Design For (Daily) Life

Thanks to today’s snow day I now have three solid weeks of holidays. This means for the first time in a really long time I don’t have to be in any specified place at a specified and unbendable time. For the next three weeks my time is very bendable. Hopefully I can re-adjust to this mode of living quite quickly and do lots of productive and fun things. Given that I had anticipated posting this blog about four hours ago, prior to spending the day cleaning, baking and decorating, and have spent that time chatting online, that challenge is likely to be a rather big one.

So I have been having some thoughts on the nature of time, fuelled in part by an email from Neil Strauss about his friendship with Timothy Ferriss, fuelled in part by reading What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami, and of course fuelled by the fact that I sort of feel as though I have been chasing my own tail since August 30^th or thereabouts. In the Neil Strauss mail he talks of himself and Ferriss bonding over the idea of life-hacking, that is, investigating how things really operate and consequently mastering your own reality rather than simply accepting the conventional way of living. This is referred to as ‘lifestyle design’. Murakami goes into great detail about his daily routine and also writes a little bit about the mental state one requires for certain things; in his case running and novel-writing. I’m only a few chapters in but I am loving this book for a number of reasons already:

1. I love the minutiae of daily life. I love reading and hearing about a day’s tiny details, whether that be a friend’s day or a total stranger’s is irrelevant to me, I just love hearing how people organise their time and their lives. And on a grander thought pattern it is perhaps the lesser mentioned details that are the most relatable and unifying.
2. I have notions and aspirations of both novel-writing and running so the subject matter naturally appeals to me.

“To keep on going you have to keep up the rhythm. This is the important thing for long-term projects. Once you set the pace, the rest will follow.” This is what Murakami reckons and I am inclined to agree. Setting the pace however is something I am finding a little difficult so I am asking to hear about people’s daily or weekly routines. How do you fit it all in? And when I saw ‘you’, I am not just asking my correspondent Anna, or other PGDE people that may be reading, I mean all manner of people juggling jobs, studies, offspring, partners, and ideas above their station.

This is how my day goes, in fantasyland:

I get up early and run for thirty minutes in Phoenix Park, followed by fifteen minutes of yoga, a hot shower and 15 minutes of unstimulated silent meditation. After this I have porridge with apple and seeds for breakfast and go to school/college. When I get home I cook dinner where the main ingredients consist of fish and green vegetables and while that is cooking I prepare a packed lunch for the next day. After dinner I spend a couple of hours studying, writing lesson plans and assignments. I might then watch an hour or so of television with my boyfriend and have a catch-up before doing two or three sun salutations and another fifteen minute meditation to prepare me for a restful sleep.

This sounds wonderfully holistic to me.

In reality this is what most of my weeks look like:

Monday night I regard as my weekend, so after getting off the bus from the midlands I cook dinner, bf then goes out to play football and I overindulge in as much trashy television and food as I see fit. This semester that has mainly consisted of The Apprentice followed by LA Ink accompanied by several cups of tea and biscuits. I go to bed around midnight. On college days I get up at about 8.15 and am in the car by 8.20 on a good day and 8.30 on a late day. I get out at Castleknock and take the 8.45 train to Maynooth. On late days I miss the train and stand in the cold until the 9.31 train arrives at about 9.40; late itself. And feel hard done by. On the walk from the train to college while ranting with Maria I pick up a soya latte at Illy’s, or the Mill Wine Cellar, to give it its actual name. It’s a café in an off licence – amazing.  At college I eat over-priced processed junk and sit in lectures all day. I get home at about 6 feeling generally exhausted and sometimes we do a Tesco shop and make dinner and sometimes we don’t and we order take-away instead. I try to get a decent amount of work done for Friday’s lessons by Wednesday night so I can print them on Thursday before getting a bus to the midlands for school the next morning. Friday night is officially take-away and TV night as by this stage I am pretty much too tired to talk. Most of the weekend is spent preparing lessons and doing assignment work whilst trying to catch up on laundry, food shopping etc. If I find time to socialise on a Saturday night I am still paying for it by Monday, in terms of post-hangover sleepiness.

