Only Your Fleas Will Mourn You

"You were born a street rat. You'll die a street rat. And only your fleas will mourn you!"





Look familiar? Chances are, if you are one of my dearest friends, you and I have watched this movie together many, MANY times. And in particular, I'm looking at you, Jewls :)

Well, this morning around 8:30 AM when I finally crawled back home, I stared at myself in the mirror and all I could think to say to myself was, "Well lookie here - a street mouse!" My eyes were bloodshot, my hair was a disaster, my face was windburnt, my clothes were dirty, my toes were still numb from the cold, and I really do think I had picked up some fleas.

Last night, I was worse off than Aladdin. At least Aladdin got to sleep on the streets of Agrabah (read: WARM somewhere in the middle east) with a fuzzy simian companion. I, however, slept on the frigid ground on the streets of Birmingham with nothing but a plastic sheet, a cardboard box, and a shot of horrrrrilbe whiskey to comfort me. That's right . . . last night I was homeless.

I know this is a TOTALLY random place to pick up with my blogging, especially because I haven't said a word since my first week of teaching, and here I am at the end of my third! But honestly, a huge part of why I haven't blogged yet is because I simply don't know where to start. So I'm lucky that I had the most absurd Saturday night imaginable . . . it prompted me to write. To start SOMEWHERE. So at least now I've broken the silence. And David can stop harassing me on GChat.

I guess the first point to make about yesterday is that Saturday is NOT part of the weekend in boarding school. You have five lesson blocks on Saturday morning. 8:30 AM to 12 AM. Saturday. Morning. Class. W. T. F. As if this job wasn't life-consuming enough already, they take our Saturday mornings. And then they take our Saturday afternoons too . . . and if we are lucky like yesterday . . . they take the whole night as well. Ok, so a NORMAL Oundle Saturday looks like this: class in the morning, Sport match away in the afternoon with buses leaving around 1:30, finally getting home around 5 PM, and hitting the pub (or drinking at home) with friends in the evening. Then you wake up the next day and it's Sunday . . . your ONE DAY weekend . . . on which you probably have to make all your lesson plans for Monday. Especially if you are me and Monday is your biggest day of the week. Teaching lessons for 6 periods out an 8 period day.

Right, so that's a REGULAR Saturday. And then sometimes we have "Field Weekends." These are the times when the younger kiddies (1st-3rd Form) get to go home for the weekend, and rest of us stay around to do either volunteer work or military training. No, I'm not joking . . . volunteer work or MILITARY TRAINING. Kids at Oundle school tend to be involved in 1 of 2 organizations - "Community Action" which is a voluteer organization aimed at doing community service, or "CCF" (which stands for Combined Cadet Force) which is military training. Army, Navy, Air Force, you name it. And during Field Weekends, CA and CCF rear their ugly heads and steal what should be everyone's long weekend. CCF kids go out hiking and living on Army rations, and CA kids . . . sleep out like homeless people.

Option #1:



Option #2:




Right, so WHY did I have to sleep in a cardboard box in the nearly-freezing-cold last night? That is QUITE a good question, and one that I don't have a full answer to. The simple answer is that CA (Community Action) was participating in a "sleepout." As far as I can tell, Oundle donated about 3000 pounds to a charity called "St. Basils" which works to shelter homeless young people and give them life skills to get them off the streets. And then St. Basils hosts yearly "sleepouts" where all the benefactors of St. B's go and have a night that gives them an approximate experience of what it feels like to be homeless on a cold night about half a mile from the city center of the second biggest city in England.

Now I KNOW this does not answer the question of why we were sleeping on the street. The act of sleeping on the street didn't in itself raise any money. In fact, it took money to hire the buses to get the students to Birmingham (2 hour drive), to buy the cardboard and plastic bags that would be our houses for the night, and to buy enough soup to feed us in the evening. Ok - so the act of the sleepout wasn't about the money. It also wasn't a protest. There was no press coverage. There was no one that knew we were doing this other than St. Basil's and Oundle. So this leaves me only to guess at the purpose of the actual sleepout. My best guess is that it was aimed at trying to get the privileged Oundle students to realize how hard it is to be homeless and how good they have it.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. But I don't want to bring down the tone of this post by ranting about what I think is a very misguided endeavor.

What matters is that the sleepout happened, the students went, and I went with them.

Being a new staff member puts you at the bottom of the food chain. I know that this is the way many working environments function - the new kids on the block get to do all the grunt work. We have to earn our place. It's a bit like hazing. But basically, there are bitch jobs that need to get done, and only the new people are soft enough to give into doing them. And only the new people don't yet know who to avoid. There are a few people at Oundle who all the older staff avoid like the plague. And two of them are 1) the person who runs CCF, and 2) the person who runs CA. This is because once you've been at Oundle for a year, you know that these are the people who will corner you next to the copier in the math department and ask you in a sickeningly sweet voice if you wouldn't mind helping some enthusiastic kids in a worthwhile community service endeavor. BLAH. If you can't tell . . . I got suckered. There is a REASON that the seven members of staff who went along on the sleepout were all new members of staff. We were naive. We were soft. We were ignorant. We were perfect targets.



