teaching

Autumn is on the way!

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Autumn Mandala 01Coloured Angela Porter

Autumn is nigh and it’s a lot more glorious because…

September has arrived at long last, along with the promise of the fiery blaze of glory that is autumn in a few weeks time.

Cooler mornings and evenings along with warm enough days, the quality of sunlight is softer, more golden too.

I really love this time of year, it’s my favourite!

Even more so that I no longer have the long fear/anxiety of returning to school as a teacher.

I don’t miss teaching one little bit!  I miss friends I had. I miss the more social interaction I had and the fun and laughter I had with colleagues and pupils.  What I don’t really miss is the constant fear, anxiety, worry, stress, pressure, bad attitudes, poor behaviour and constantly being looked at and assessed. All the things that led me to some very dark places that I found difficult to get out of.  No, it’s not ‘I don’t really miss’ these things – I really don’t miss these things, though I still get moments anxiety verging on panic when memories of various situations arise from the depths of my subconscious.

Arty pursuits

I’ve finished all the black and white line art for Eerily Entangled – my latest colouring book for Dover Publications.  I have two more to colour in for the book, but I’ll wait to see what my editor and her design team would like me to colour – there are so very many, if not all, I’d love to colour!

As well as this, I’ve spent quite a bit of time starting to organise my ‘pattern library’.  It’s something I like to do when I’m too tired to do anything else, when I’m feeling down and need a comforting not challenging activity, and when I’m lacking in inspiration; sometimes the patterns bring the inspiration I’m searching for, sometimes they just allow stuff to well up to the surface of my subconscious mind where my conscious mind can grab them and make use of them.

As a change of focus, I decided to draw some autumn themed mandalas, the one at the top of this blog entry being the first.

I’m a bit rusty at creating them after focusing on other things for a while, but the skills soon come back, often with new ideas or twists to old ideas, as well as new skills learned by my use of Autodesk Sketchbook Pro with my Microsoft Surface Book, which I used to create this mandala.

Half-term at last…pheweee!

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It’s been a long half-term at school; eight weeks to be precise.  In that time there’s been two training days, a twilight training session. a memorial walk to raise money for school funds and the Senghenydd Mining Disaster Memorial, almost daily incidents of poor behaviour/attitude to deal with, lessons observations, book reviews (as in how well and regularly work is being marked), a consultation with my union representative, a stress-meltdown and hopefully the end of three year period of what feels like persecution/bullying in a particular situation at work (culminating in the union consultation and the stress meltdown).

I still have a pupil to be dealt with who has been making threats to physically attack me because I apparently ‘start on him’ by asking him to do his work.  How shocking is that, that I should request he stop shouting around the class, distracting others and to do his work?

Oh the joys of being a teacher.

Having said that, there are joys.  The shared smiles and laughter with pupils enjoying the lessons.  The ones whose faces light up when they see me and who never exhibit poor behaviour in my class, even though they may do in other lessons), the shared laughter with colleagues, morning breakfast with ‘the girls’, the helpfulness of the lab tech, the enthusiasm and questioning of pupils because they are interested in something, their kindness and thoughtfulness.  And so much more that it’s a shame it can become dominated by the negative things that occur and dominate my ruminating, over-analysing, over-thinking brain.

It’s been really busy for me with having to prepare work for a new course I’m running with my special needs classes, as well as teaching mainstream classes that I’ve not done for years.  It’s meant late nights at work and even bringing work home – something I avoid doing as I do not want to go down the route of being a workaholic as I was in the first decade or so of my teaching career.

This busy-ness has really eaten into my creative time.  Little art has been done, and I’m am doing my best to settle back into it in this half-term, especially as I have two contracts to create artwork for two books, though I have been waiting for direction for what the artwork is to be for a long while now.

I’ve barely stopped in the first four day so of the half-term.  I seem to be running away from time with myself.  I can struggle with being alone, feeling lonely and end up keeping moving, moving, moving to avoid it.  Today I am remaining at home and trying to get things out of the way so that I will settle to some arty pursuits, or de-stressing after the last half-term.

I do seem to be a lot more resilient than I was a year ago.  Though things can get to me (such as loneliness, lack of a sense of belonging, the constant worry I’m doing things wrong that have precipitated the situation at work that led to a stress-meltdown), I often find there’s a content ‘centre’ in me that I can access when I do things of a creative nature or things that focus my mind away from it’s rumination and negative thinking.  It’s a little easier to spot when this is happening, though I don’t always catch it in time to stop the tears, the self-loathing and the comfort eating.

I rejoined a choir I’ve been a member of since I was in school myself.  Sadly, I had to leave again once the stress levels rose as my voice was, and still is, affected by the stress.

