What makes you happy ?

Hundreds of protesters are expected to gather at Oxford University after students voted to allow BNP leader Nick Griffin to speak at their union

Martin McCluskey, president of the Oxford Student Union, said it was “disgraceful”

Sabby Dhalu, secretary of campaign group Unite Against Fascism, said: “If the event goes ahead as it stands, it does not even have the appearance of a ‘debate’.

Lee Jasper, secretary of the National Assembly Against Racism, added: “Oxford Union is jeopardising the safety of the students by continuing with this event. Guardian

This is the same as “I believe in Freedom of Speech but…”
It’s not some sort of variable.
It’s not there just for the cosy warm stuff.
It’s not there just when you agree.

You either have Freedom of Speech or you do not. There is no grey area. There is no in-between. So the “I believe if free speech but not if I find it offensive” trio of Martin McCluskey, Sabby Dhalu and Lee Jasper along with their obedient little followers in the “I can but you cannot” troupe should STFU.

So the brilliant file “An Inconvenient Truth” can be seen in schools. Apart from the last few minutes when it’s a case of USA! USA! it’s a damn fine film and one that all kids should see.
One guy thought different and challenged the Government. He won – though it can still be seen.

Mr Dimmock said: “I am elated with today’s result, but still disappointed that the film is able to be shown in schools.
“If it was not for the case brought by myself, our young people would still be being indoctrinated with this political spin.”

I sincerely hope you are not bringing your kids as having to belong to any faith – that’s called indoctrination.

And if you believe global warming is “political spin” then you need to get a grip.

No, not the gorgeous little shiny gadget that I covet but those fruity beads on the end of spiny vines. P and me went blackberry picking earlier – she got the easy stuff I got the higher stuff – hence the multitude of scratches. Tomorrow she’s making Blackberry and Apple pie :)

Both rowing machines were being used to the gym today. Threw me completely. Onto x-trainer – 20 minutes later they were still rowing. Did a few weights – still rowing. Did some more weights – and one stopped. So I got some of my fix that I was after. But I’d forgotten the regular bottle I use, and the towel and the gloves. So it all felt wrong. If I get time to go tomorrow I’ll see if I can get it all correct.

P was telling me earlier about school meals. Apparently they have a short break around 11am and the school sell small food items. Which is fair enough. But they sell toast. One small slice of buttered toast costs 21p. That’s extortion! 21p for a single slice of slightly charred bread? The maths for the profit margin are amazing. And they say they have no money…… so they charge for toast? Actually, you know if they did that in the NHS and made every member of staff pay 21p for each slice they ate the NHS deficit would be wiped out. I used to eat loads. They thought I was weird though because I proclaimed that thick sliced bread, toasted then left to go cold was the very best toast. White bread too. Brown bread is good at all other times but quality toast has a white slice at it’s foundation. Butter is essential too. None of that grey-but-coloured-yellow sandwich grease – just proper butter. Quantity – minimum of 4 slices I reckon. Triangles or rectangles is not an issue that rattles my box – if someone else has prepared it correctly I’m grateful with either shape. Myself – I don’t have a preference if I slice. Grill or toaster? I have to say Toaster simply because otherwise I forget. That said, NHS toasters in my experience had no popup so you had to remember to grab it. The number of false fire alarms may have persuaded management differently over time. But 21p? Pah.

I was recommended for a teaching secondment during the last couple of years of my nursing career. I was denied it by my boss. It was an aspect of nursing and leading that I enjoyed immensely for a whole bag of reasons. By the time I left I had accumulated 195 academic points (the proper name escapes me). I qualified in 1988, worked 13 years in Challenging Behaviour, ran wards, lead staff, produced working docs – the whole lot – and I was less ‘qualified’ than a new nurse with their 240 academic points and a mind empty of clues. Whatever. I could have APEL’d to get the 45 probably (Accreditation of Prior Experiential Learning – in other words “Tell us what you did, why you did, what you learned, how you would do it differently, how it developed you, how it made you a better person etc etc etc etc……… and we might give you a point.) but it was a pile of work for zero guarantee. So I didn’t. I’ve still got my Professional Portfolio though. Chock full of certs.

