I felt my class worked really well today, so I was horrified when my classroom assistant said that she thought they were stuffing around.  She feels that I am not hard enough on them, and that there are no consequences for misbehaviour / laziness in the class. But I know that every one of my 9 kids is coming in with issues, some of them with issues adults would be struggling to deal with. I also know that "kids do well if they can", and that it is more productive to view non-compliance / difficult behaviour as a lack of skill rather than deliberate provocation. Some of the kids have sensory issues, some are probably on the autistic spectrum, more than one of them has family violence in their backgrounds and a couple probably border on, at least, emotionally neglected.  Most of them have come from schools where they were seriously unhappy, often to the point of physical illness and I will not make this classroom a place of shame or trauma for them. 

We have consequences - if they play with a toy instead of working it has to go on the bookshelf until break. If they choose to colour or draw all morning then they have to stay in at break to do their work. If they don't finish their work during the week they have to do it for homework the next week. But there's no point in getting cross about it.

I am trying really hard to balance high (but reasonable) expectations with an understanding that sometimes they really are too tired, or too sick or too upset to work effectively. Sometimes they were up watching tv with mom so she wouldn't be alone, and then got up at 5am to look after their baby brother. Maybe yesterday was a day when the chronically ill mom of another child couldn't get out of bed and so the 8 year old had to look after her all afternoon. Maybe mom forgot to pick up one of the little one's again, and anyway no-one's done anything about her ear infection so she really does feel too awful to be motivated about spelling.

So no, I'm not going to crap on them unless I absolutely have to. Because there's enough crap in their lives already. 

Tags: rant, school, teaching

My mom is doing an amazing job homeschooling M.  She is happy and doing maths and literacy way beyond what they were managing with her in school. If she comes in with me more than one day a week then we have some difficulties as it takes her a while to wind down from a classroom situation, but once a week for art seems to be fine.  For Geography, we have signed up with Postcrossing, a really really really cool site that lets you send and recieve postcards from random people in other countries. We are using it as a sort of lucky dip - when we get a postcard from a country, then M and my mom study that country for a bit. Our first postcard was from the Netherlands, so they have been researching that - we are keeping it very practical and fun - essentially just to increase her general knowledge.  So far they have dressed a paper doll in traditional dutch clothes, grown tulips and cooked us all a traditional dutch meal last night.  It was really good, and M was sooo proud that she had actually had a significant part of the cooking. It was great! 

I uploaded photos today, and realised, to my horror, that I hadn't done that for nearly 4 months. So I thought I'd post the pics of the birthday cakes I made for the children this year. 

( Cakes here... )

Now for the kitten I promised...because I know that's what you're all really interested in :).  She purrs like a cheetah, and it makes me happy.

Tags: cats, children, homeschooling
Current Mood: okay

1/8 of the way through the two stupidly overloaded years I've signed up for. PGCE, plus first time teaching, plus trying to help with homeschooling plus coping with S the human tornado.

If S would sleep through the night, that would be an improvement. I'm averaging less than 6 hours sleep a night at the moment, and basically, I'm just too old for it. Of course, sucky time management also plays a role.  Still, I'm doing better this term than last - I have only the Afrikaans, Science and one non-standard gr 4 schedule (mostly maths) left to plan for the whole term thing, then just have to do the usual week-by-week stuff that can't be done in advance. (Last term it took me the first 3 to 4 weeks to get the term scheduling done). PGCE-wise, I have an assignment and a dp hand-in, then exams on the 11th June. There are no full-weekend stints this term though, it's only Saturdays. Yay! It`s the teaching prac that's scaring me shitless, though. 

Feeling disspirited today - only 2 of the 9 kids I teach has bothered to do their holiday reading. We (the school) spent a fortune on this brilliant reading programme, and they just don't do it because they think they know how to read. And they don't.

Tags: pgce, teaching
Current Mood: wasted

I love my job. It might be the death of me, but I love it.

If I won the Lotto, I would still keep this job.

Tags: teaching, work

I am running an insane life at the moment - working til 11pm at least every night just to try to keep on top on teaching preparation and marking. Yes, I know I only have 10 students but they're in 6 different grades, and 10 different levels. So far I've sent 3 for assessment for various issues, so that gives you a bit of an indication of what kind of a class I have. They wouldn't be in a start-up alternative school with an inexperienced and not-yet-qualified teacher if they were coping with mainstream, and every single senior primary learner has some kind of issue - one has very bad eyesight, one is ADD, one had MASSSIVE emotional problems and something else I can't identify going on, one is gifted but highly visual and missing a bunch a basics and one is very weak, whether through previous crappy schooling or something else I don't know yet. So I'm trying to cater for all of them, plus my littlies and my own children's schedule and not really coping at all.

