As a teacher one hopes to create that one iconic moment for students where academia becomes magic. My moment as a student happened when my ethereal English teacher, Moira Lovell, began reading 'To Kill A Mockingbird' to our Grade 10 class. If one is familiar with the book one knows that the opening pages are somewhat long in the tooth. Lots of sociopolitical context. The introduction is one which will make a 16 year old fresh from having eaten lunch a little heavy lidded. Enter Scout. The moment Mrs Lovell changed her perfect elocution and adult tone to the gritty, fiesty accent of a little girl from Maycomb County, Alabama I believed that anything was possible in a classroom. The entire class was transfixed. Similar to how I'm sure the generation of radio listeners felt at the lead up to the next Goon Show, or War of the Worlds, our English lessons became much anticipated events. We would sit enraptured for an entire lesson as the voice of Moira Lovell, an English teach...
Inspired by various families I have witnessed while on holiday... The family chat group that Kevin begrudgingly belonges to exploded sometime in February when one of his in-laws suggested that they all celebrate the coming Christmas together at a hotel. It would coincide perfectly with his mother in law's 70th birthday. Everyone on the chat group, apart from Kevin, agreed that they could think of no better way to get into the Christmas spirit than to spend seven solid days in each other's company, including nine children all under the age of 10. Since then the chat group has been riddled with extreme holiday expectations and awkward reminders to pay for accommodation. Kevin spent the next 9 and a half months in mild therapy with his padel partner, Brian. Their final post game beer, sometime at the beginning of December, ended in a bracing hug with Brian reminding Kevin that he is only a phone call away if things get too much. It is now two days into the seven day Christmas ext...
Last night as Stephen and I were getting ready for bed we got a message from our security company, Ensure, to say that there was a porcupine at the bottom of our garden. The message came with the above picture. While we scrambled to put shoes and coats on we watched the elusive creature rummaging around with the help of our camera monitor. By the time we got to the bottom of our garden it was gone. We then got a message from our security company (who obviously watched us trying to view the porcupine) saying that we must be careful because they are dangerous creatures. They were also worried about our dogs. We assured them that the dogs were locked inside. Two nights ago our dogs went berserk in the middle of the night and I immediately contacted our Ensure team who did a quick reconnaissance of the footage and confirmed that it might have been the security guard walking across the Kearsney field who kick started their response. Our Ensure team also warn us when it's go...
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