28 so far (Grumpy, old Debbies)

Well, I have been 28 for one week now. There is not a great deal of change between 27 and 28 but I have noticed a couple of subtler changes. 1. I feel grumpier. I guess it could be the stress of moving house and end-of-term* pent-up rage but I feel really grouchy. Seriously, I'm considering moving into a trash can on Sesame Street and being surly and sarcastic at children and muppets. 2. I feel more vulnerable to the cold and whinge about the weather more. I caught myself joining in one of those conversations that more mature ladies at work have about the cold. This isn't just one of those polite quick chats about the weather. This was in depth analysis and complaining about which joints and bones hurt more in the cold, the lack of proper heating, cost of electricity and thermal underwear, a pessimistic view that the 'worst was yet to come' and a general agreement that winter nowadays was not as good as the winters used to be in the old days. The thing is that I couldn't stop. I have continued to blather and bitter lament the cold weather for the duration of most days. I don't even know if I can have a conversation about topics other than the cold weather anymore. 3. I have become more forgetful. I am added to my reputation with my form class as 'senile' with my continually calling students by the wrong name. I also say the wrong words in sentences all the time. 4. I crave tea and gingernuts. Ok, it's not really a symptom of being old so much as a sign of being cold. * Students lighting fires in bathrooms on cold, rainy days really doesn't help. Evacuating in bad weather really sucks.** ** It also sucks when the fire alarms manage to short a fuse in the scool's wiring and we have a power cut for most of the afternoon!

Last night of 27

Well, tomorrow is my birthday and I still don't feel grown up.

I remember as a kid getting all excited the day before my birthday. I often became so hyper about the impending birthday that I couldn't sleep and started feeling sick and squirmy. A lot of the excitement was admittedly about the prospect of cake, presents and parties. I generally started planning my birthday party theme and birthday cake* a good 6 months in advance (as soon as Xmas was over, it was time to start thinking about the birthday). Dad used to make these incredibly cool customised games for whatever theme the birthday party was. There was usually an adventure game which was kind of like a LARP meets a pick-a-path now that I think about it. There would be illustrated booklets stuck on the walls over the house with numbers. All the kids had characters and you can to read the story and then there would be a choice about where you had to go next. Quite often there was a puzzle you had to solve or a challenge. Victory results in candy prizes. It was so good.

The theme was generally extended through other more traditional party games like pass-the-parcel, the mask or outfit you had to wear for the chocolate eating game and the musical chairs variant we had 'Here comes the keeper'.

However, I like to think that my love of birthdays was not purely mercenary. I loved the idea of growing up - getting physically bigger, becoming smarter and wiser, learning more about life and the world. I felt impatient to get older and become better. I think I associated aging with 'levelling up' (I guess I did start playing D&D at the tender age of 5). It was as though having a birthday meant that I should get to roll a +1D6 more hit points and become more powerful.

I would always run to the mirror on the morning of my birthday to see if I had noticeably changed. This continued through my teenage years, the thoughts were maybe a little more sophisticated but it was the same idea. That somehow turning a year older would make me a better person.

Somewhere in your twenties that notion starts to fade. I don't feel appreciably smarter, wiser, tougher or more powerful in teaching-fu than I did a year ago. If I try to look back objectively to say 2 1/2 years ago when I started teaching, I can see that I have improved in that I feel more confident and relaxed about it. Maybe the whole process slows down as you age - it takes longer to progress to the next step in your development.

Hmm, distracted by husband comments from the other side of the room. Random. Sometimes statements made by your spouse as he works at a neighbouring computer can be unexpected.

Example: "Awesome. You can download Tony Blair speeches."

Ok, it turns out he was only wanting them for sample speeches for school but it was unexpected nonetheless. At least it wasn't Tony Blair images he was excited about downloading. That would be freaky and gross**.

* Our family had this excellent Children's Birthday Cake Recipe Book and I would spend countless hours pouring over the pictures and selecting which cake I wanted. There were animal cakes (I had the rubber ducky and the pig), candy store shaped cakes, fairytale castles cakes and gingerbread houses, and lots of other amazingly pretty yet delicious cakes.

**More disturbing than having a pin-up of Margaret Thatcher even. At least she had balls. He is like a neutered Thatcher.

Believe it or not

Hmm, Matt just received notice from the Game Chef folks that they were short-listed for the Diana Jones Award. For a second I thought that the Monster Hunter phenomena had spread further than I had even imagined.

However, reality kicked back in and I discovered that Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming is in fact so named after a rubbed off engraving.

"Who is Diana Jones?

Nobody. The only visible part of the Indiana Jones logo within the trophy has been burnt away so that it reads Diana Jones, and the award takes its name from that." Source: http://www.dianajonesaw
ard.org/

So did the writers in fact name the Monster Hunting Action Heroine after this? Am I the only one who didn't get this as Gamer in-joke? Is it just a coincidence?

Grammar Geek Goodness

Warning: Content may be boring to people not interested in Grammar (please comment with your cries for mercy and pleas for me to NEVER write about grammar again or more may come...)