This month I have lectures every weekend, mostly Saturday AND Sunday and a big PGCE assigment due that I'm ostensibly working on now. It's just nuts and I have to figure out better ways to cope. Today I got a jab to counter the 7 day headache so I'm flyiiiiiing..... Not the best way to work on an essay about excellence in schools.

I keep forgetting about LJ and missing great hulking chunks of stuff :(.

Homeschooling seems to be going really well now. I doubt I'll ever be able to put M back in a classroom. Silly me, thinking this would be temporary.

S continues precious, and hard. OT is making a *huge* difference for him. I love their therapist :).

Tags: life, mental health, pgce
Current Mood: drugged

I feel as if I've been run over by a truck today. Only without the fun drugs one gets when that actually happens. Teh interwebs make me feel better. Bed now. M is still up. I'm considering sedation. I don't really mind which one of us takes it.

Tags: mental health
Current Mood: tired

I was going to post about this fascinating blog I have just discovered - http://meredithandmerebith.blogspot.com.  A mom blogs her conversations with her daughter who is a visual thinker and a synaesthete. It's really cool, the little I've read.

But M has just come downstairs for about the 27th time. She HAS been asleep 4 or 5 times this evening, but when we leave she wakes up and comes downstairs. This means that none of the adults have any time to do anything/ discuss anything as a family, because one of us is either missing, having to lie with M, or she's outside every 10 f-ing minutes.  We are seriously not coping with it. I am at my wits end because I have stonkloads of work to do* and I am not getting anything done.

She is sleep deprived. We're all sleep deprived because it takes 5 times longer to get anything done in the evening since it takes, on a good night, about an hour to get her to sleep, and on a bad night 5 minutes out of every 15 until about 11pm. She is scared of being up there and we are all losing it.  She is not getting positive parenting or positive messages because it is as much as we can do not to knock her unconscious to just get her to @#$#@$ing sleep.   S also doesn't sleep on his own, but he goes back to sleep quickly, and he's only 2, so it's less of an issue. She just will not stay upstairs, and there is no downstairs place that she can be in. Plus, she listens to everything, so no adult discussion can take place and I probably haven't actually had a conversation with my husband for about 2.5 months, since this started.  We have tried all sorts of things, they work briefly, and then she just comes downstairs again, and again, and again, and again.....The whole reading time thing has collapsed. I do not know what to do.

It is screwing up my parenting and making me into a horrible person and a horrible mother who is constantly hurling verbal accusations and threats at her daughter because we are all so stressed and sleep deprived that we can't cope with her and she can't cope with anything because she doesn't sleep.

I think I'll have a little weep now, maybe use a bit of profanity, make my self hot chocolate and try to finish part of my mammoth TODO list.





*hence the WABbing and blog-discovery

Tags: children, mental health
Current Mood: losing it

I've been thinking about my New Year's resolutions.  I listed the usual suspects, sleep, exercise, children, work, clutter - but all I had were formless good intentions. I already try to do better at all those things, with varying levels of success. I wanted something more concrete. Something do-able. I've got a tough year ahead of me, one that will (hopefully) involve half a post-graduate diploma, a new job in a completely new career area, a new school for my son and a new educational paradigm for my daughter.

All these things are non-trivial, time-consuming and emotionally demanding.  So my initial stab at a resolution list produced the desire to just Get Through 2012. But that's no way to start a new year. So I've thought about it hard, and I've decided to do  something completely new. Instead of trying to do better, I'm aiming for a "B".
 
I've always been an "A" student. I love learning, and I'm good at it. I define a large portion of my self worth by how well I learn, and I have always defined how well I learn by the marks I get for showing others my stuff.  This time I'm doing something really hard for me - I'm aiming for a "B". I'm studying to learn, not to score. Working for those few extra top marks won't improve my knowledge of the material, it won't necessarily make me a better teacher, and it absolutely won't make me a better mother, wife and friend.  What it will do is stress me out and cause me to neglect and sideline other parts of my life unnecessarily.

