Airport Anxieties

Well! It has been a long time since I took a transatlantic flight. Nigh-on three years in fact and in that time, this lovely face has been sorely missed:

Joyously, the reason for my space-time journey (leave at 7:15pm, arrive at 9:30pm despite spending 7 hours on a plane? Go figure, guys!) is the happy union of hearts and minds between one of my most loyal blog-reading fans and her bow-tie toting beau which has been a long time coming and a much anticipated event. 

I'll tell you what, though, blog readers: leaving school on a Friday, travelling to the airport and taking a flight in the UK is a hundred billion times more stressful than leaving school, donning a trusty rucksack, zipping along on Little Moto and waiting for your name to be called out whilst you sup wine casually at the FinBar at Tan Son Nhat!  Indulge me whilst I list all the stressful comparisons:

1. In Vietnam it costs me no pence to get to the airport on Little Moto other than 50p for three days parking. In the UK, it costs £42.20 in a taxi because there is NO TIME for public transport. WOW. There's cost of living for you

2. In Vietnam, I basically carried my passport around with me like a set of keys. In the UK, I wake up at 6:30am on the morning of my flight and it is only at this point that I reflect upon the fact that a passport might be helpful and begin to wonder where it is. 

3. In the UK, i am preoccupied by a million things and so walk out of the house and get half way down the street before realising that I have left my suitcase in my bedroom and it is not until I am being charged a penalty fare on the tram that I realise my tea is still brewing in my thermos flask in the kitchen. Boo. 

4. At Heathrow, as at Changi, they play that game of putting you in a lottery named 'Flight Overbooked' to see if you will win a seat on the flight you have already paid to be on. Stony face. Why do they do this? It is in no way amusing or fun. 

On the plus side, my anxiety surrounding missing this very important flight was calmed by a 75 minute key note speech by David Crystal at today's fun school INSET. COOOOOOL. Grammar nerds, don't pretend you ain't jealous. This is grammar celebrity GOLD. 

I did not get a selfie. Lame. This is because I had not managed to get coffee beforehand (remember the abandoned flask of earl grey) and so raced to be at the front of the queue at break time. Crystal schmystal. I needed caffeine!

Now, after all this, you may be thinking, 'Did she make it to the airport in time?  Or was she too busy drinking coffee with David Crystal and chatting breeze about semantics and pragmatics?'  Of course I made the flight, sillies, and I even poo-pooed the lovely Heather's suggestion at 6:15pm that we make our way to the gate. "Have they called our names on the tannoy, Heather?" I asked, seasoned traveller that I am. "They are not really taking off until they call our name on the tannoy and a man runs up to us with a sign. This is how airports work. We only pay our red wine bill when our escort appears!"

Alas, Heather is not a veteran like me and insisted we make our way to our departure gate where we ended up queuing - yes, queueing! - for at least three minutes and we had to find said gate all by ourselves with no-one hurrying us along in politely irate tones. Kuh! This is not how I roll. 

Once on the flight, I discovered this:

WOW. A thing of beauty is indeed a joy forever and has allowed me to update you with all my goings on because hey, guys, an iPhone is not like a writing pad: it has a battery that runs out which is uber rubbish and the magic of 4G only just makes up for it.

Now. We are about to land in a frozen world of snow so I will post pics of igloos and me dying of pneumonia in a wedding outfit and inappropriate coat very soon. The pilot has just announced that it is -11 degrees centigrade. I didn't even know that this temperature existed in a place that human beings lived. In the words of Lawrence Oates: 'I'm just going out. I may be some time.'

The Most Famous Cliffs in All of England

This weekend I decided to take Frenchie on a Great British Adventure.  Luring him with the promises of some 'really impressive bitches', I piled him into a hire car with a thermos of tea and some Lindt chocolate for the journey and whizzed out of London - poop poop! - to the East Sussex Heritage Coast.

