If you don't introduce yourself.
If you jump straight in to a controversial thread and I have no idea who you are or what you are doing on a particular forum, without having introduced yourself first, I will ignore you. It's like a stranger coming up to you on the street and yelling in your ear. Rude.
If you don't write in paragraphs.
You may be the nicest, most polite and most deserving person on the forum. However, if your post is one long page of unbroken text, I won't read it. My eyes don't like it and my brain won't process it. Write your heart out, sure. Then before you post, go back and separate your post into paragraphs. Leave a space between paragraphs. Then I'll read it and probably respond.
If you are ungrateful.
I may have taken the time to respond to your query, comment, argument or concern on a previous occasion. If you responded with " Wow. You totally missed the point. I don't know why you even bothered to respond, you arrogant woman." or similar, I will ignore you from then on. If you think a response you've been given is stupid, keep it to yourself. Unless it's hurtful or abusive, in which case, go for it. Remember that a stranger went out of their way to consider your problem and took the time to try to be helpful. You don't have to lie. You don't have to gush. You don't even have to respond. You just have to move on. Quietly.
If you expect me to understand everything about your situation from one post.
If there are details that provide important context to your post, include them. I don't have access to the inside of your head. I can only respond based on the information you have given. If you realise you forgot to provide the important details, graciously explain that in a subsequent post instead of getting huffy with me because I didn't somehow guess them. If you do get huffy about my lack of psychic abilities, I will ignore you.
These reasons are brought to you in a spirit of slightly annoyed helpfulness.
Friday, September 30, 2011
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Career Advice for Second Grade
Me: Fantastic!
Snowy: As soon as I turn fifteen I'm going to start saving up the money to build it.
Me: Awesome!
Snowy: I'm not going to work at K-Mart any more though.
Me: Really ?
Snowy: I'll need a better paid job. I'm going into advertising.
Me: You are ???
Snowy: You can make a lot of money just from one account Mum.
Me: So...how did you find out about advertising ?
Snowy: (like I'm a little bit slow)...Bewitched, of course!
Only the best life coach for my kid!
Thursday, September 22, 2011
September Read Alouds
Farmer Boy - Snowy and I are ploughing our way through this one, pun intended. I must say, Little House isn't nearly as much fun with my boy as it was with my girls. Even the chapter where Almanzo and his siblings get left alone for a week and spend the whole time eating cake and icecream and feeding candy to pigs hasn't really grabbed his imagination. I do, however, enjoy reading aloud the bits about food.
He ate ham and chicken and turkey, and dressing and cranberry jelly; he ate potatoes and gravy, succotash, baked beans and boiled beans and onions, and white bread and rye'n'injun bread and sweet pickles and jam and preserves. Then he drew a long breath and ate pie...He ate a piece of pumpkin pie and a piece of custard pie, and he ate almost a piece of vinegar pie.
The Wombles at Work - This is our 'fun' read aloud but I'm unimpressed. I'm a Womble fan - indeed, I went to Wimbledon Common to see the Womble habitat - but this book finds the Wombles relocated to Hyde Park and I'm not buying it. Snowy, however, finds it a soothing sort of bed-time read.
A Girl of the Limberlost - Since the girls and I finished Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, we've been lost for a book. The library is uninspiring and the bookshop hasn't got in any of the lovely new books we're waiting on, like The Penderwicks at Point Mouette. ( We could order everything from Amazon and indulge in Good Books to our heart's content, but I'm the last homeschooler left on earth gamely trying to support the independents, or so it feels. Jobs are looking shaky in the bookshop business. )
It puts me off balance, not reading aloud to the girls after lunch. In desperation I rummaged around in a box of under-the-bed books yesterday and discovered Limberlost. It's been under the bed for years, having read it myself and found it to be overwritten and sentimental. Strangely enough, in the way some books have, it's much better suited to reading aloud. It's the kind of book where you can have fun 'doing' the voices. It's a coming of age story, lonely Elnora Comstock, burdened with an unhappy and widowed mother, making her way out of a harsh life of rural poverty via An Education and the collection of moths. Yes, moths. I seem to remember there's some sickly romance in the later chapters, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, neither of my girls being great admirers of sickly romance.
He ate ham and chicken and turkey, and dressing and cranberry jelly; he ate potatoes and gravy, succotash, baked beans and boiled beans and onions, and white bread and rye'n'injun bread and sweet pickles and jam and preserves. Then he drew a long breath and ate pie...He ate a piece of pumpkin pie and a piece of custard pie, and he ate almost a piece of vinegar pie.
The Wombles at Work - This is our 'fun' read aloud but I'm unimpressed. I'm a Womble fan - indeed, I went to Wimbledon Common to see the Womble habitat - but this book finds the Wombles relocated to Hyde Park and I'm not buying it. Snowy, however, finds it a soothing sort of bed-time read.