Out of all of this, and at odd times during the last couple of months, I have managed to do some arty things.  Here’s two mandalas of mine.

Calmly Does It © Angela Porter 2013

Autumn Splendour ©Angela Porter 2013d

Another snow day…

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After going into work yesterday to a crazily icy site and no heating in the block I work in, snowfall overnight has resulted in some kind of common-sense.

This means that in a little while I get to go back to sleep for a while and keep warm safely at home and not having to brave roads practically closed by snow.  The M4 is down to one lane.  Many roads are closed or passable only with extreme care.  I’ll also be keeping myself, and others, safe by not travelling along side-roads and the school-drive and ‘roads’ in school that aren’t exactly clear of snow/ice in my little Smartcar aka Deetoo (as in Smartoo-Deetoo).

I like snow as long as I can stay safe and warm inside and look out at it safely from my windows.

I do not like the sensation of slipping/sliding on snow in uncleared areas, nor do I like the fear of my car sliding into someone else’s.  I do not like the sensation of slipping and sliding as I walk or drive, carefully, on compacted snow/ice.  I do not enjoy the fear of falling over and hurting myself, which is always a distinct possibility with me as I can trip over thin air on dry, safe surfaces!  The fall always hurts.

Last time I fell over, I ended up in A&E with a very painful foot.  The foot wasn’t broken, luckily, but there was ‘soft tissue damage’ (i.e. ligaments/tendons) that took weeks to heal. Painful to walk for a couple of weeks it was, and I did not like that at all.

In Britain we are not geared up for snow.  It happens for a few days a year, if that, and that does not justify the expense of gritters/ploughs/other snow-clearing equipment.

Years ago, people lived close to where they work and it was easy to get there by shanks’ pony.  Nowadays, people live much further away from work.  Many live a distance away from public transport and would need to use private transport to get to them, if they are running.  It means that on days like today there may not be enough staff in school to look after the pupils safely.  

Years ago, health and safety law wasn’t a big issue either nor did we have the ‘if there’s blame there’s a claim’ culture that we seem mired in.

I am absolutely sure that those who shout loudest about schools being closed in this weather would be the first to lay a claim if their little darling got hurt while walking around a site that had treacherously icy surfaces or because there weren’t enough staff to supervise the pupils who had attended school.

Don’t get me wrong here, health and safety of people is very important and is always the priority for me, as a science teacher, when planning lessons for my classes.  It’s also a priority for me as I really do not like being hurt or damaged in any way, either physically, emotionally or mentally.

I do wish people would understand that the reason the school is closed is because we do not want any accidents on site, we want the pupils and staff to be safe while there and supervised properly too, and we want pupils and staff to get safely there and home again.  

The school isn’t being closed because the teachers are lazy.  We’re not lazy.  Not by a long shot.

We work hard with the pupils in our care and ‘snow days’ mean that we have to work harder to make up the lost time so that the pupils make as much progress as possible, that they are not disadvantaged when they sit their exams, exams that are needed for their future.

We spend long hours after the end of the school day and at weekends and during school holidays marking work, preparing lessons, preparing resources, writing reports, filling in progress sheets, doing extra revision lessons for pupils after the end of the school day to ensure they do well in their exams, putting up displays of work, parents evenings, meetings, concerts, fund-raising events and so many other things that people who do not know a teacher personally and are able to see how their job encroaches on their personal life are unaware that we do or think it all somehow magically gets done by itself.

I try to manage my time effectively and to achieve a work-life balance.  I remain late in school most days a week to mark/prepare work so I don’t bring it home with me, something I had to learn to do as I was a workaholic for many, many years, and I need to take care of my own mental and emotional health and well-being.

It’s not just the amount of work we do.  There are other aspects to the job we do.  We also have to deal with a lot of stuff, such as poor attitudes, bad behaviour, bullying, being aware of children who may be being abused and disclosures of abuse, as well as many other things that my not be easy to deal with.

There’s a lot of pleasure in the job, laughter and smiles with pupils through the day.  It’s all to easy to get mired in the ‘bad stuff’ and forget how much good is done.

What we are not are babysitters, childcare. We care enough about your children to close the school for their safety as well as ours.  We have a duty of care towards them.  Respect our caring about them, don’t interpret it as laziness.  Respect the fact that we follow health and safety laws and don’t ignore them, not just for the sake of the staff, but for the pupils too.

If we seem pleased about a day off, it’s simply because we know we can remain safe and well, we don’t have to face the hairy-scary journey to work, the difficult movement around the site nor the worry of if we’ll get home safely again at the end of the day.