The actual motivation behind the weekend was to celebrate the temporary return of the lovely Karin Jose, visiting Brighton on a sojourn from her normally steamy Philippines but I thought, why not enjoy some of what this lovely country has to offer whilst we're at it?  Coincidentally, I have also been reading 'James and the Giant Peach' with my year 7s at school and if you know this delightful book, you may remember that at one point, the enormous peach rolls down a very steep hill leaving destruction and a flooding chocolate factory in its path, as well as two squished villain aunts, before leaping to freedom over the side of a very tall, very white cliff into the ocean, where it bobs around before getting chomped on by sharks.  This is where we are up to in the story and we are all having a rompingly good time with it so far, in true Roald Dahl fashion.

Imagine my lightbulb moment, therefore, when I realised that my lesson on writing a post card from inside the peach coincided exactly with my very own holiday to a white-cliff'd coastline!  When I tell them, year 7 will literally think I planned it this way because I have no life other than to serve their educational needs, but really, I am still uber cool and have my own life, and this was just chance good luck!

So, where were we.  Oh yes, zooming down an A road with Frenchie peering suspiciously at the sky wondering why it was so blue in England in January when actually he had heard from very reliable sources that the sky remains a constant middle-grey tone for 97.4% of the year (his sources are very precise, but apparently not accurate).  There was a moment of struggle when the little put-put car wasn't sure if it was going to make it up one of the South Downs, but when we topped the 'up' and began our ascent, I obviously broke into jubilant strands of 'Jerusalem' at this very green and pleasant view:

At this point, after asking for an exact definition of 'pleasant' (lovely, agreeable, nice) Frenchie McFrencherson decided to scoff quietly and ask me if 'green and pleasant' was really something to become patriotic about, whereupon I assured him that, yes, it was.  That's what it is to be British, sometimes, I insisted, and what better way to be than green and pleasant.  If more people were green and pleasant then we would have less need for swords of burning gold and arrows of desire and more time for pleasant pastures and mills and lambs of God and stuff.

When we finally arrived and drove the car into a National Trust bollard (oops), we were greeted with a whole array of bearded, dog owning, wooly jumper wearing Roald Dahl characters in the NT Cafe and a car that was surely straight out of one of his short stories.  I'm thinking 'The Hitchhiker' - thoughts?

Very quickly, as we huffed and puffed up pne of the Downs' 'ups', Frenchie quickly decided that the British landscape is not actually flat, but rolling, as I have told him many times, and in fact there was 'a certain magnificence' about the coast and the light, and that we must go and see the film 'Turner' at once.  Now I'm quite okay with 'green and pleasant', but I'm not going to refuse a 'magnificence' when it's offered.

Very pleasant, I think you'll agree!

We continued the weekend in the marshland around The Seven Sisters park, reminiscent of another Roald Dahl short story - a sad one about two bullies and a swan - and as we drank tea in quaint villages, squelched through the mud by the river and stuffed ourselves full of roast dinner in a traditional pub overlooking the estuary, Frenchie could even be overheard mumbling that the walk had been 'beautiful' and the village of Alfriston 'quite pretty'.

Obviously, I did not show my delight at his conversion to walks in the British winter countryside, but obviously, I've had to transfer my smug excitement to a blog entry to save myself from exploding with Jerusalem Joy.  And did the HOly lamb of GOD in ENGland's PLEASent PAStures SOMETHING?!  Yes.  I think He did.

I came home to discover that 'James and the Giant Peach' is probably actually set in Dover, and Beachy Head is not 'The Most Famous Cliff in All of England', but I'm not convinced my students will question this, and I, for one, am not interested in being the bearer of factual information.  There's no place for that in my classroom: only interpretation, opinion and your own special angle on life.  Or rather, my own special angle on life.

Tara for now.  The next blog should be coming to you from a very cold, but very romantic Salem, MA, US of A!