Okay, so this may be a little TMI, and just because I love intricate details doesn’t mean anyone else does, but I am seeking to change the pattern to something healthier but ultimately sustainable, as the sustainability of any routine is the secret to its success.

How do you do it?

We Can Get Through This :-)

Well where to start?

Three posts since my last visit; under normal circumstances (i.e. if you were me) I would call that an ‘assignment avoidance strategy’, but knowing you (which I don’t very well) I suspect you may have those little things all wrapped up.

While I have this posted over my desk:

 

In terms of the CIQ, I would be interested in some student feedback, though I feel I can imagine exactly what their opinions would sound and look like having spent some time with them already; the power of teenagers’ body language may tell us all we need to know. I expect this is why the course throws us into our teaching placements at the very deep end so early on; as you say, the best way to put the theory to its best use is through practice. Experiential Learning ‘R’ We. It might be a nice exercise for the students’ own reflection to think over all that we have covered and uncovered in our lessons together though.

And if today’s lecture is anything to go by I guess the dogfooding is going to continue across all modules, but it seems to me its beneficiaries will be future PGDE students? I hadn’t heard that term until you posted it but it reminds me of Facebook’s Facebook page…I like this.

I was a long while away from being born when you wrote your last essay Anna! I am amazed. I don’t think you need to take any guidance from peers on the course though, as you say they/we are only guessing. More importantly though we can take guidance from our lecturers, they drop little nuggets all the time, hoover them up. And more significantly, it is they who are grading us.  February is very late for feedback since we leave on April 15^th but I suspect that if we were to meander down the wrong garden path altogether we would get a little word in our ear.

And may I say how very prophetic of you to post a Ken Robinson clip a mere two days before we get shown one in a lecture! Very inspiring stuff; both the content of the clip and your burgeoning telepathy. I do think the issues addressed in Robinson’s work are much more pertinent than Howard Gardner’s preoccupations, and to my mind they are both working from the same premise; that of the inadequacies of the traditional school system? As for what can be done, in the words of my SPHE lecturer when advising us to rebuke a student who pushes the boundaries a little too far “We are not going there today.”

 

Interesting things I have seen today:

#1 An article on the BBC magazine website about Irish migrants in the UK.

#2 An article in today’s Irish Times about homophobic bullying in schools. If anyone has this in hard copy could I get a copy please?

This also reminded me of BeLonG To Youth Services and I can’t recommend their pro website enough.

 

 

Interesting Video

 

 

Much like what we are being taught, presenting in a fabulous way. Good delivery, but scary – here we are as new teachers, about to head out to a system that is outdated, and not delivering what is needed  - and with an uncertain economic future. Can we do anything?

Feedback loop

Well, a little procrastination from the rigours of lesson plans and assignments.

I’m really enjoying dreating and delivering lessons, and (like with my kids), the students give me lots of valuable feedback on what works and what doesn’t. And my supervisor has been once, and will come again soon, and that feedback is fabulous.

 

However, with the assignments, I feel like I’m jumping into an abyss. I haven’t written an essay since my Leaving Cert in 1980.  Now I have written a lot since then, but in a work environment, where collaborative colleagues (or an interfering/supportive manager ) would iterate through any document several times, until we all felt that it was as good as can be. So I have confidence in my ability to express myself well, and to communicate my thoughts clearly, and that confidence derives from and is supported by team work. I’m fairly comfortable that my writing is adequate – blogging helps

However, I’m creating something personal and pretty important, and soon, I’ll proffer it to authourity figures, who have told me a lot about what they expect, and with guidelines about content and appearance. . But I’m a great believer in ‘proof of the pudding is in the eating’.  So I  don’t have a firm sense of what their reaction will be to my humble offering. I won’t know until I get the feedback in early February.  And then I’ll have to adjust/recalibrate as necessary.