I am so in love with AsTTle at the moment - a sentiment not shared with many teachers at my school. For the non-teachers among you, AsTTle is a standardised test gives really detailed and specific feedback about your writing and reading levels (at least in English this is what it focuses on). It breaks your writing into 7 separate categories. Firstly the deeper features: Audience Awareness (how much do you write for the needs of your audience and purpose), Content (is what you are writing relevant and useful), Structure (paragraphing, sectioning and also how logically you link and order your writing), Language resources (the sophistication of the vocab, diction and relevant technical words you use). It also examines the surface features of Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling. For each of these categories the writing is put not only into the correct level of the curriculum but also into an appropriate sub-level: Basic, Proficient or Advanced.

It is pretty cool. It means that you can get extremely exact data on a student's strengths and areas needing development. Often in marking the mechanical accuracy (spelling etc) will bring down the overall grade or you might assume that accurate writing is more sophisticated. I love the breaking down of the different aspects of writing and separating out the 'what you write' from the 'how you write'.

It also has the cool nostalgic element of reminding me of level checking English students in Japan. Part of the signing up process involved you assessing the student's ability in both written and spoken English. The process was pretty speedy but you became quite really fast at picking up certain features of different levels in English. For example, if someone could answer basic questions in simple sentences but struggled with verb agreement in present perfect tense, they were a 7b.

As instructors we became pretty gun-ho about throwing around grammar terms and making up silly comments and/or games with them. One day a week I had to work in Shin-yabashira (the suburbs of Chiba) with 2 Canadian guys. In between crass comments about their sex lives or, more frequently, the lack thereof*, we had some random grammar slang and smack talk.

"Your type 2 conditionals are strong but you're weak in the ways of the type 3."

"Dude, I _own_ non-defining relative clauses."

"This is the non-defining relative clause that won't be owned by a *!@#$."

There was also the future perfect progressive tense game. Future perfect progressive tense is the most unnatural tense to try to cram into a conversation, therefore it was fun to see who would run out of FPPT things to say first.

"By the time I finish writing out this lesson feedback, I will have been working for 3 and 1/2 hours."

"By the time you finish writing that, I will have been sitting here for 5 minutes."

"By the time you stop talking, I will have been not listening to you for 6 months."

"By the time you finish that coffee, I will have been spitting in your drink for 6 months."

And so it went. What I have noticed at my school is that the terms for grammar are not consistent - the names change over the years and most of the ones I know are actually the American terms. I also do not think I have ever heard an English teacher make a joke about grammar. I kind of miss it. I like it when people have an awareness of language and enjoy playing with it. I like breaking language down into its different elements and looking at the different ways different people use it. It seems like even most English teachers think grammar is boring or take it seriously. They can't understand why I volunteer to check mark other classes. It just really interests me.

I'm fascinated that you can get thirty kids to write a description about their bedroom and what their dream bedroom would be, and each one will unique, not just in terms of content but also in the way they way they write their descriptions. The way we express ourselves and our ability to communicate through language is truly individual like a fingerprint.

* For some reason if you are a married female friend with a liberal attitude to binge drinking, guys assume you are fine with hearing their locker room drivel that can be pretty damn misogynistic. I guess they don't consider you an available female, so they don't care about being unattractively graphic or disrespectful in their discussion of females. That aside, they were lovely guys and a lot of fun to work with.

Well, we would have got the teen vote

Oh dear. Some people have posted their vote for the Wellington finalists (not judges but people who have seen all the heats) and we're not on the list. I'm trying to prepare myself for the disappointment of not making the finals when they are announced tomorrow. I still hold out hope that our movie will make the cut but I also know that it might not.

This shouldn't really matter because the experience of making it was awesome, we worked so much more efficiently than last year and I think we learned heaps. Also we have made a movie that I'm pretty darn proud of.

I have shown it to all my classes at school, even my alternate Year 12 English class which I had planned not to as I'm not very good at taking criticism of the non-constructive variety.

I've got to say the reactions were overwhelmingly positive, especially with the juniors. We have made a film that would very popular with the 13-15 year old boy demographic. My year 10 class spontaneously starting applauding wildly during the closing credits. It was actually pretty moving because enthusiasm does not come easily to teenagers and they are not going to clap out of politeness or to spare their teacher's feelings. These kids are downright honest when it comes to telling you that a book or movie that you chose for them is "boring" or "stupid" so when they are positive about something, it is pretty nice.

In fact the lads in my form class started calling me Diana Jones for the next couple of days and excitedly told their science teacher that I was in a movie and could shoot guns*. I guess if you ever want some teens to think you are cool you should stroll about looking angry and wielding weapons.

It is nice that our film appeals to those who aren't part of the 48 hour film competition - it stands up well outside of that context. I explained after the class had seen it that it was made in a weekend for the competition and that it had required elements but they didn't need to know them to get the film. I had to explain to several what an optimist was and then one young lad nodded thoughtfully and said "ah, that's what the hippy guy was." Hee hee. They thought that Robin Slade was a hippy apparently because he was happy, didn't want to shoot anyone and wore a Hawaiian shirt.

* The only criticism I received was that I didn't shoot the monster. They couldn't understand why I didn't shoot melty man when the gun was right there. Some of them were yelling angrily at the TV "just shoot him!" towards the end. The bloodthirsty wrath was abated slightly with the 'cool' neck-snapping. One even asked, "did that guy really break his own neck?"