Frosty

Now, listen, Vietnam. I am not one to put others down. I don't like to brag at the detriment of a person or a country's feelings or self esteem. You've got all the right rain in all the right places and you are da bomb at steamy humidity and hot, hot sun. Your undergrowth is lush and jungly and let's not even start on your deltas and swamp land. Mwa!  Magnifique!  It is the best not to need an alarm because you'll be woken up at 5:45am (just in time for work) even on weekends by the natural sunshine pouring in through your windows and oh, the sense of freedom to commute amongst hordes of beeping mopeds and families lodged together on bikes or even those quiet mornings when you can zip down the highway at 60kph because no one else is up yet. Yes, yes, Vietnam: you got dat covered. 

But let's just do some cultural sharing for a sec. Vietnam, I introduce to you the Frosty Morning Walk to School (no a sweat included):

The kids at school say to me (best saaaf London accent please), "Miss why are you so cheerful in da mornin'?" And I say (in Joanna Lumley tones) "Because of the beauty, darlings!  Because of the beauty! And also coffee."

So, soz, Vietnam. It's mean to create a competition with something you can only achieve in your northernmost mountainous regions, namely temperatures below 20 degrees but on this occasion, I'm afraid the UK wins 

Wimblingdon

Gosh, the posts are coming thick and fast all of a sudden, are they not?

Here, just in case you have always lived in tropical climes and consider the following 'exotic','foreign' and 'different' or have lived in tropical climes too long and have an urge to feel a wrenching longing for the British countryside, are some pictures of the rather lovely Wimbledon Common that Frenchie and I have adopted as our back yard:

And here are some miracle Jesus birds walking on water.  That's just how we grow them in Wimbledon: miraculously. 

 

Mmm. Ice, mud, long winter grass, puddles and low-lying cloud. Don't get much more exotic than that!

I'm Dreaming of a French Christmas

So. Hello again. Here is a cultural-come-teacher post all about the importance of literacy. Don't worry: there are some photos and amusing bits and a lengthy exposition about Christmas. 

So.  Some time ago I married a rather lovely French expat man who recently agreed to continue his international adventure on the other side of the world in jolly old England, taking on once again cultures and customs not his own in the spirit of global exploration.  He is wonderfully good at assimilating and is practicing with pleasure the very British art of complaining about the weather, listening to Radio 4 and delighting in London's green spaces and Sunday morning walks. He still hasn't proclaimed his allegiance to dear Queenie, isn't yet convinced that the NHS really is free, and prefers a coffee to an Earl Grey but at least he's ordered his My Waitrose card to get said coffee for free from one of our most loved national treasures.

Such daily adherence to my culture comes with the agreement that major holidays be spent bathing in his culture in the busom of his family in the south of France, nestled in foie gras, champagne, nespresso machines and babies. Lots and lots of petit filou-type francophone adorable babies. It's hard, I know, but these are the sacrifices one makes for one's husband. 

Now, despite many travel adventures over the last ten years (so old) or so, this was my first Christmas spent away from Chez Shep where, obviously, we do Christmas The Shep Way or, as some people have come to think of it: The Right Way. Other ways of doing Christmas are of course The Wrong Way, The Hoi An Way and the French Way.

The French Way, like an unreasearched visit to Australia, is strangely similar but by no means in any way the same as The Shep Way, thus I spent this festive season floating through a blue and white striped, onion-garlanded twilight zone of Christmas playing 'spot the difference', 'spot the equivalent' and 'don't get upset that they don't understand that it's not done this way'.  Whilst practicing the tolerance and open-mindedness typical of my long-and-proud-history-of-colonisation mother nation, I observed and recorded some rather curious and peculiar rituals performed by these dark and swarthy peoples across the Channel or the 'Manche' as they like to incorrectly call it:

1. They put shoes under the tree for Père Noel to fill, but no sign of a stocking. Similar, but weird. 

Poor petit filou inherited niece #1, the only one capable of speech, and the only French family member speaking a similar standard of French as moi was very upset when she saw my enormous boots on the left because, even though she is only three, she is intelligent enough to note that I have abnormally large feet, even for an adult, and thus would be receiving an inordinate number of presents that far outnumbered the volume capable of fitting in her own tiny booties. Too bad, petit enfant: Père Nöel favours the outsized and galumphing. 

