tears. I'm burning out with work and I haven't even started.



Rats.

*Grits teeth.*
I AM going to pass this term.

"... I guess you had to be there".

Isn't that possibly one of the most annoying phrases someone can say to you? Especially when it follows their lengthy attempts to relay some "absolutely hilarious, honestly" event, which you can't hear through their uncontrolled giggles and what you can hear just makes you think 'seriously? THIS is what you're hysterical over?' But you stand there quietly, trying to look amused whilst expending all your energy in willing the side of your lip not to curl in disdain and persuading your raised eyebrow to resume normal position. After all, you can totally see the reason why this tale is so side-splittingly, belly-achingly hilarious. Right?

Unfortunately, as much as I hate this phrase, this is exactly what I was guilty of last night. It was dark, nearly midnight; the boyfriend has almost drifted off to sleep... and he's suddenly aware that the bed is shaking.

He rolls over. "(April)? WTF are you laughing at?"
He knows me too well. I can laugh pretty much silently - upto a point - but the tears and trembling will give me away every time.
So, for fifteen agonizing minutes, I tried to form sentences - words, even - through my stutters and explosions of laughter... and failed miserably. Boyfriend politely tried to find the funny parts in my story, although he had to give them up after a while and tell me to just shut up. Which I couldn't. There is something about knowing you shouldn't be laughing which just makes you laugh harder.

I eventually managed to splutter "I guess you had to be there" and left him to sleep in peace.




What was I actually thinking about?
Well, we had this TERRIBLE lecture yesterday. Really, really awful. He spent ten minutes searching for a 'safety tested' sticker on the bottom of a fire extinguisher, which fifteen minutes earlier he had told us was capable of burning off eight layers of skin! In the next sentence, it was capable of burning through TEN layers of skin! And so on.

... Do we even have ten layers of skin?


Anyway, I digress. Which was exactly what this poor chap did. For a whole hour. He knew he'd lost us, but did he brush himself off, change tactic and try to recover the lecture? No, he continued talking about fire extinguishers and sticky safety labels and did his best to ignore the 120 quivering shoulders and stifled snorts. My friends and I hid our heads on the desks initially - we couldn't look at each other - but our violent shaking just caused our pens to create a huge rattling noise against the desks. By the time he'd moved the discussions onto the correct positioning of fire blankets, we were weeping openly.

What did this have to do with teaching? I have NO idea. But I know you're not finding it that funny, whereas I'm still laughing away over the mere picture of the fire extinguisher.

Excitement!

Ohh, two exciting things happened to me today. In order of importance and excitement factor:

Firstly, 'Wales' wrote to me officially confirming my place with Sion in the Showjumping Finals. WAHEYYY! So I filled it the form, wrote my cheque and am all set to go. B thinks she can get us transport for the weekend, the dates are in the Easter hols (so no time off school; also Day One is my birthday!) and my new show jacket has arrived and is beeaaautiful.



No, sadly this is not us.* If only. The horse does look a little like Sion, but Sion has a white stripe. And is, obviously, more handsome, despite being about half the size of this horse.

Secondly, I have my first job application to fill out! This is so exciting. Who knew filling in forms could produce such a thrill? (Yes, I need to get out more/have more sex/whatever). I feel almost like a real teacher... Although I have so many ridiculously naive questions. The form says 'use black ink'; does that mean I have to handwrite it (please God let me be allowed to type it)? Is my referee my mentor or Head of Department? From which school? I've left one and haven't started at the other yet, so I'm currently homeless in that sense. Maybe I should wait a couple of weeks until I've started my second school...?
Fortunately I'm meeting with my uni tutor on Thursday so I can grill her then.

Heading off now to do the cooking/cleaning/general 'fun' housework/finish application form as far as I can/read up on my uni essay/work on my QTS standards tracker like I should have done over Christmas/open a bottle of wine.

Later!

*In order to protect myself from copyright Nazis suing me, I don't own the photo or any rights to it, etc etc. The photo is Little Big Man and Laura Chapot, winners of the $60,000 Kilkenny Internationale Cup at the Winter Equestrian Festival. Photo (c) 2007 Randi Muster. Just in case anyone was wondering...

Another Post?

Yes, another post in the same evening.
I've just worked my little (or not so little, see previous post) butt off writing a letter of application to give to my uni tutor tomorrow, and feel now that I deserve to sit back and write a load of rubbish.

