Back 2 Skool

I’ve been back in the classroom for over a term and half now and was expecting to find teaching super-stressful after a 17 month hiatus, but actually a workload of three classes has been perfectly manageable. I guess I forgot I have 10 years of teaching experience, and that really helps when you have a minimal amount of time in which to do a stupid amount of things.

I was also expecting the transition to childcare to be really hard for both myself and my daughter, but she settled in pretty quickly, and she seems to really enjoy all the activities she gets to participate in, as well as the inside resources and outside playground she has access to. She even naps better there than she does at home these days! She’s in good hands.

And of course I was expecting to get very little sleep… that did happen for the first term, as my daughter was exposed to what seemed like every single little virus going around the toddler-world (she’s not one of those kids that sleeps well when sick…), but Term Two hasn’t been nearly so bad, now that we have hardened immune systems of steel. I have definitely been a zombie-teacher on occasions, but it’s much easier to zombie-teach two or three periods a day than it is four or five.

Anyway, this post is really meant to be about the pros and cons of being a part-time teacher, as I have experienced it so far.

The Pros:

• I have 2 to 3 free periods a day in which I can plan and mark. This is SO much time compared to a full-time teacher! 
• I hardly do any work at home. It’s almost impossible to get anything done with a toddler around, so I just try my best to be super-efficient during all those free periods I have during the week. This is in huge contrast to how my life used to be, which involved planning lessons at home in the late afternoon, plus 2-3 hours of schoolwork on Saturday morning and then another 2-3 hours again on Sunday morning…I don’t miss those days at all. 
•  I only have to get out of the house super-early three times a fortnight because most of my classes are after interval. 
•  I don’t have a form class. Form time is unpaid contact time for full-timers that takes a precious extra 15 minutes of your time every morning. 
•  Only one half-hour duty slot per week. I get to sit down and eat my lunch in the staffroom on a regular basis. 
•  I share an office with a much larger group of super-lovely teachers. There’s always someone to bounce ideas off/get advice from/grumble with. 
•  It’s been very interesting returning to the lowly role of a part-time assistant teacher. Previously I was middle-management…and as one of my colleagues said, now I’m mingling with the “commoners”, hah. 
•  I get paid extra to attend PD and occasionally do some relief teaching.

The Cons:

• The money is rubbish. I get 46% of what was my full-time salary for what is essentially a 60% workload. That’s because part-timers are not remunerated for their non-contact hours like full-timers are. It’s something the PPTA is currently discussing, and hopefully something will be done about that soon, because it is appalling. But even with PD and relief pay, I’m not earning much at all. 
•  My timetable is not part-time-teacher-friendly. We’re on a 10 day timetable (so you have Monday A and Monday B, etc) and as I said earlier I teach my classes later in the day which means that I pretty much never get to go home early. The one day a fortnight that I do finish at 12pm…well, my daughter goes down for her nap at that time, and we are big fans of routine, so I just stay at school and work. I’m at school 9am-3pm, every day. 
•  I’m paying for childcare petty much full-time, 5 days a week. Almost half my pay goes on childcare. The quality of childcare is very high and is well worth the money I do pay, but that is a significant chunk of my meagre income, and that alarms me.

I’m lucky because I’m not the only earner in the household, and that has allowed me to go part-time this year. And I’m so glad I’ve been able to go back to work, because I really do enjoy my job!

Here, Baby There, Momma, Everywhere Daddy, Daddy....HAIR!!!

As a teacher, I’m expected to reinforce the rules in the school I teach in. And I do, because it’s my job. But it’s not to say that I like all the rules, and I do tend to vocalise my displeasure with my colleagues about rules that I think are stupid and unnecessary. Not that that gets me anywhere, because schools are really quite powerful when it comes to setting and enforcing their own rules; and I think that’s why there’s been so much discussion about Lucan Battison who was recently suspended from St John's College, in Hastings, for his hair-do. So here we go, this is my (very quick - baby will only sleep for an hour and a half max.) take on the hair-saga. I kinda can’t believe I’m writing a blog-post about this, but, sadly, I kinda can too...