So, my Saturday looked like this:

1) Wake up really freaking early to teach lessons.
2) Get in a taxi (by myself . . . again I got sweet-talked into making this midday trek as well) around 1:30 to drive 2.5 hours Chaltenham to pick up various members of girls' hockey teams who had been at away games.
3) Find minibus that was ordered to take 13 hockey girls and me from Cheltenham to Birmingham (2 hour drive) . . . with the only information I had being "The minibus will arrive on the campus at 5 PM." Right. No problem that the campus was a few square miles. And that I spent most of that time running around looking for five different hockey teams who had played on different pitches all over the campus.
4) Drive in mysteriously-found minibus with 13 hockey girls to Birmigham, stopping at McDonalds along the way and secretly breaking school protocol because I WANTED SOME FREAKING CHICKEN NUGGETS.
5) Arrive at our special parking lot in Birmingham around 7:30 PM and wait another hour for the 130 other students to show up who had driven the 2 hours from Oundle on big buses.
6) Make sure no students died/killed each other/slept with each other/did illegal substances/ran off during a night where all we had were warm clothes, cardboard boxes, and the street until 6 AM.
7) Corral kids onto the buses at 6:30 AM.
8) Get back to Oundle around 8:30 AM this morning.
9) Pass out on couch until 3 PM.
10) Collapse for laziest Sunday in known history.




So here I am on the other side. Showered. Rested. And of course not one bit bitter. I'm above bitterness. Obviously.

BUT THERE ARE SO MANY GOOD THINGS. FOR REALS.

One is that TODAY I got my first BIG GIRL PAYCHECK. It was so glorious. And Allie and I promptly ran out and bought some reaallllyyy good food to cook for dinner. And dinner was sooooo good. It was a victory feat. Plus, Allie is an AMAZING cook. She can improvise anything, and has tons of fantastic recipes memorized too. Not only did she make chicken and gnocchi for dinner, but she made chocolate banana bread for breakfast. The woman is my hero.

Then we also took our big girl paychecks and planned a day away. And that day away is TOMORROW. The good thing about Field Weekend is that you get MONDAY OFF. So tomorrow, Allie and I are catching a train bright and early and going to Cambridge. And no, not the fake Cambridge where that crappy school is in the US. This is the real Cambridge. With Cambridge University. Which I guess is supposed to be pretty good. She and I are just running away for a day. Seeing beauty and blowing a little bit of our money. Goodness knows we need it.

Cambridge University:



Ok. I guess that's all for now. I feel good having broken the silence. There will be more, and hopefully soon.

I really am loving my job despite the cynicism of this post. I LOVE teaching, and overall I feel like it's going well. I'm certainly no pro, and I have some days where I just come home and cry. But I have more days where I come home beaming. And because Friday was one of those days, it's still fresh in my memory.

Alright. I hope you all had lovely weekends. As always, your comments make my day, so say hello!

All my love,

Freddie

In the "Hood"

I have so much to write, but I find myself absolutely exhausted and thinking I should treat myself to some sleep pretty soon. So this will probably be short and sadly lacking in LOLcatz pictures. Sorry folks :)

I woke up at 6 this morning, and had MAYBE one full hour of "Me Time" between 6 AM and 11 PM. Does that make this a 17 hour work day? I'm thinking it does.

My morning: Got to the department at 7 when the building opened. Prepared a lab practical, fixed a broken projector, and wrote a homework set all before the kids showed up at 8:30 for their first lessons. Because of first-day things like assemblies, my morning classes didn't meet, so I took the morning to sit-in on the lessons my colleagues were teaching. It was a very mixed bag. On teacher, whose nickname is "Dr. Death" is beloved by his students, and he told me he improvised his entire lesson. Even so, he was articulate and held his students rapt. He insulted them all as a form of getting to know them, and they loooooved it. The other lessons were mixed, and most tended to be a little more conventional than Death's lesson. One of my colleagues who I thought was going to be great to watch turned out to be very unclear in his lesson. I was very surprised. Another was very good at engaging the class and he made the whole lecture almost seem like a dialogue. And yet another teacher gave a very conventional chalk-and-talk that was effective if not thrilling. It was really really really good to see what other kinds of things were going on in the chem department.

My afternoon: Had lunch in my boarding house and met with my Tutees. We actually have longer meetings scheduled for tomorrow one-on-one, but today was a day to touch base and assure them that I know all of their names :) At some point, when I have more time to write, I'll have to write about what I've observed about this all-girls boarding house. Some of it is a bit . . . much. Just imagine 60 teenage and younger girls living together. Yeah . . . today I heard the shrillest version of "Happy Birthday" that I could have ever imagined even in my worst nightmares.

After lunch: Three periods of teaching students! A single block with my Lower 6th form Research Projects class. The class is only four students and me, so I started the lesson by explaining my expectations for the caliber of their work and the nature of the projects, and then I met with the kids one-on-one to help them brainstorm projects form their interests. With different kids, we thought about projects on anything from isolation of ethanol from different types of beer to the creation of healthier baby foods. The kids came up with great ideas and have broad interests, and I'm excited to help them find ways to turn them into good science projects! Again, I'd love to write more about this, but ZOMG SLEEP SOON.