Along came the year 2000. From then until relatively recently (I’m talking months) life was pretty much shitonastick for a variety of reasons. In that time I’d pretty much given up on having a future career. If you’ve read here for long enough you’ll probably know why. Many many months ago J looked round for routes into teaching for me. I looked too. Because of the points it came to nothing. I found those points to be massively frustrating. So the idea was thrown out. The week before last P came home saying that all she had done in one long lesson was colouring. She was fed up and annoyed. A few days ago the deputy head rang back after our call. I spoke to her. She talked about the reasons why things has arisen, what the kids were being asked to do and what it formed part of. And then I went off on one at her (nicely!). I recall talking about motivation, motivating, capturing imaginations and other subjects. I told her how it should have been done. (On the Treatment Unit – challenging behaviour + mental illness – there was one client who would explode into furious rages. He was genuinely frightening and very dangerous at that point. He detonated one lunchtime. I told everyone to clear the dining room. A member of staff went to a blind client, grabbed his hands and told him to ‘Come with me’. Naturally he wanted to know why, who she was, what that big noise was all of a sudden, who was making it, I want my dinner, can’t you make him shut up please and more. He was in danger and this member of staff had just made life more risky. She wasn’t motivating, she wasn’t giving him a goal he could understand, she wasn’t making what she wanted him to do more attractive than any alternative. She was in a battle. And she – and us – would have lost. When a paranoid schizophrenic is shouting violence and threats at you that is something you take extremely seriously. Me? I’d have offered him chocolate cake / a packet of sweets / a walk / a trip out – anything at all. He lived. She got put exactly right).

Back to the present – She said I should go to the school as they needed ‘thinking like that’. haha. I mentioned it later to J. She made it a goal of hers to find out all there was and to see just what the situation was. Few days and 400 phone calls later she says that Derby have all my info, are happy, will let me onto a RTP (or RPT?) course – I have no idea what that even is yet – so I’m in. I can indeed train to be a teacher. Experience would be very useful though and it’s probably essential. After all, might as well get my feet wet before jumping in the pool. So I’ll be ringing the school again. Asking for a visit, interview, whatever else with a view to doing something in the new school year. All I need to do is take the metal out of all places visible, remove the implants from my hands and peel those pesky tattoos off.
All of a sudden I have the possibility of a new career – and I have body modifications which cannot be hidden. Tattoos? Long sleeves but I hate long sleeves and they’d get seen anyway so I need to be open about them. If they insisted on sleeves? Don’t know yet. The implants? They can’t come out. Of course I believe – not that it is my right because it is THEIR right to decline me on any grounds that make me unsuitable to their criteria and a school has to satisfy pupils, staff, governors – that the way I appear can help more than hinder. But I would say that wouldn’t I? To the school I shall go. I go as the parent of two very well thought of girls, as a man who was welcomed into and helped at the primary School and as someone who was a nurse and who believes in education. And I go as someone visibly different in a way that some find threatening.
Have I made myself unemployable? No – that’s stupid talk. I have made things more difficult but it doesn’t take a job for that to be apparent, I see it in the reactions of others, which is why I have already changed prior to this. But I don’t have any right to be treated any differently but then I have acted in a way that gives them a viable reason to treat me differently. They have the power here – I do not. I know that and I’d not fight it because it’s my fault. It’s a case of getting through the door then working harder to justify the decision to open that door.

It’s going to be interesting to find out what happens. It’ll be nice if I can smile at the end of it.

I will be accepted on a Sept 2007 Teacher Training course. I fulfill all their requirements.
I need to get some practical experience – not even a slight problem as D’s school are desperate for bodies to fill gaps.
That can start in September – not that far away.

So….. dual me? The blogging here me / the school there me? I didn’t think I’d get this sort of dilemma but hmm….. what to do …. given that what you try to hide – because you can’t hide on the internet (have I said this somewhere else………?) – comes back to bite you I suppose I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. Remove it / Leave it / Think on it.

“We need to reinforce the message that school is a ‘place of work’ preparing youngsters for the world of work, where a work ethic is required – not a house of fun to meet youngsters’ social needs.”

