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 . . .

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.

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.

 

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!

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.

I've lost weight!

It's been ages since I managed to weigh myself, as my days have usually been so full that I haven't felt relaxed enough to take the time. Plus the scales are in a public area of the house (my parents' study) which made me selfconscious.

This morning I felt relaxed enough, and my parents were busy elsewhere, so I jumped on the scales.

I've lost more than 3 kilos!

I knew I had to be losing weight because my clothes were getting looser, but that's happened before without any really obvious change on the scales. I was pretty delighted to see that number pop up :-D

All I've been doing is, basically, being too damn busy to eat. I'm so harried and stressed and constantly busy that there's really no time for me to snack or even think about snacking. And I'm too broke to be buying food when I'm out, most of the time. That, and the fact that Mum weighs my dinners along with hers so that they're Weight Watchers portions, seems to be doing the trick.

Now to keep it up . . .

Not forgotten

Back in 1995, 14-year-old Christine sat down at her computer and began to write an autobiographical novel. Its subject was to be the utter destruction of life as she knew it, which followed her parents' divorce and the forced house-move that meant losing contact with every friend she'd ever had. The title was going to be Please Don't Forget Me - a plaintive plea to her former classmates not to let her prior existence disappear entirely.

It sounds silly now, doesn't it! I don't want to to trivialise what I was going through at that age - my existing life had been destroyed. Like all teenagers I experienced the shock with a level of hysteria that seems peculiar to my adult self, but to me at 14 the distress was very real.

On Saturday the 1st I went to the 10-year reunion of the high school I left in 1994 (ie I would have graduated year 12 with the class of 1997). I went along expecting to spend most of the night explaining who I was – because, of course, I was only there for two years, and I was so quiet and unimportant that no one would remember me, would they?

So . . . it took about 30 seconds for someone to scream “OMG! Christine! You’re here! Where did you go?!”. And more in the same vein. All night. Everyone remembered me, many had missed me, some had vaguely worried about my disappearance (I didn’t announce that I was leaving, I just didn’t turn up in year 10). I was hugged, interrogated, enthused at, etc.

I’ve been a bit blown away by it all, to be honest. For so long I’ve assumed that I’d made little or no impression on the people who shared those two years at that school with me – certainly far less of an impression than they had made on me. But the evidence is incontrovertible . . . they remembered me! I’m now Facebooked with lots of them too, and suddenly I’ve got almost as many friends from that high school as I would have if I’d been there right up until graduation. It’s almost . . . almost . . . like the horror of being snatched away from that school never really happened.

And that’s a *weird* feeling!

I’m so busy with prac at the moment that I haven’t had time to analyse all of the feelings that have been thrown up by the reunion. Which is possibly a good thing – it can sort itself out without my help! But in the quiet moments when I’ve been able to listen in to the background noise of my brain, it seems that I’m intensely glad to know that I was remembered and valued by so many people, and it also seems I’ve gained a building block in my attempts to repair my ever-crumbling self-esteem. I believed I was almost invisible at high school, unnoticed and unmemorable. I was wrong. I was visible and important and part of things. I really was.