Inspection – meh

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In the next week the school I work at is enduring an Estyn Inspection.  As teachers, we have been under pressure for at least the last two years in expectation of this.  The pressure has increased over time, with so many tasks given with little time to do them in and no sense of priority – everything is the most important.  I have been late in work every day in the past few weeks, went into work over the Christmas holidays, and was there yesterday and will be there today.

There has been little time for art this past week that’s for sure.  Today’s tasks are to get at least one day’s worth of lesson plans completed, along with any extra resources I may need, just in case.  I’d like to get all three done, but that may be expecting a lot, especially as I’m currently having a quiet couple of hours sat in bed drinking tea and letting the ibuprofen dispel a thumping headache I woke up with.  Despite the need to do work, I also know that I need some time to just relax too, as much as I can at the moment.  Finding time to meditate this week is a priority for me!

I, along with many staff, have been losing sleep worrying over this.  My self-belief and self-esteem is never great, but all of this has been putting dents in the dents in the dents that I have, especially doubting myself greatly (despite the evidence of the past that says I’m actually quite good at the teaching thing).

I try to focus on the definite fact that, no matter what happens (well except for school closure due to snow) it will be well over by this time next week and I can get my life back.

We’re expected to be prefect, but nothing is ever perfect; we are all human and humans make mistakes, find it impossible to do absolutely everything or to do everything perfectly.  All we can do is our best.  However, over the past couple of years I feel I have been given the message that whatever I do is never good enough, and it isn’t just me who gets that message.

All I can hope for in the next week is that I make understandable, allowable human mistakes, rather than stupidly huge ones that cause problems.  I hope I can do my sparkling self, that the core of difficult pupils in my classes will cooperate for once, and that my voice actually lasts the week (my voice has been breaking on and off all this week and the voice enhancing equipment installed in my room has been deemed unsuitable for purpose, well part of it has, so goodness knows how long it will be before that is rectified).

I mentioned earlier in this post that the pressure is waking up those inner voices who love to reinforce the idea that I am useless, pathetic, weak, a really poor teacher, a failure, and so on.  I do have evidence to the contrary, but believing that evidence in the clamour of the strident negative self-talk can be difficult, especially when I overhear other teacher’s talking about how they are going to make their lessons extra special dazzling singing an dancing.  The pressure I then feel under to do the same is ridiculous, and that feeds into the negative self-talk.  My past experience of being seen teaching is that when I do things as I would normally do them, perhaps with just a little more organisation and less opportunity for the pupils to sidetrack me with interesting questions than usual, I have done well.  So, I will be continuing in that vein, which is commonsense really.

It’s been a while …

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It really has been a while since I last posted – two months more or less.  And what I couple of months it has been.

Work has been tough at times as respect has noticeably diminished along with good behaviour and attitudes.  I lost my voice for a week, a regular thing with me it seems.  The good news is that the ENT consultant put a camera up my nose to look at my vocal chords/throat and there were no problems at all.  I’m now awaiting speech therapy as it seems to be an occupational hazard and they can help me to use my voice without stress or strain.  I know of two, no, three ways my voice could be looked after while I still work.  One is to change my job/career.  The second is for the school to actually get the microphone/speaker system installed in my room so that the speech therapy can be focused on teaching me to talk at a healthy level.  The third is for the decline in behaviour to be managed and turned around so that I didn’t have to raise my voice so much, or even shout to be heard by the person two feet away from me.

A good point looks like I’ve finally achieved my aim of someone actually admitting that I’m right that the GCSE equivalent course I’ve been expected to deliver to my SEN classes isn’t actually possible for them to do the controlled assessments.  I do have to search out an alternative qualification that would give a GCSE equivalent qualification that I can deliver for part of the time while I continue to deliver the Entry Level science course.  I think I’ve done that, but it has to be sold to ‘the man’.

Outside of the world of work things have been strange.  It seems that a move away from a spiritual pathway I’ve been wandering along has finally happened. The signs have been there for a while, my unhappiness with it has been present for a while.  As nasty as the ending got (I vow to do my best to never become involved with committees with ego issues every again!) it showed that there was no way of mediating the schism.  I just hope the half-truths, rumours and downright lies about me don’t cause problems elsewhere.  All could have been avoided by effective, polite, even-tempered communication, or just a politely stated desire that the class I have run for a couple of years needs someone other than me to run it.

I’m finding that so many people who claim to ‘know’ me really don’t know me at all.  I really dislike confrontation, but am willing to listen to calm requests, well reasoned and logical arguments backed up with actual evidence, even if that is someone’s opinions.  I’d much prefer someone to ‘man-up’ and state their opinions rather than sneaking around behind my back, getting people to ‘spy’ on me with a remit to dig up dirt and if there is no dirt to dig up to manufacture it.  I’d much prefer someone to be open and honest, even if their version of truth hurts, for them to admit it’s all their own perceptions.