2. Having fairy lights on the Christmas tree just isn't a thing. Everyone looked at me politely when I described it. That was all. I have no picture of the naked tree because what would be the point?

3. All dessert is frozen and in winter landscape form. 

Wow!  The French are so proud of their natural contours that they immortalise them in cream and chocolate. And then they devour and conquer. Gosh. 

4. In France, on Christmas Day, you don't eat until you want to be sick but pass out over a game of Scrabble still cradling a warming glass of Baileys, the only one you will drink all year before waking up with tiles worthy of a triple word score stuck to your face. It's just not good manners, apparently. There was also a sad absence of potatoes. 

5. On the 27th December, in France, one sits outside on the terrace in sunglasses without protective clothing to ward off pneumonia. I kid you not. I got a tan on my face. 

One of my more profound and serious reflections from this holiday period though only came to me when I counted the number of entirely bizarre and uncontextualised statements I made in the presence of my family-in-law that read more like Berlin speakeasy passwords circa 1934 rather than the conversation starters they were intended to be. Allow me to offer a few examples and please remember that nobody listening had any idea what on earth I was talking about:

"The cat arrives on Friday."

"Where is your sesame?"

"It is not far for her to reach, the floor."

...?  Entirely unfathomable.  The majority of my functioning conversation was with my three year old petit filou niece in law who, when crouching down in the middle of the town square and squealing 'pee pee!', was communicating on approximately the same level as me. Having said that, she is quite articulate and berated me a number of time for reading her stories wrong. Mais non, Emma!  C'est un lionceau!

Lion cub, apparently. Who knew?

Anyway, a week after the grammatically incorrect festival that was Christmas at the in laws, I returned to work for the first time in six months in an 'up and coming' Greater London school.  In my first week back I met lots of lovely students and was reminded of the crippling impact of poor literacy and after my beautiful francophone Christmas, dear me, am I beginning to empathise however, poor literacy is not about speaking English or another language well, so in fact, I'm lying, I can't empathise at all - I am super duper literate in English, I just appear to be some form of weird dream manifestation in French, floating around saying random things that are tediously linked to a conversation you vaguely remember having three days ago. Cat? What sesame cat?

Literacy is about communicating and making sense of the world in which you live through some tool of communication be it writing, speaking, sign language, listening, reading - whatever.  And in communicating your experience, you create and develop your experience.  Imagine if my only experience of the world was sitting mutely at a dinner table with nine other people, unable to ever take part, smiling politely before growing bored and distracted, offering to clear plates because at least that is a way of having purpose but really sitting there feeling worthless because I can't understand, or I can understand but can't contribute and making a meaningful verbal connection with me is so much effort that nobody bothers. This is the worst scenario of my francophone experience but for some children, a lesser version of this is every day in the classroom and if it's every day in the classroom, the likelihood is that they are then opting out of experiences that require a literacy that they do not possess: watching the news, reading a book, writing coursework, filling in important forms, accessing higher education, engaging with politics, expressing complex emotions, visiting museums and galleries, reading about other cultures...

Low literacy really is rubbish. Boo. 

So that's about it, really. But if that's all a bit depressing, here's some positive ideas:

1. If you have a child, read with them. 

2. If your partner speaks a different language to them, read in both languages!

3. If you teach kids with low literacy, get into Accelerated Reader. 

4. If you teach in London, ask me about all the great training that Teach First does!

5. Watch this video: Ed Sheeran reminds us that there are lots of ways to communicate: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXvzzTICvJs

That is all. 

The Other Side

Well, everyone. Despite the implication of the blog silence, life has not been dull this last month or so. It has been a November packed with house moving, fireworks at Gothic castles, lovers' reunions in Paris and afternoon strolls around Wimbledon Common. Delightful, and all very blogworthy. 

