Now I've gone and lost my voice!

The therapeutic suggestion so far is... Gin.

Any advance on gin?

Aww.

Played my Year 9s an Italian pop song the other day to try and combat a year of in silenzio, grazie. One of my favourite songs for getting caught mid-flow at the traffic lights by the fabulous Alex Britti all about wanting to spend all day in the bath, and so was feeling very protective of it. Seemed to go down OK, one kid thought it was silly (it is). Arrived in class today to requests for an encore, and one kid had downloaded it and managed to translate half the words. Aww.

This made me smile again...

This is the information desk at the hospital :)

Alright, you fat fuck.

I'm not under any illusions about how my subject area is regarded in this country. Despite this veneer of pride in our supposed multiculturalism - HA! - the majority of native Australians remain steadfastly, stubbornly monolingual, and the height of linguistic prowess is all too often considered to be the ability to say 'Voila' and not spell it 'Viola'. (Right, Bern, Gayle?)

So I know that the other teachers have no idea what I do. I was at university a year and a half longer to be able to do it, but still I can cope with professional development days where LOTE is considered to have been dealt with in depth by the suggestion we cook pizza with the kids. Everything you do as a department I can do on my own. I have to interpret the syllabus and write my own assessment items, criteria sheets, units and work programs. The textbooks available here for language teaching are so appalling I end up making most of my resources too.

I will do all of this without their support because the kids that push through everyone else's discouragement and choose to learn another language are worth their weight in gold, and in my own small way I am helping to make this compartmentalised world a little more open.

So this is all I ask of you, my head of department. Do you think you could wait unti' I'm out of the room until you start bagging my job? If you're going to bitch to my colleagues, one of the other LOTE teachers, no less, about the complete redundancy of my efforts, how you don't want your daughter studying another language, could you not do it when I'm sitting next to you in a meeting? I don't expect you to recognise me as one of your charges - after all, I've only worked in the classroom next to your office for a month now - but it would seem that I have more professionalism in my two front teeth than you have in that enormous gut of yours. Just you fucking watch me run rings around you, you waste of space.

And you, Billy Connolly.

It's a particularly devastating kind of frustration, and it hits after you've spent hours working steadily towards something only to be irretrievably foiled at the last minute by your own carelessness. If you have ever attended a university you know what I mean. This is what happens with the assignment that's finally finished at 3:00am. As your cursor wriggles ecstatically towards the print button Word, having functioned flawlessly for nearly 12 hours, suddenly loses the will to live and performs an illegal operation to get it all over and done with. Your whole 3,000 words (and now you realise, of course, that never had you written so fluidly, so intelligently in all your life) has been reduced to a pile of 1s and 0s in the bottom of some random and unreachable binary bin. But that's OK, isn't it? In between making cups of coffee, animating the Word Assistant and running the word count, every 15 minutes you've been diligently making backup copies of your genius, haven't you?

OF COURSE YOU BLOODY HAVEN'T.

This thing needs a name, and I've decided to call it 'an attack of McGinty'.

Allow me to explain. I spent most of last night loading tracks onto the mp3 player I've bought for my dad, who's about to have the dubious privilege of spending a week face down in a hospital bed while his kidneys get over being sliced open. Not having one of these deelies of my own, I was very proud of the progress I was making, and even more impressed with my antique laptop for standing up to the strain. 173 files in, however, I noticed I'd misnamed Billy Connolly's song about a train ride. Well, that was easily fixed. All I had to do was right-click on it, type in the new name...and watch in horror as ALL 173 FILES RENAMED THEMSELVES 'MCGINTY'. And that includes, ladies and gentlemen, all the config sys files that make the little sod work.

One of the essential parts of the attack of McGinty is the ridiculous silent angry dance you do around the room after you realise the extent of the damage. I didn't let you down. It took another two hours to go back, listen to the first few seconds of each song and manually type in its correct name and another hour of searching on the Net to get my device drivers back. And the nail in the coffin... Well, you've guessed, haven't you? The bloody song isn't even CALLED McGinty!

How I Miss You

Caught myself mid-lyric in the car this morning realising why I wasn't toasty enough. I do hope you realise that I can't point the heater vents at me because you were the last thing they kept warm : )

Keep yourself safe, now.

Questions Not to Ask the New Teacher

Is Mrs Thing in this staffroom?
Aren't you supposed to be on playground duty?
When does this lesson end?
You all set for the gala expo this afternoon?
Haven't you gone home yet?
Oh, no, do we have you for English?
How's that senior work program going?

: )

But you can always ask this one! (God bless 8E, the joy of Wednesday.)

Miss, how come it works like that?

# I Remember You-ou... #

Oh, I've been here before. There's a nasty glint of defiance in her eyes, and I know this could be about to turn ugly. I must keep the tremor from my voice.
I must not, must not back down now. The mobile phone is hers. She made her friend ask for it back to avoid punishment.
I have followed procedure. I warned them I would, so now I am going to take the phone away.
Following through looks and feels messy. Do it anyway. Make it happen NOW.

In Italian, and in other Romance languages, when you're talking about grammatical gender it only takes one masculine object in a group of feminine ones to turn the group on its head. Put one masculine thing in with a bunch of feminine ones and the whole damn lot becomes masculine.

A similar thing can happen at school. By and large, the kids here are a good bunch. I was mildly amused to make it through the first day without being told to fuck off. A week and a half later that still hasn't happened, and I can't believe my luck. Perhaps these places aren't all the same after all. I did a LISTENING activity with Year 9, for crying out loud! Occasionally a little voice will even break through the 1812 Overture-type clamour of last lesson with Year 8. I like her. She's nice.

Well, I like you too.

But this one is going to undo 209 students worth of good work. This morning I bounced along the corridors, tossing out ciaos like Smarties and grinning like an idiot at children I'm not even sure I teach. Now I'm going to sneak into the staff meeting through a side door and hope to God no-one asks me to introduce myself. I'm Trout, and I'm crap at this. I may have done the right thing by the book, but still I'm going to drive home with the radio off and crawl into bed not sure if I'm up to this at all. It only takes one.

But this she must not know. Make it happen NOW. She's making the sorry face, but in 30 seconds I'll be 'such a bitch' as she walks home with her friends. I take the phone that they planted in the bookshelf and made ring until I found it halfway through the class and take it to the office. Learning how to do this again starts NOW.