OK, so being suspended is serious business – students at my school are suspended for drug/alcohol use on campus, or violent/bullying behaviour. These are serious safety issues, clearly, and ones that impact on students’ learning. And that’s what suspension is for, right? To remove studnets from the school environment when they are behaving in a way that compromises the safety and/or learning of others. St John’s College, however, suspended the student for his hair-style, and he was off school for over a month. He’s in Year 11 and he’s in his first year of NCEA, and thus that month will have a significant impact on his Level 1 results. 

But the thing that kills me is….the school SUSPENDED him for HAVING LONG HAIR! LONG HAIR!!! He didn’t have a Nazi symbol shaved into his head. His hair wasn't a variety of different colours (not that that should matter.) He didn't have dreads (not that that should matter either). In fact, from what I can gather he was actually following the silly rule about having his hair off the collar and out of his eyes (which is so pedantic – what kind of mayhem might break loose if your hair should touch your shirt collar?!?). But he had long hair, which he refused to cut, so he was SUSPENDED. What is wrong with the principal?! I just think that is crazy behaviour. Did he have nothing better to do? Are there no other pressing issues in the school that need dealing with?? If only the rest of the schools in the country were so lucky...

Anyway, I come now to the argument that it seems like everyone who agrees with the principal’s decision has been making: That “schools make their rules and if you don’t like them don’t go to/send your children to that particular school”.

Well, I think that’s an antiquated and vaguely dangerous argument. Rules in New Zealand schools do not have a history of being particularly inclusive; for example, it was against the rules to speak Maori in school only decades ago. (In fact, rules and laws and New Zealand in general don’t have a history of being particularly inclusive, I guess because colonisation happened, and racism, sexism and homophobia exist, amongst a smattering of other prejudices). New Zealand high schools are not the pinnacle of tolerance and inclusiveness that I would like them to be, unfortunately. Can I just point out that most high schools in Christchurch still insist that female students wear skirts/dresses - NOT pants - as part of their school uniform. Throughout winter. In Christchurch. Where it’s -1 degrees outside on a frosty morning. So stupid. And sexist.

I'm all for rules that help students stay focused on the learning. But following rules for the sake of following rules is mindless idiocy. Thus I think that silly, discriminatory rules should be challenged, and consequently abolished. It’s a shame that the school principal at St John’s College can’t see the difference between meaningful rules and silly ones; a bit of reflection would have saved the school quite a lot of cash, and a teenage boy a month of lost learning.

And finally, I think that we, as a society and as members of the education profession, need to move away from this idea that boys should look like “boys” and girls should look like “girls”. It’s old-fashioned, gendered, and increasingly redundant. Some/many guys love wearing long hair. Some/many (most?) girls like having cozy warm legs in winter. If you are worried about the blurring of gender boundaries…well… get a bloody grip of yourself! If you can’t handle it when you can’t tell the gender of the person in front of you, then you need to get over it because their body is their body and, ultimately, none of your business.  

And most importantly, as we all know, there are far more pressing issues in education than how a person looks.

Happy New Year/Life

Here we go! This my first blog post of the year. Also, it's my first blog-post since I gave birth to my daughter in late October. And it's now over 3 years since I began this blog. So it's a bit of a milestone :-) I've been wanting to write a post for ages, but it's been a little hard to find time to do so...

Anyway, I'd just like to start off by saying that it's just as well that I read all those novels before baby was born. Likewise with watching stuff. However, people who were all, "you'll never read again," were wrong; I picked my Kindle up when my little girl reached 9 weeks, and I've read every day (even for just 15 minutes) since. Funnily enough, my life as I knew it is not completely over since having a baby...which is nice.

But my life as I knew it as a teacher is - temporarily anyway - as I'm officially on leave until January 2015. This seems like a long time, but considering I've been on leave for over four months now (and exhausted my crappily short maternity pay entitlement; you suck New Zealand parental-pay scheme), I'm going to hazard a guess and say that this year will probably go very quickly, and before you know it I'll be back in the world of planning, teaching and marking. But I don't want to think about that because it freaks me out...teaching AND looking after a baby! ARGH!!!!!! So instead I'll just focus on the now, and enjoy being the 'Parent As First Teacher' for my daughter.