However, none of this moved me seriously to blog (I mean, Horace Walpole's House after hours, prancing around on the turrets and in low lit libraries with a glass of mulled wine in hand. Yawn, frankly. I wouldn't want to bore you). What did catch my fancy last night was the scientifically monumental realisation on the bus home at 11pm that I have achieved a feat mad professors have been working at for hundreds of years: I have travelled back in time. It's true.  Quite precisely, I have travelled back to that time that may be familiar to some of us, circa 2006-2009 when life was made up of London, night buses, waitressing and temp work with the happy understanding that it all served a greater purpose (at the time, books; now, survival until the Real Job begins). 

What is fascinating about travelling back to such a time period is that you experience things that you would otherwise never have chosen to, and it's educationally enlightening in many ways. For example, I have spent the last five days marking year 7 Maths tests and KS3 Reading and Spelling tests for an education company who of course, will remain anonymous.  Whilst I have been responsible for all 60 spellings and all 60 reading questions on all 500 papers (how many questions did Emma mark in total?  Ans = ...), it was only necessary for me to mark questions 3, 17 and 18, 3, 17 and 18 over and over and over again 3,000 - 4,000 times on the Maths papers, during which time I have learnt the following things:

1. Rules and uniformity are really important to standardised testing, but really, bureaucracy is stupid. A child, who does this, for example, gets 1 mark for a correct method, even though they are a moron who can't multiply by 100:

A child who considers it beneath them, aged 11, to demonstrate to an examiner they they know how to multiply by 100 because now they are in secondary school and really, shouldn't they know that by now, will also only get one mark for a correct answer because they have only shown 'part working' and thus their method is considered incomplete.  It feels injust but I'm pretty sure you don't get marks for trying in Life so Child #2 should win out in the end. 

3. I am not the only child who struggled with Maths at school, but number-blind children seem to be much more polite about it nowadays than I ever was:

I totally get what this guy's going through:

And I feel that this child already understands how life works:

3. The District Line makes no sense. But at least they have retro signs. 

4. 2000/ 250 = 8

    8 - 6 = 2

    2 x 250 = 500 

Is the same Maths as...

    6 x 250 = 1500

    2000 - 1500 = 500

Who knew?

5. Images are not always helpful:

This took us a little while to figure out...

6. Poor spelling is hilarious when you read it out loud phonetically in a silent library in a half whisper to your entirely unsympathetic husband, but really, life must be just so confusing for some children: 

7. England is cold, but sometimes freezing early mornings are worth it:

8.  Erroneous. Abscess. Eligible. Precocious.  Allegiance. Who knew they were spelt this way?  Huh!  Not me, the English teacher. 

9. Admitting you don't know how to spell 'mischief' but acknowledging that your iPhone does is humbling. As is remarking and re-entering the data for the 120 tests you marked down for spelling this word 'wrong'. 

As well as the repetitive hysteria of marking thousands and thousands of papers outside my subject area and repressing panic when children use alternative and valid mathematical methods not included on the mark scheme, or in my realm of understanding, I have also been waitressing. This is how I roll in 2006-9.

Last night I waitressed for a lovely South Kensington home-hosted company Christmas drinks for the American expat CEO of a big company that did something with money. Throughout the evening I learnt that his children were quite lovely, if a little overexcited, I met the Filipina nanny and the German au pair and was amused that I counted, for this evening as 'The Staff' and that the mother spent her whole childhood as an expat in Manila and her American accent was not real, but the international school accent that many of us know and love, as long as it's not whining at us at 7:50am.  Miiiissss Shepppppaaaaaaarrrrrdddd?

We got chatting about Asia, obvs, and we totes had an expat affinity and then I watched the whole evening full of intelligent, monied, well-dressed, high-powered people from the other side of the bar feeling slightly surreal that only a few months ago, our enormous, maid-maintained house in Singapore was also paid for by the company, as well as my second home, the bijou apartment in Saigon. 'Oh how the mighty have fallen,' I feel obliged to say, but you know, it was really lots of fun having a sort of external view of this world, remembering my despair at the prospect of being a trailing spouse in Singapore and hysteria at having no pressing reason to get up in the morning.  