Now, I can use my fellow students as reviewers, but they are in the same boat as me, only guessing.  It’s such a short course, and I really want to do well – I’d love if the feedback loop was a bit less chunky. Hard to do with 150 students, I guess, but not the ideal learning environment for me.

 

 

 

 

Disconnects & reconnects

Well, it’s not much of a conversation if you’re speaking to yourself….

I’ve been caught up with family, school, assignment writing, but stealing a moment to blog a bit.

So first off, maybe I’m cynical, or pragmatic, or beaten down by life, but I’m not having so hard a time reconciling the aspirational stuff being taught to us with the realities of day to day school life. That’s not to say I’m implementing everything I’m being shown,  but every Tuesday I come to college with real problems, and mostly I have an idea about a possible solutions by Thursday afternoon.

As for my fellow teachers, they are all very experienced. They are kind to me – a little like adults are kind to earnest and well behaved children. They give me advice when I ask for it – I’m not always able to use it , or in some cases even understand it, but that’s my lack, not theirs. And when I was an experienced, overworked, slightly jaded IT manager, I didn’t always share the enthusiasm of my new hires .

And a lot of this is about forging my own path. When I took my first child home from hospital, I had plenty of theory on parenting – and plenty of strong, fixed ideas. But my best training was delivered by my new born, generally at very inconvenient times. He taught me to be a parent, in a way that no book could – It’s a shame that I was so dense that he needed to resort to sleep deprivation.

I think that this journey is similar. We learn in the classrooms. The students will teach us – by learning and being engaged, or not.  Critical Reflection will help us realise what they are trying to teach us. As will our peers and reading literature. But in the end there’s no replacement for experience.

Now, I have a question for you. Brookfield writes very eloquently about a Critical Incident Questionnaire (CIQ). It’s a way to give students the opportunity to let you know what they think of your teaching, a great way to get input for reflective practice.

Here’s some info if you haven’t read Brookfield. (yet )

Has anyone used anything like this in class? I’m planning to…

And (perhaps more controversially) should our teachers be asking us? Angela has asked us a few times, and Catriona asked us today, but no one else seems to be dogfooding. Or did I miss it?

What do you think?

Fighting the Good Fight

We’re about two months in now so we are getting well into the routines and rhythms of school life and the school year. Among the challenges facing myself (and I certainly hope my classmates too) are the realities of life in our schools, not just in our classrooms but in our staffrooms too. I detect there may be a growing concern that there is a great disparity between the things we are being encouraged to practice in our teaching by the Dept of Education at NUIM and the reality of school life. I could likely rant on for hours and paragraphs with my own examples of occurrences that support this idea but I won’t go there. I will say however that some of the things being felt at the grassroots level within the education system are a generally derogatory attitude towards our course, and with that a certain level of impatience for or lack of interest in some of the things we as students are being encouraged to implement.

Have many people experienced that same sensation and is there a risk of these kind of situations creating a bit of low morale? I would like to add at this point that this is not an attack on my staffroom, rather an impression I am getting when coming out of lectures and discussing the realities of what we have just been listening to.

It has been pointed out to me that this is part and parcel of the transition into professional life; we all have idealised expectations about our chosen profession, whether we realise it or not, so the reality is likely to throw us some surprises that we couldn’t have anticipated without having a foot in the door previous.

The way I see it currently we can go one of two ways, we can go the way most drivers tend to go once they pass their driving test; go back to driving how they want to, without much regard for safety or correct procedure; i.e. we could get a job and plug away and forget everything we are being taught in university, or we can go the same route my old class were advised to in IADT by Dr. Gilligan when being reminded of the importance of being hardened ardent feminists, and “fight the good fight”.

Hello world!

Here’s a conversation between 2 student teachers, learning to be teachers at NUIM. Please join in!