So I'm aiming for a "B". I'm going to try really really hard to be a "Good Enough" student. To choose to finish the assignment only 70% (or *gasp* 60%) well, and go to bed two hours earlier, or to ditch a few marks to go out with my family.  Believe me, this will not be easy for me.  

I'm also starting a new job in 2012. One I have always wanted to do, and have often managed to practise, in one form or another. I'm teaching. It engages me completely. It's people and design and emotion and cognition and knowledge and love in one messy, engulfing package that feels like home. It's exhilarating and exhausting.  It's very easy for me to be consumed by it. I desperately want to do well. I want to be the best teacher these learners have ever had. I want them to say, later in their lives "Wow! I had this phenomenal teacher once..." and I want that to be me.  But practically, next year is not the time for this. I have two small children - one of whom is now homeschooled. I'm studying, and we still haven't unpacked the house. So I'm going to remember that while the learners I teach deserve the best I can give, the best I can give is defined by where I am Right Now.  It won't be my best if I lose my balance. I can't aim low when other people are involved - so I'm going to give it more of me than my studies get, but - I'm going to be ok with a B. Good, but room for improvement.

I'm aiming for a "B". To be ok with that, I'm going to have to persuade myself that I am more than my accomplishments. That though I don't get marks for being a great mom, or paid to be a supportive wife or daughter, these are still vital and worthy parts of my life, my heart and my self. That health, sanity and family are more important than the pieces of paper to which I give so much power.

I'm aiming for a "B".

B is for balance. Balance in my brain, balance in my body, balance in my life.

Tags: family, mental health, resolutions, studying, teaching, work
Current Mood: determined

I need at least 3 lives. I'd like one where I stay at home and do cool crafty stuff with my children - but somehow avoid housework. I would blog that one here.

I'll have another where I get to teach and learn teaching and cognitive development stuff and be an amazing, awesome teacher (one can only hope), and I'll blog that one here.

Perhaps I'll also need one where I work at a job that actually pays me enough money to have the income we would like, that covers things like house maintenance AND child medical costs. If that was bloggable, it would be here.

Which pretty much leaves LJ for family news. So I'm all set up for it - now could I  have two or three more lives, please, to run concurrently.

(In completely unrelated news, the move "Happy thankyou more please", is lovely. No upsetting thoughts at all.)

Current Mood: busy

- My daughter is not an optimist. She is currently depressed because "advent is nearly over and then all the excitement of Christmas will be gone." :(. 

- The other day I was heading out to the shops, and said goodbye to M, who was reading on the stairs. She hadn't realised there was anyone else home, and asked plaintively "What will happen to me?". To which I made an obvious response, namely that she would grow up, leave home, and then get to decide her own bedtime. It had clearly never occurred to her that this was even vaguely in the offing because she slowly suffused with glee, and has spent the last couple of days randomly asking me what other things she'll get to decide for herself in future.

 - We have a whole new bedtime routine for M.  About a month ago she pretty much stopped sleeping. We spent two horrendous weeks where every night she went dutifully up to bed at 7:30ish, and then, after reading / singing-to etc, spend 4 hours alternating between having hysterics upstairs or coming down and having them here. During all this time, she was refusing to be upstairs in her room by herself so one of us had to be in constant attendance, plus the hysterics were waking S up so we pretty much all had very little sleep. After a particularly memorable evening during which I fined her all the money she had saved in her whole life (~R100), we had a family meeting and decided a plan of action. 

Now, M has warm milk and honey goes up to bed between 7 and 7:30pm. This is the start of Grown Up Time. After this she is not allowed back downstairs again unless it's to tell us that she is ready to go to sleep. She drinks her milk and brushes her teeth and then reads for about an hour. Initially we were going up between 9 and 9:30 because she was completely adjusted to the 11pm sleep, but now she tends to come downstairs ready for sleep at about 8:30pm. So, while I still think this is too late for a 6 year old, it's a huge improvement on hysteria 'till 11pm. Also, because it's holidays, M sleeps until about 7am in the morning, so she's still getting 10 hours a night. I think she just needs the hour to chill out and calm down so that she's ready to sleep.  Our part of the deal is to find a yellow lampshade and get her a bedside lamp. I have also provided her with a spray bottle of bright yellow Monster Repellent. Apparently, monsters are afraid of yellow.  Good to know.

Tags: children, home, mental health
Current Mood: okay