My ruminations from the world of Dip Ed

Right there - I’m recovering from a massive workout and am now installed in the Northcote library.  I don’t have my Inclusive Ed (the Caring Cowboy) book with me, so will work from the exam questions and whatever I can find online. I’ve just finished answering emails from my EDSP380 tute group and they seem like a nice bunch of people.  Today I’m off to meet Cindy, who is hopefully the student I’ll be studying for my ESL subject.

all is good. On a personal note, I’m taking two weeks off working out to give my aged body a much needed rest. I’ll have to be careful about what I eat while I’m not exercising

drawn here again by a comment, this time not spam!! I  meet the student I have to study for ESL tomorrow. My other challenges are making a unit of work (five hours, which I’ll base on my actual work) and keeping the inclusive ed stuff in my mind until the test.

…is how I feel - got an Inclusive Education test coming up and have just finished an assignment….late, so I’m praying it juuust passes. Now I’m about to type up some minutes for work, then get studying on the test.

those of my audience who are religious are invited to pray for me

I got an actual comment, from a nice person who knows about spam, is about to turn 45 and is NOT trying to sell me second hand cards or pictures of famous people without clothes on.  WOnders will never cease.

I got a credit for the last assignment, am racing to finish the next one and fearing the test.

How do I know that these things are true?  Well, I know the spam is getting smarter because I got some kind of spam-filtering device put on by the nice people at UNE and for some time there was no spam at all.  Now there are two German language spam emails on my account at une and one spammy message waiting for me in the comments here.  this worries me - are my filtering efforts just educating spam software until it becomes like the machine that ran theworld in The Matrix?

I know I’;m getting older because I had a birthday party yesterday and am now 46, where I was once 45.  I didn’t mind 45 and could have done that for much longer.  Now I don’t feel that I have the seriousness required for 46, nor the long list of achievements.  On the credit side, I had a great birthday party and I’m looking pretty good at the gym.  I’m on my way to my ideal weight which is 74 - 76 kilos.  This next five weeks the target is to get down to 77.80, one kilo less than my weight at the end of the last 5 week period  (my work operates in 5 week cycles, so I’m starting to think in 5 week lots).

S tudy wise, this is the week for doing the next esl assignment - 3000 words of linguistic analysis.  But first I must have lunch, drive to work and do my IELTS reaccreditation and clean my desk. We’ll see, but I WILL get some done today.

yours undistractibly,

Floyd

….which is what Japanese people do when they are lifting a heavy weight or are about to. Which is how I feel. Two assignments finished, both late, and another one to do.  Yosh!  After the two assignments (which I can only pray I passed) I took a vow - this doing things as the last minute must end, it’s just too painful  So, how to change from how I am now, to how I want to be?  Send answers on a postcard please.

Anyway, this week, I’ve knocked back a free night at the theatre - that’s something.

My next assignments is 3000 words of analysis of a student’s work, so I’ve borrowed a grammar book from someone at work.  I get a week off from work soon, which means that I get no money, but I get time to study, the better to get a job that doesn’t have so many unpaid holidays.

yosh!

…because I don’t get any more spam. Consequently, I had to remember to search for the blog, then sign in to it. Anyway, I was really, really, really, jack of the spam, so that’s a good thing.

Today, after some virtuous procrastination*, I’m back on the ESL essay - I want to make some headway there. The only pain is that I’ve hit the dippy-dopey part of Brown’s textbook, in which he describes different aspects of the ESL classroom, lesson etc in very general terms. I’m very familiar with the ESL classroom and don’t need to be told to make it interesting, or that our job as teachers is to help students challenge any oppressive structures they may encounter in society or elsewhere in their lives.  I’m all for people not being oppressed, but the vague, predigested nature of Brown’s comments on this get on my wick. Am I supposed to help students overthrow the ANZUS treaty? Perhaps I should be helping the Chinese ones overcome censorship and state brutality, in which case I could really really use some help from Brown on how to do this. Perhaps I could just make a little announcement in each class about the forms of oppression faced in each country…..do China on Monday, Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, Vietnam on Wednesday and so on until I’d covered all of them. The only problem with that is that I’d probably be unemployed by Thursday at the latest, which I’d find oppressive.

I had enough of this lazy, thoughtless crap earlier on in the Dip Ed. I’m a lefty myself and am alive to the various forms of oppression operating (sexism, racism, the United States, government as practiced by China, Rupert Murdoch….to name but a few), but the lazy way it’s dished out annoys me.  Grrr - Brown can and has done better.  Anyway, now back to study,

yours wearing the lucky headband of studiousness,

Floyd

Right now, I’m wearing my Yushima Tenjin headband. I’ve discovered that it says ‘I will smash through the entrance examination’ - not entirely apt, but I don’t think they make an “I will smash throught the Diploma of Education at Univestiy of New England Armidale’ headband. Anyway, in the interests of smashing through, I’ve registered to a de-spamming service called ‘API Key’ - we’ll see if that gets me anywhere.  My next action is to look at the ESL assignment and make a rough plan, so my reading starts going somewhere - at the moment it’s too vague.

If I can post a headband wearing pic from the ASUS eeepc, I’ll do so.
in non diped news, I’m reading The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens and good stuff they are too. The jokes are corny and slowly set up, but very funny, besides which the book’s so old, I think it might be the first time those jokes were made

resisting ’sexchoolonline’ (which sounds like kind of fun), getting ready for work and thinking about a day of study tomorrow. Plan: drive down to the Brighton Library with my books and laptop, work equally on TESOL and Special Ed, bonus, treat self to coffee before the library opens and pick up a Shakespeare CD (Brighton library has all Shakespeare plays on CD).

So that’s it - how’s your long weekend looking?

S till on my Ennis/Pindar frenzy; just finished ’streets of Laredo’ which is corny as hell, but fun and beautifully illustrated. Odeswise, Pindar is the usual mix of well-written sucking up to his sponsors and concise versions of myths

grggh because:

a) there are two noisy teenagers studying together near me in the library - shut up or go and get a room, is my feeling. It’s too bad we don’t have love hotels in this country

b) I’m way later than I wanted to be because I was charging up my lovely asus eee.

c)I’ve really had enough of the s

well, other than that, it’s a triumph! I’m here, I’ve got the books and I can use the wireless thanks to the nice librarian called Libby