Christine, Wondering

Random Musings of a Human Becoming

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Over it

I'm so bored at uni at the moment. The assignments I'm doing are simply irrelevant: they neither assess nor inform my teaching skills. And they're also not legitimate assessments. Since when has a 10-minute group presentation been any indication of learning?! And yet we've been taught that all assessment must be valid . . . *sigh* Roll on exams and the whole thing being over and done with. That's still four and a bit weeks away.

With any luck I'll find out which school I'm going to next year within those four weeks, and can start making some definite plans. And hopefully those definite plans will involve 'S' who I'm looking forward to meeting on Sunday. Fingers crossed . . .

Monday, October 15, 2007

Well, that's done

I've just finished doing the wipe-out of all of the melodramatic posts. I've left some of the whingey ones, because they've got content that's important for general context, but the real melt-downs are gone. And I'm not going to be posting them any more . . . they're not healthy.

In other news, Mum took this photo of me at my uncle's wedding last month. I was hugging 9yo-brother, and I think it's rather a lovely shot.

Sunday, October 14, 2007

Aspergers

This article is an interesting read for anyone who's wondered what it's like to have Aspergers.

I found the article truly uncanny - so many of the things this guy talks about ring true in my own childhood. For example, he talks about having hated the act of bashing apart piñatas and having been taken home inconsolable from a party after having watched the piñata donkey being 'killed'. I used to cry if I accidentally 'hurt' one of my dolls . . . I still feel guilty that they're locked up in boxes getting squashed, for that matter. 

The whole article is full of such things. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be inside my head (or wondered what I mean when I say that it’s my childhood more than my adulthood that confirms that I have Aspergers), then have a read. That’s what it’s like.

 

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Change Coming Soon

This is my second week of "study break", and so far I've spend one day writing assignments and two days in bed fighting off yet another sore-throat-based virus. Blech.

The next two weeks are taken up with classes, then I have four more weeks of assignment-writing time, two weeks in which I will have two exams, and then I'm done with this course and free to just work (for money!) and relax until I move sometime in January.

Sometime in the next two months this blog is going to undergo a purge. I'm going to take out all of the torrid, tragic posts from my moments of deep depression, and my savage rants from moments of rage. I want to use this blog as a place to share information with friends and "selected" family members once I go country - a journal of my country schoolma'am experience lol - so all that needs to go. Plus I think it's better to put those experiences to bed. I'm determined to come to grips with my weight, my finances and my depression next year - all at once, as they're inextricably linked anyway. So I'm going to spring clean my blog and make a fresh start.

The fun stuff and photos will remain!

Thursday, October 4, 2007

Coming up for air

Hi. 

Prac is over, and I'm currently on a two-week "study break", which largely means that I'm either writing assignments or doing extra shifts at work because I need the money. "Break" doesn't really feature all that much.

Prac was horrible. Well . . . I loved the teaching, and I passed, but both my teacher and my supervisor made it explicitly clear that they don't believe in graduate diplomas, think the course should be scrapped, and don't think any grad dip student can ever be good enough, especially when compared with the "wonderful" fourth-year BEd students. I nearly killed myself coming up with interesting and innovative programmes and keeping up with the paperwork, and all I got was "satisfactory" for everything on my report, even though my teacher was effusive about many of my lessons at the time when I taught them.

I’m angry and frustrated and sad and annoyed, but there’s nothing I can do, and it won’t matter a damn in the long run – the education department contract is valid as long as I passed my prac, and after a year in the classroom it really won’t matter at all.

But it hasn’t helped my confidence any, and I spent most of the long weekend (ie last weekend) wondering whether I was actually unemployable since I apparently keep stuffing up professional work situations. I think I’m not. But . . . I don’t know. Oh well, I can always do what everyone keeps saying, and find & marry a nice farmer :-D SAHM ftw!

(. . . er. That little burst of abbreviations translates to “stay at home mothering for the win” . . .)

Yesterday I took a break from everything – assignments, work, too many damn people in this house – and drove out into the Wheatbelt region east of Perth, which is where I’ll be teaching next year. I did a big loop and briefly visited (or did a drive-by viewing of) the towns of Bakers Hill, Northam, Meckering, Goomalling, Wongan Hills, Calingiri, Bolgart and Toodyay, which are eight out of the 35 towns I may be sent to next year (there’s 38 schools in those 35 towns – Northam has 3 schools and Merredin 2, the others all just one). None of those I visited are more than two hours’ drive from my parents’ house. It was a very pleasant day, and the scenery was lovely – green fields of wheat and lupins (it’s Spring here), spectacular wildflowers on the verges and around the creeks and gullies, and some striking rock formations.

Between Wongan Hills and Calingiri I stopped at Lake Ninan, a large inland salt lake from which the Mortlock River flows. Here’s some photos . . .

Several of the lake. The hills in the background are the Wongan Hills. In the local Aboriginal language (I think it’s still Noongar out there, but don’t quote me), they were known as Wongan Katta – Wongan meaning “whispering” and katta meaning “hills”. So, the Whispering Hills. I like that!










Salt crystals around the shore of the lake. When I was taking these, the glare off the sand and the salt was so bright that I could barely see the screen of my camera, even with a hat and sunglasses on, so I had to kind of guess that they were coming out!



I liked Wongan Hills the best of all the towns I visited, although Goomalling came in a close second for atmosphere even though it’s smaller than I’d like. I don’t like Northam (it’s too big and has too many social problems), Toodyay alright but the school is large and it has some of the difficulties of Northam, Bakers Hill is so close to the metro area that I might not get housing, and Calingiri, Bolgart and Meckering are just so small – Meckering’s school only has 30 pupils! Still, I’ll go where I’m sent, and I’m sure I’ll be fine wherever I go. I still don’t love the Wheatbelt landscape as much as the forests of the South West, but from what I saw yesterday, it’s not unlovable.