So yeah, as my daughter's 'first teacher', I've just gotta say...how the hell did new parents ever cope without the internet?!? It must have just been so much more baffling being a new parent pre mid-90s.There's so much no-one tells you about coping with a newborn baby. Don't get me wrong; my antenatal classes were good; I learned stuff. And yes, I do have books, and I read a fair bit beforehand, but a few books, as graphic as they may be, aren't quite as comprehensive as millions of web-pages at the touch of a button. I don't know where I'd be without the ability to search for information quickly in the comfort of my own home. I've joined various groups on Facebook (mostly breastfeeding and sleeping groups), and I google stuff every day - e.g. "how to make baby sleep through the night" (I didn't find an easy fix, unfortunately...).

But the other thing about the internet is it means I'm not completely isolated from other people. One of my worries about being at home with a baby was that I'd be lonely and bored. I do feel a little cooped up at times, but overall I'm definitely not lonely and I'm not bored (yet) either. I have lots of friends and family who are also at home with babies, and I keep in regular contact with them, messaging and emailing regularly to compare notes and offer sympathy, heh.  The internet is also quite entertaining, however, I need to build up a bigger bank of sites that I visit regularly (I used to have a huge list, but for some reason that list has dwindled over the last few years).


And now I just have to compare having a baby to teaching... I always wondered which would be harder, and I've discussed it many times with friends who have kids, and friends who don't. I may have even been guilty of saying on one (or more) occasions, "surely having a baby isn't as hard as this job!" Ah, how naive. So, here's my comparison of the two jobs so far:

Sleep Deprivation

The sleep deprivation of having a newborn is much much worse than the sleep deprivation caused by teaching. Teaching can and does result in sleep dep - the anxiety of anticipating all the things you have to do keeps you up at night, and then there's the not being able to wind down after parent-teacher interviews/Open Evening/anything else that requires you to stay until 9pm situation, and of course the staying up late to get planning/marking/report-writing done. But it's not comparable to the sleep dep of waking up every 2-3 hours to feed a baby (and for those of you who don't know, feeding a baby can take up to an hour in itself). Baby sleep dep is really brain-munting and body-tiring, and it doesn't let up. I've been riding the baby sleep-dep train for 18 weeks now, and it's like a roller-coaster that seemingly never ends (I hate roller-coasters so this simile works for me).

Freedom

It's for life, and your life is no longer about you. I knew this going into it, which is why I waited so long...but I haven't even seen the Banksy exhibition yet!! Ugh! At least with teaching you do get periodic breaks and you can book yourself a holiday somewhere and then just leave all your schoolwork at home. And if you are super cynical and jaded and over teaching altogether, you can leave the profession (this doesn't seem to always happen though, admittedly...) No such luck with a grumpy baby.

Stress

I know many parents find having children very stressful and anxiety-inducing (I have surprised myself in how un-anxious I've been - who would've thought! But then I have a pretty un-stressy life in general, apart from the job). So, in my opinion, the stress of a teacher's workload (which, as we all know, is astronomically huge) is slightly worse than the stress involved in having my baby. I say 'my' because I can't speak for all babies parents here. I don't mean to label babies (just make some comparisons of the situations that their parents face...), but I think I have an 'average-to-good' baby; she feeds well (although feeding has not been without its issues) and she sleeps pretty well (albeit in fairly small chunks still), and she doesn't have any serious health issues; nor is she colicky. I have friends who have had/are having much more challenging baby experiences. But then I also have friends who seem to have cruisy-ier babies than me (oh how it would be lovely to have a baby that sleeps through the night).