They are kids – it’s their JOB to have no work ethic, to have fun, to run screaming around a playground, to laugh, to cry, to befriend, fall out with and then make up with others – that’s bloody hard work and if you can’t do all that when you ARE a kid then when in hell are they meant to?
Maurice Smith – loosen up ffs. (And while you are probably not chilling out, will you also stop telling us how to raise our kids? I don’t tell you what to do and what my kuds do out of school is entirely my business, not yours.)

All this fuss about giving money for colleges and getting a peerage, the talk of establishing academies, universities dropping pass rates to 26% and even the school that the parents bought because it had closed. All that – and the Opus Dei member is kept away from the public view. For once, thank you your Tonyness :) (or more likely your spin doctors)(and seeing as we’ve all forgotten her, sack her)(Ruth who?)

Today is “Go to work day” for the kids in P’s class. So those that can go to a workplace with a parent do so they can experience a bit of ‘work life’. Those that cannot for whatever reason get to stay in school. Even if J and me still worked in our previous jobs this would be a non-starter because of the nature of the people we looked after. So we gave P a choice: go school or stay at home. No points for guessing the choice.
But she needs to do something and J suggested that she see what I do. Cool – I can do that. I then launched into ‘Housework – a lesson’ and explained what needed doing, why, that it was a vital job that is much undervalued. I added that for me I also look after J which varies so what I actually do – if I were to be paid – is worth a whole heap of money. I tried to explain that just because someone goes out of a house to somewhere else and earns money doesn’t make what they do more important than what I do. It’s different (and in some cases other jobs are more important but you know what I mean) but it’s no less a job. (Even though it’s seen as much by everyone “Hey Mark, when you going to get a proper job then?”). So, having whetted her appetite for this important job, I proposed we get started. One good rolling of the eyes and a slumping at the table suggested I’d lost the argument.

J said why not see what I do on this machine so much. Okay – I can do that too. I explained about what I do for WordPress and why, I explained about FreshlyPressed and the differences between them and I talked about other stuff I do and that most of it is US-based so when she wonders why I’m still doing stuff at night she knows why. I think she sort of got all this. So then we came to Blogs. I tried to explain what blogs were and what wordpress.com was – “Is it like Myspace?” she says. “No” I replied, it’s better”" – and we talked about getting a blog. She’s not quite sold on this domain business (Cpanel at 12 years old? Not for her) so I mentioned wordpress.com again and explained about that in some more detail. So off we go…. the name she wants is available (no surprise given the name she chose), pw sent to my email and she logs in. She clicks around, changes a couple of things, gets a girly theme and then goes to edit the default post. She pauses …. and wonders what to write. So I talk about different reasons for blogging etc, the fact some people talk techy, some do recipes, some do work or other work stuff and some write anything at all (I used the word ‘garbage’ for here :) ). She gets the idea. Minute or so later she still hasn’t typed so I ask why – she replies “Wordpress is for grownups”. (Need some colourful icons there Matt! – get’em when they are young). I thought this was amusing and no amount of explanation could remove this thought. Maybe it’s the formality of the layout.. whatever, she didn’t feel up to scaling the adult heights just yet. (Now if she’d seen some of the blogs there she’d not have that worry. I can’t wait for people to add – if they can – words like ‘l33t’, ‘hax0r’ and ‘t3h r0xx0r’ to inline spelling).
So off we go to myspace to illustrate the difference. Isn’t that place just so damn ugly? But hey, it’s sort of blogging. (And she’s now fully adblocked on firefox too). We lied to get a blog there just in case of age restrictions but we cannot have been the first. But…. she wrote less on myspace than she did wp.com. In fact she spent less time there too. Good stuff.

She decided that as a first day working a half day is enough and I’m not entirely sure she sees the point behind blogging (there is one?) or looking after domains (though she was very impressed when I told her all the countries where I’d installed WP for people. Hawaii got the biggest ‘Cool’.) but if she sees a little bit more of what I do, then that’s a result :)

Following a comment in #wordpress, and a previous observation some weeks ago on the same thing, I have a question. In English, which of these is correct:

What time is it ?

What time is it?

And why.

I am informed that this is supremely cool.

http://www.pocoyo.com
Loula rules :)