A Girl of the Limberlost - Since the girls and I finished Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, we've been lost for a book. The library is uninspiring and the bookshop hasn't got in any of the lovely new books we're waiting on, like The Penderwicks at Point Mouette. ( We could order everything from Amazon and indulge in Good Books to our heart's content, but I'm the last homeschooler left on earth gamely trying to support the independents, or so it feels. Jobs are looking shaky in the bookshop business. )
It puts me off balance, not reading aloud to the girls after lunch. In desperation I rummaged around in a box of under-the-bed books yesterday and discovered Limberlost. It's been under the bed for years, having read it myself and found it to be overwritten and sentimental. Strangely enough, in the way some books have, it's much better suited to reading aloud. It's the kind of book where you can have fun 'doing' the voices. It's a coming of age story, lonely Elnora Comstock, burdened with an unhappy and widowed mother, making her way out of a harsh life of rural poverty via An Education and the collection of moths. Yes, moths. I seem to remember there's some sickly romance in the later chapters, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, neither of my girls being great admirers of sickly romance.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Extract & Link: When The Towers Fell by Galway Kinnell and WTC 9/11 by Steve Reich
From our high window we saw the towers
with their bands and blocks of light
brighten against a fading sunset,
saw them at any hour glitter and live
as if the spirits inside them sat up all night
calculating profit and loss, saw them reach up
to steep their tops in the until then invisible
yellow of sunrise, grew so used to them
often we didn’t see them, and now,
not seeing them, we see them.
Read the rest here.
I'd also like to link to this, Steve Reich's WTC 9/11
Please be aware this piece of music, accomplished and full of interest, also has the potential to be upsetting and difficult to listen to for some.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Who Are You Educating Your Child To Be ?
Equip your child to be a leader
The journey of learning and leadership
Grow leadership skills
Educating future women leaders
Educating today's girls to be tomorrow's leaders
Strength and leadership
Leaders of heart and mind
Developing future leaders
These slogans jump out at me as I browse the local paper over a cup of tea. Schools advertising for students, public as well as private.
Educating your child to be the leader you want them to be
In my head I have an absurd picture of a school jostling with seven hundred leaders, no followers. Are parents really sending their children to schools strong in 'leadership' because they want their child to lead ? I'm struggling to understand wanting your child to be anything, other than his or herself.
I don't see education as a means of value adding, a way of shaping a child into something that pleases you. It's a right, an education, and I aim to give my children an education because they have a right to it. Just as they have a right to housing and food and clean water and air. To give a girl-child her rightful education is particularly sweet.
What I don't do is educate them as a means of becoming. A leader, a doctor, a business woman, a politician, an artist, a town planner, a biologist, a mother, a sportsman, successful, wealthy; take your pick.
Children aren't becoming. They are. The life of a homeschooled seven year old holds as much intrinsic value as the life of a sixty year old High Court judge. Or a twenty year old garage mechanic. Education doesn't - and shouldn't - turn them into anything .
Education should offer them a series of skills, of tools, of information that they can use to grow their own lives, according to their own desires and the inner template they carry of what a good life looks to them. Leader, follower, iconoclast; how do we dare assume to shape this, choose that ?
The journey of learning and leadership
Grow leadership skills
Educating future women leaders
Educating today's girls to be tomorrow's leaders
Strength and leadership
Leaders of heart and mind
Developing future leaders
These slogans jump out at me as I browse the local paper over a cup of tea. Schools advertising for students, public as well as private.
Educating your child to be the leader you want them to be
In my head I have an absurd picture of a school jostling with seven hundred leaders, no followers. Are parents really sending their children to schools strong in 'leadership' because they want their child to lead ? I'm struggling to understand wanting your child to be anything, other than his or herself.
I don't see education as a means of value adding, a way of shaping a child into something that pleases you. It's a right, an education, and I aim to give my children an education because they have a right to it. Just as they have a right to housing and food and clean water and air. To give a girl-child her rightful education is particularly sweet.
What I don't do is educate them as a means of becoming. A leader, a doctor, a business woman, a politician, an artist, a town planner, a biologist, a mother, a sportsman, successful, wealthy; take your pick.
Children aren't becoming. They are. The life of a homeschooled seven year old holds as much intrinsic value as the life of a sixty year old High Court judge. Or a twenty year old garage mechanic. Education doesn't - and shouldn't - turn them into anything .
Education should offer them a series of skills, of tools, of information that they can use to grow their own lives, according to their own desires and the inner template they carry of what a good life looks to them. Leader, follower, iconoclast; how do we dare assume to shape this, choose that ?
Monday, September 5, 2011
Creatures of the Season
Like an animal emerging from winter-hollow, we look to see how things have changed. I am famine lean and greedy. Green hits the back of my eye, feast-colour.
Saturday, September 3, 2011
Thursday, September 1, 2011
A Dream in Which I Fail To Take my Poetry Seriously
Last night, before I went to sleep, I asked my subconscious to please allow me a dream of the the animal whom I should write about in my next Zoo stanza. Thinking tragic, majestic, poetic. Thinking Rilke.
Goldfish. That's what I dreamed about. Trying to keep two goldfish alive in my bra - bowls and Tupperware being unavailable, apparently - by pouring water into it. Pleasingly, I not only managed to keep the fish alive; one of them even gave birth to a little goldfish. Touching.
Ape, eagle...goldfish ? I don't think so.
Goldfish. That's what I dreamed about. Trying to keep two goldfish alive in my bra - bowls and Tupperware being unavailable, apparently - by pouring water into it. Pleasingly, I not only managed to keep the fish alive; one of them even gave birth to a little goldfish. Touching.
Ape, eagle...goldfish ? I don't think so.
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