So, in summary, I'm going to admit I was wrong and say that parenting is, overall, harder than teaching. But it's also enjoyable and amazing, and totally worth the stress, lack of freedom and sleep deprivation :-)

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” ― Philip Pullman

I've officially been on maternity leave for almost 3 weeks now, and on sick leave for 2 weeks prior to that (which involved setting relief for my classes, marking, and tidying up some administrative stuff - not particularly taxing, compared to actually being at school). I couldn't quite make it another 7 weeks, as planned...and physically, I have felt SO much better for not teaching. I love teaching (hence this blog), and the best part of the job is definitely being in the classroom with the students, but towards the end that was what I really struggled with; by the end of a day of teaching my hips were so achy I could barely sleep at night. And on the Monday of my last week of school, I worked an 8 hour day straight with no breaks, and that was truly difficult (and disgusting - no-one should work an 8-hour day with no breaks, but that's just what happens when you are a teacher). Whoever knew that having an extra person attached to your front would make life just so much harder?! Well, it did. And it still does, but at least now I can lie in bed until I feel the need to get up, only think about myself and my needs (and the attached person), and take naps when I need to. Needless to say, pregnancy and teaching do not go particularly well together.

But I can't deny the fact that I felt a little...well...bored, a few days into that first week at home. I'm so used to being busy, and having a demanding job to drive me to do stuff, that I didn't really know what to do with my time. Yes, I know I've had school holidays in the last 9 years of teaching; if I got 'bored' I'd start doing some planning (which is the second most enjoyable part of teaching, I reckon), but I'm not going to be teaching for quite a while now, and thus planning units is not a productive nor satisfying use of my time. Yes, there's always baby-prep...but how much prep can you really do? We've got most of the bits and pieces (that we can actually think of at this point - no doubt there are some vital things missing), and there's only so much you can anticipate ("The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley", says my anxiety). Exercise is becoming more and more impossible; it now takes me twice as long to do half as many lengths of the pool than I used to do, and my daily walks around the Red Zone are becoming shorter, and slower, and more painful. So, I've turned to literature, because what else will allow me to lie on the couch and be a full-time incubator, whilst feeling like I can actually be productive and enjoy life?

Thus I'm 'reviewing' all I have read on maternity leave so far. Don't worry, I don't do spoilers :-)

The Beginner's Goodbye by Anne Tyler

I really like Anne Tyler's writing. NB: I'm really into realism. I want to believe that everything that is happening in a novel is actually real - the settings, the characters and the storylines. And this was definitely a  typical Anne Tyler novel, in that sense. It's about a 35 year old guy, who lives in suburban Baltimore with his wife (pretty much all of her novels are set in Baltimore, or the north-eastern part of the US, 'cos that's where she's from and it makes it so good when writers write about where, what and who they know). His wife is killed suddenly by a falling tree...and then she reappears. I won't say any more, other than it was quite good. But not GREAT good. My most recent favourite Anne Tyler novel is Digging to America; it's about two American families who adopt Korean babies, and it follows their journeys as they raise them. Digging to America resonated a lot more with me than The Beginner's Goodbye. I dunno why - I am 35, and have had more experience with death than raising a child at this point. But yeah, if you want to read a really good Anne Tyler novel, then I'm not sure this is the best one to begin with.

Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver

I was excited when I realised that Barbara Kingsolver had another novel out! I loved The Bean Trees (which I read many years ago when it was first published, and then re-read again about 5 years ago), and The Poisonwood Bible is a great novel. I'm pleased to say I really enjoyed Flight Behaviour too, although it's not up there with her other two novels that I hold in such high esteem. I really liked the narrative point of view - a young mum, living on a farm in the Appalachian mountains (yay again for setting texts in places the writer knows well - I guess this means if I ever write a novel I'll have to set it in 80s-90s Wellington and 2000-2010s Christchurch). She is unhappy in her life but a turning point comes when she becomes the first person to witness the migration of a swarm of Monarch butterflies from Mexico. The story is fairly involved, with some other rather interesting characters. Someone told me that they didn't bother reading this novel because they heard it was 'preachy'. And yeah, it was, but I still liked it. I like it when novelists deal with global issues (in this novel the global issue is specifically global warming and, to a lesser extent, capitalism) on a personal level. So I would recommend this novel, although it's not going to make it onto my list of 'best novels ever'.