I love being in uni, I really do. I love having a lie-in (7am, bliss), although admittedly I didn't particularly enjoy spending 10 minutes de-icing my car at -5 degrees this morning. That pre-icer you can buy, which you spray on the night before and then awake to a frost-free car? Lies. All lies.

I love the drive over to university as well. It takes about 40 minutes, during which I just sit back and watch the sunrise (it's 20-something miles of motorway; the car pretty much drives itself there whilst I gaze out of the window at the tree silhouettes and watch the sky change colour).

When I did my undergraduate degree, I had four hours of lectures a week. "Amazing!" everyone used to say. Yep. And exceptionally boring when all your housemates have the more normal schedule of between 3 and 6 hours a day and everyone on the same course as you insists on using their free time to 'struggle through the mountains of work we have' (er, sorry? What work would that be?).

This uni experience is totally different. I have lectures 9-4 (with 2 hours for lunch, admittedly) and I always look forward to them. There are four of us who stick together and we're usually the ones who leave with mascara-streaked cheeks from laughing too hard. We love just pratting about, but we do the work as well. In fact, we get a little carried away with it sometimes. One speaker gave us a 'write the next paragraph' exercise - we LOVED writing collaboratively and it resulted in us spending lunchtime completing an entire story, often laughing too hard to be able to actually write anything. Today's first lecture had me wrapping my arms around a guy I've never seen before and telling him about what I'd had for breakfast (honestly, we do whatever they tell us - sing, stretch, chant nonsense, write a poem - I've never come across any kids who are so blindly obedient. Zimbardo would have had a field day with our lecture group).

So far, the PGCE is one of the best things to happen to me (but ask me again in February when I'm struggling with behaviour and time management and searching for someone daft enough to actually employ me).

There's Such a Thing as Too Much Chocolate?

I love chocolate.

I love my boyfriend.

I love my boyfriend and chocolate.



Until recently, the boyfriend has been quite oblivious to/accepting of the fact that I have a slight addiction. Breakfast, lunch, dinner - whatever, if there's chocolate I will eat it.

Now I've put on quite a lot of weight over the past few months. I know this. And I also think, by my age, I am capable of realising that this is somehow connected to the fact that I no longer train obsessively for Judo, but still eat chocolate. Yes, I think I can figure out how this gaining-weight process works. I'm not slim, never have been, never will been; mostly I accept this fact, although I don't like it. And sometimes it gets me down and I might make a passing remark. Rarely, though. I don't particularly want to draw attention to the fact I'm becoming a heffalump.

Evidently my boyfriend has noticed though, and decided he doesn't like it. He seems to become genuinely annoyed when he sees me eating any. And it's Christmas - we've been given four boxes. Three are still unopened.

I threw the lot in the bin yesterday. We were lying lazily on the sofa and I leant over a took a chocolate from the open box. Just one. Still, it was enough to unleash a stream of remarks about my lack of self control and warnings about calorie content (yes thank you, I hadn't made the association between weight and sugary foods myself). I got up and just put the lot in the bin. He pretended not to notice, even when he went to put something else in there later.
I know it was irrational (I should have taken them into uni and shared them out really, but only thought of that much later) but I was so angry! No one has ever told me what I can and can't eat. It felt like a personal critisism.


But on the plus side, it angered me so much that I now have no chocolate. This can only be good for my waistline.

Electronic Hide-and-Seek.

Except in the real game, the person who hides is not also the person who then has to search. My laptop was clearly twirling its hair idly round its finger and gazing out of the window when the rules were explained.






My lovely shiny new laptop which my boyfriend gave me for Christmas has taken all my blog entries (written hastily in Word, as I didn't have internet) and hidden them. Now, admittedly, I asked it to. I didn't want A coming across them, as I knew he'd use this computer at some point. So, I clicked the 'hide folder' option. Lovely shiny new computer obeyed. But, I - somewhat naively, apparently - expected it to give the posts BACK when I asked for them. But no. It's squirrelled them away somewhere, and no amount of hazelnuts will convince it to return them. Perhaps it's decided that they're such dreadful drivel they should never see the light of blogspot. I don't blame it, but nor do I really care about its opinion. I want my posts back - and, more importantly, the notes for my novel; they were in the same folder.

Why is nothing ever simple with Windows? Why would providing a 'show hidden folders' option cause the world to collapse? Oh, it wouldn't? Then why, exactly, isn't there one?
I suppose my various ramblings about lunch with the in-laws, tattoos, being 'the other woman', fluffy slippers and chocolate will have to remain interior monologues until I manage to outsmart Windows. You can breathe a sigh of relief - for now.