Golden Fields –  Abstract Textile Work

I finished this little textile piece yesterday evening.  It’s approx. 9cm x 10cm and made from cream hessian painted with acrylic inks and then embellished with matt and metallic embroidery threads, beads and panels made from gold and copper leaf.  The inspiration came from a piece of abstract art I did a little while ago Golden Gloucestershire Hills of Corn.

It’s taken me a week to do, half and hour here and another one there, as school does interfere with my creativity.  I’m quite pleased with it, but prefer to work on felt as the contrast between the beads, threads, fibres and custom made panels/sequins is so much more apparent.  I do need to get some cream felt and see if the inks will work on that just as well …

Mind you, I have loads of these little bits of textile art to mount and frame now … that will really finish them off nicely I think!  As well as make them ready for sale …

School…

Yes, it was the return to school on Monday… huge sigh here.  The week started off with an hour and a half meeting about what to do about the behaviour/attitude in school, with some refusing to acknowledge there is a problem.  Every time the teaching staff, or care staff, or non-teaching staff mention that things are getting worse we get the comments of the last inspection report thrown at us as evidence that it is not bad.  Errm, the inpsection was five years or so ago now, things HAVE changed in that time.

Five years ago relationships between staff and pupils were good, they still are now, in well defined pockets, but there are an increasing number of disruptive pupils in every single class…  We have one of the highest exclusion rates for schools in our county, yet we don’t have a problem.  That’s a contradiction if I ever heard one!

At the end of the meeting there was no change.  Any ideas the teaching staff came up with were dismissed as either un-staffable, unaffordable or needing the consensus of parents to put into place (which begs the question – who is in charge of the school?).

Has anything changed since?  No.  I still get verbally abused, aggressively spoken to, shouted at, defied and questioned ‘why’ when I ask, quite firmly but politely, for a pupil to stop talking, to get on with their work, to stop disturbing others, to take their coat off … I did comment about the defiance as not being the same as The Defiant, a tough little ship featuring in Star Trek Deep Space 9, though it could be useful to have around as a defence.  Mind you a pair of Klingons or Jem’Hadar would work wonders in the class; you’d have no messing with them around.  A couple of Jedi with light sabers may work just as well …

Thank goodness I was told about a light at the end of the tunnel to aim for, maybe, but more of that when it all comes to pass …

Stress and marble-work

Another good point about the week is that I’m finally learning that this attitude is nothing to do with me, particularly, other than I’m a teacher.  Although it seems personal, it’s not really.  My stress levels do go up, I do my best not to lose my temper (though it can be incredibly hard at times) and do my best to calm down asap afterwards, so these are all very much positive steps forwards.

I do seem to be coping better in school, though maybe not as well as I would like.  This gives time in the weekly marble sorting out sessions (also known as counselling) to work on the knotty issues of self-love, self-esteem, self-image and so on…and hopefully unlearning the messages from the past about myself, what other people wanted me to believe about myself … it’s not easy, but it is possible!