I especially enjoyed a gentle reminder that there is still a British class boundary that even the most exciting expatting will not diminish. It's easy to forget, when abroad and all jumbled up with everyone else, sort of like soldiers were in the trenches, your proper place in the natural order of things, but conversations like this help me to remember that if there's a percentile, I'm really not in the upper realms of it and probably never will be because neither my parents nor I inherited a title and I went to a school, lower case, rather than a School, one of select few, upper case:

Lady: (after amusing bants about American phrasing) Gosh, you are funny. Were you at Girton?

Me: ... What is 'Girton'?

Lady: ... Oh. 

If you don't find that amusing, then welcome to the ignorant, but striving middle classes.  I managed to continue the bants for some time after the crushing realisation that the amusing waitress really was one of the Staff thanks to the witty power of high brow innuendo and shared appreciation of the feminist cause, but the Lady was clearly saddened by the fact that we would never really be friends, not truly, and, like Mr Wickham, returned to her posh colleagues and pretended not to know me when I came back to top up her champagne. Oh the sting. 

Sigh. Anyway, next on the agenda: getting festive in France (featuring ovary-aching new additions to Frenchie's famille that I will squeeze.  Yum!) and my first day at the Big New Academy. Actually medium sized but it's important to my ego that I continue to impress and inspire my blog fans...

London! We Could Go There One Day!

Right. If you have a 'real' job in an exciting city - London, say - and you have a sibling who spends their life doing 'fun' things like prancing around dressed as a bookshelf or teaching young people about phallic imagery then I entreat you to run a 'Bring Your Sibling to Work Week' as my sister has done. Check out how awesome the real world is:

On Day 1, between Royal Mail coffee cups, dearest sister suggested I use my lunch break to explore the local surroundings. Oh. Okay. Sure. 

WOW. 

On Day 2, amongst the phone calls and operating the oldest working lift in London, sister suggested I move to the rooftop fire escape to get a better view of the soldiers in the courtyard outside who had been entertaining us all day with their drums and marching and shuffling and chinooks. 

Second from the left in the front row is looking the wrong way. Naughty. 

The roof was also good for pretending that I was Dick van Dyke in 'Mary Poppins'. 

 And for conquering my fear of heights. 

AMAZING!

On Day 3, before we even thought of running out for milk or replenishing the coffee cups, sister suggested a rave. At 6:30am. With the lights on. And no alcohol. 

It was IMMENSE. And also very sweaty. 

Strangely, despite the fact that I have genetically 80s hair and uncannily orangutan-like dance moves, I have never been to a rave and thus was very worried about not having an appropriate rave outfit but luckily, I was staying the night with my friend Chandni who, upon hearing the word 'morning rave', nodded sagely and started rummaging around in her wardrobe, pulling out items that became this most rave-worthy outfit:

YES. Never have I felt more appropriately dressed. Think early morning rave, think leggings and sparkly crop tops.

On Day 4, the weather perked up again and since I was tired after all the raving, I spent my lunch time in the absolutely gorgeous St Dunstan in the East park, which looks like something out of a post-apocalyptic film where nature has taken over civilisation, which in some ways is true because the church was bombed in WW2 but instead of rebuilding, the Parks and Gardens people created this space in 1964. 

 

It is very peaceful here so if you work in the city, I highly recommend it for a relaxing lunch time experience. 

On day 5, it was obviously Halloween and the UK seems to be taking this far more seriously than I ever remember it, which is saying something considering I lived a year of my life with an American from Salem, MA, where they take Halloween very seriously. It turns out that in the world of real people with real jobs, craft skills are as necessary as they are in teaching, and I watched on in admiration as my sister carved this wonderfully frightening creature to sit below my Halloween lilies:

The slightly sad thing in the bottom right hand corner is my attempt at a paper bag pumpkin. Just in case you were wondering. 

As if this wasn't enough Halloween excitement, we were also joined in the afternoon by an argument of wizards who collected in the Guildhall to receive their O.W.L.s (I'm so sorry for the HP reference. It hurt me to do it but it makes the blog reader-friendly). 

So. Take your sibling to work week. Awesome fun times.