Into the River by Ted Dawe

I first heard about this novel when it won the Best Young Adult Fiction and New Zealand Post Margaret Mahy Book of the Year award this year, and some people complained that it was too explicit for teens, so of course that got me interested right away! And it was a really interesting read - unique, gripping, honest, brutal at times, and sad. I read it partly with the question, "could I teach it?" in my mind. And the answer is no. And here's why. Firstly, it's one of those novels that doesn't clearly fit an age bracket, if you know what I mean. Stylistically, it's not hard to read at all (a Year 9 reading at Curriculum Level 5 could easiy get through it). But the ideas, events and themes are quite complex and thus I'd never get away with teaching to to Year 9s. Or Year 10s. Or Year 11s. Secondly, the structure of the novel is, I think, quite different to what you'd expect. It follows a 13 year old Maori boy who grows up on the East Coast and is then accepted into a prestigious
private school in Auckland. The first couple of chapters about about him - his whakapapa, his identity, and his relationships with his whanau. Then, when he moves to Auckland it all changes, and whilst it's still about his identity, and relationships, the contrast is so stark to the first couple of chapters that it is shocking and heartbreaking, and not a very pleasant read. And that's the point, I guess. Racism sucks. It's a really good coming-of-age novel, and I would definitely recommend it to certain students to read.  The explicit details didn't put me off - sex was dealt with realisitically, and I appreciated that. But in the end you pick your battles, and I prefer not to pick them with conservative parents of teens in a relatively white, middle-class Chch school.

If You Lived Here, You'd Be Perfect By Now: The Unofficial Guide to Sweet Valley High by Robin Hardwicke

So this is a collection of blog posts by a woman who has been writing about various 'teen
texts' she read when she was growing up (so it's very bloggy in writing style). She's about my age, and read all the Baby-sitters Club and Sweet Valley High (SVH) books as a pre-teen, in the late 80s/early 90s, just like I did. And then she re-read them again as a grown 30-something year old woman, and reviewed each book on her blog, The Dairi Burger. This book is a collection of all her posts about SVH. She critiques them from a feminist perspective (how could you not?) and from a literary perspective, and it is so enjoyable reading her critiques, having devoured the books 25 years earlier myself. Can I just point out, that SVH makes Twilight look like high-end, well-written, liberal literature. I mean, Twilight is not good reading (yes, I have read all four books) but it just cannot compare to the lazy writing of SVH. Yup, I read a lot of crap when I was young, and yup, it possibly did damage my mind/self-esteem a bit. But this collection of blog posts has made it all worthwhile, heh heh heh. I just wish I'd thought of this idea first. I recommend this book to anyone who read SVH when they were younger and would like to see it ripped to shreds now as an adult. Not sure how big the market is for that, but I fucking loved it. NB: You can buy it really cheap on Kindle, or go to her website and read the posts individually. Enjoy!

A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin

It's the fifth book in the A Song of Ice and Fire Series, and I'd been saving it for maternity leave all year. Don't worry - I'm not actually going to say much about it, 'cos I don't want to spoil it for anyone who is reading the books or watching the series. I did enjoy it a lot - more so than the last one (A Feast for Crows was great, just so very dark, and thus completely and utterly depressing), but I don't think it was as good as the first three books in the series, partly due to the way he structured the last two novels by only having certain characters in each novel (I know he had difficulties with this, and I forgive him, because the books are still gripping and well-written nonetheless). It is very cliff-hangery, which is cool, but now I'm worried that Martin won't get the next book in the series, The Winds of Winter, written and published next year as planned. All I want to say about this series really is that, if you haven't already read it, you should. I'm not really into fantasy (I'm a LOTR hater), but this series is really something special. The characters are complex, and the world Martin creates seems so real. And it is very, very readable. NB: The books are better than the TV series (which is still great, if a little gratuitous at times), but then I think that 99.9% of the time, of course.

And that's it so far. I started another novel today, but then fell asleep on the couch, which was bizarre and unprecedented, so I am wondering if maybe I will be switching to watching and reviewing films and TV series for my last few weeks of solitude...