The result of all this was a rather nasty meeting with the committee members with confrontational attitudes and no desire to mediate, just to attack.  I think the members of the group I lead sent letters with their observations in that caused some level of guilt and/or jealousy somewhere as they were asked to explain why ‘she’s a credit to us’, she being me.

That means, to me, that I’m not a credit.

In the end I quietly stood up and politely said I’d had a day of managing confrontational behaviour in work that I didn’t expect it from adults in this kind of setting, that no matter what I said I’d not be believed, that I was obviously in the wrong and that the faults lie with me as a person for caring about others, for being welcoming, for giving my time to those who need it, for losing sense of time as I got lost in long discussions about things that were relevant to the purpose of this group.  I kept my voice quiet (mainly because the stress of the situation had caused my throat to constrict) and my demeanor non-confrontational, yet the attacks continued.  So I left.

I left with tears in my eyes for the pain caused to myself and others.  Tears of disappointment that those who proclaim so loudly to be spiritual aren’t.  Tears of disappointment that my involvement in a certain part of this organisation will also have to come to an end.  Tears of frustration.  Tears of anger.  Tears of embarrassment, humiliation.  However, there were also tears of relief among them too, and tears of grief, tears of letting go.

I hadn’t wanted to go, knowing exactly how it would be; knowing that someone had an axe to grind because they disagreed and disapproved of me and my ways and they wouldn’t be happy until they had not just put the knives against my back but driven them deeply in.

I’d felt the knives there for a long time, but there was no way they were going to puncture me, and I don’t think they did.

They will believe they are victorious, but it is a false image or at best a Pyrrhic victory, but they will not see that.

I’m the true ‘winner’, if there is a win anywhere.  I am now free of the rules and regulations.  What I do and how I do it is now up to my own personal sense of ethics and morals.  I would never treat someone the way they have and revel in the glory of it.  I’m sure the gloating will go on for a long time by some.

As for me, it’s time for me to decide where I go with this next, or rather how the decisions that have been made need to be developed.  It’s kind of exciting yet scary as it’s very much me breaking new ground for myself in some respects.

Another ending has been hypnotherapy.  I’ve had problems getting people to be guinea pigs for my case studies.  I’ve also become very jaded with the course and the practice.  I realised I had got from the course what I needed, realised that I didn’t really want to start up my own hypnotherapy practice.  Taken together, I decided that I had what I needed and wouldn’t complete the course.

Arty things have taken a bit of a back seat lately.  My half term break seemed to be filled with errands and appointments and trying to rest, relax and restore myself.  In the evenings when I return home from work I’m often too tired to do anything much, emotionally and mentally drained that is.  The weekends are often a washout for me as I sleep a lot of the time as my sleep in the week is disturbed (and has been this weekend as part of the fallout from the above mentioned meeting which was Friday night).

I did buy a book – Knitted Dinosaurs by Tina Barrett – on a visit to the National Museum Cardiff.  I have a lovely pterodactyl knitted with sparkly purple wings and a lilac body, head, legs and arms.  Some friends have fallen in love with him and have asked for ones of their own!

Yesterday evening, after a lunchtime outing to The Skirrid Inn in Llanfihangel Crucorney with one of my pals, Wendy.  I really didn’t want a dissection of the previous evening’s meeting, and so did my best to turn the conversation to other things, which we mostly did.  The little conversations about the meeting did help to bring some clarity that may be related to jealousy, guilt, and some evidence of absolute hippocracy in at least one ‘complaint’ that was levied by the committee.

The previous Saturday we’d been to Glastonbury for a nice wander around the shops and a leisurely lunch in the Cafe Galatea, where I had the nicest cheesy garlic bread and homemade coleslaw I’ve had for a very long time.  I had a good look around Starchild and stocked up on candles and incense – I just love that shop and always have since my first visit to Glastonbury some 11 or so years ago.  A new favourite shop is The Crystal Man‘s shop where I picked up pieces of spirit quartz and botryoidol lepidolite mica, which is shiny and silvery-pinky-lavender in hue.  The chap who owns/runs it is hilarious and friendly, which encouraged us to have a good look around and to rummage in his drawers – drawers of crystals/minerals.

This has been a bit of a random ramble, admittedly.  However, it does give an idea why there’s been little art or blog entries of late (not that I’m consistent in doing entries anyway).

My main problem at the moment is that I’m happily ensconced in bed tapping away at this on the laptop given to me by a friend when they bought a new one.  It’s comfortable here, safe too, warm as well.  My only problem at the moment is that I want a cup of tea and I’ll have to get out of bed to go get it!  That’s one of the main downsides to being single!