My last class of the day was a double-block with my class of 4th form chemists. In the first half I lectured, and in the second half I ran a lab practical. In the lecture, I reviewed what they knew about different types of bonding, and then we went more in depth on the subject of covalent bonding. I felt pretty darn good about the lecture. I felt a little less good about the practical. Imagine 24 teenagers who have just gotten back from a good summer: they have Bunsen burners, they have to use lit matches to test for hydrogen gas (it makes a shrill popping noise if there is hydrogen gas present), the boys are pyromaniacs and use fire to flirt with the girls, the girls want to talk with each other at a mile a minute, and everyone wants to dive in to experiments before they've really thought about them. Now I'm making it sound worse than it really was, but even so I felt like the kids got a little out of control in the lab. I see the same kids tomorrow, and I'm going to try to be a littler sterner with lab behavior. Just having it be my first day, I was a little frazzled by the situation today. Now that I know what to expect, I'll be able to show them my teeth tomorrow, haha.

Evening: After sticking around for about an hour after the kids left to clean the lab and sort out some paperwork, I had about 30 min before eating supper in my boarding house again. Then I met with the head hockey coach to talk about how the heck I'm going to be an effective hockey coach for lots of little boys starting on Thursday. Haha, I'm still not sure what the answer to that is . . .

And finally, I found myself back at home around 8:30 where I promptly poured myself a glass of wine and got to lesson planning. And I didn't look up from my plans until 11 except to eat one of the LOVELY sugar cookies my darling housemate Allie made for us. Haha, her idea of a treat for us after our first day was baked cookies. Mine was sharing a bottle of white wine. It was a pretty nice combo :)

And now here I am. Exhausted. I feel like I've run a marathon today, and I have to jump into another full sprint tomorrow. I think I am going to EARN those 18 weeks of vacation in this year. I think teachers need that much vacation because we don't seem to have any time of our own as long as there are students attending school.

Oh yes, and I bet you are confused by the title of this post. It was a fun "English" moment of the day. In my chemistry studies in the US, the place where we carry out the really noxious reactions is called the "fume hood," often just "the hood" for short. And it turns out the English do NOT call it that. So when I casually told my 4th form class that I was going to do "a particularly nasty reaction in the Hood" I got quite a few giggles. They thought I had been trying to talk like a gangsta. And obviously I am a gangsta, so I don't know why they laughed :-P Probably out of fear of getting shot by this street-smart American who knows how to cap some chemists in the Hood.

Ok . . . yikes being exhausted turns these posts into a bit of a sick parody. I love you all for reading despite the weirdness.

<3 Freddie

What If It All Goes Pear Shaped?

The heading for today's post was a headline that caught my eye on the "IT Help" page of the teacher training handbook. Just like you, I had NO IDEA what this heading meant, but by the glorious power of context clues, I managed to deduce that it essentially means "What if everything goes wrong?" So I guess this is today's lesson in British slang. Brought to you by the letter "zed."

Sorry it's been a while since I wrote. Things have gotten pretty hectic pretty quickly. And even now, I should probably be lesson planning, or memorizing my students' names from the pictures I've been given, or learning how to play field hockey (you'll know why in a few more paragraphs), or studying the government-issued tests that I'll have to give to my Lower 6th form kids throughout the year, or even just getting ready to go to the pub (YET AGAIN) to meet more staff. But right now, I'm frustrated because I've been thwarted for the third bloody time in trying to get myself a cell phone, and I'd rather just write to all you lovely people.

Starting on Tuesday, this sleepy little town came alive. All of the staff who had been "on holiday" for the summer came rushing back to town, and the staff training began. There are 28 new members of staff, and we all had to attend the New Staff Drinks Party on Tuesday night. Here, we met the Headmaster and all the other staff who weren't new but decided to crash our party anyway. Then, afterward, we partook in the very British custom of the Pub Exodus: all of the staff, new, un-new, young, old, Chem department, English department, Sport coaches, even the partners of staff members, all headed over to THE SHIP.

The pub known as THE SHIP is an Oundle phenomenon. You can meet every type of staff member or townie here. You can buy British beer (which is served only slightly cooled and tends to be much hoppier than the American stuff), "lagers" (which are what the British call the types of beers Americans drink - the stuff that's served cold and it a bit waterier), or glasses of wine. There is liquor in THE SHIP (haha, I'm just capitalizing it because I think it's funny to say THE SHIP in a booming voice, and hopefully you read the words in a booming voice when you see CAPS), and in fact the liquor is on tap, but if you buy a mixed drink, the whole pub will stop their galavanting and turn around to stare are you like you are a creature from outer space. It was explained to me this way: "Why would you think of having a cocktail when you can have a pint?" And I guess he had a point . . . I'm lucky that I like beer.



Ah yes, but the social phenomenon of THE SHIP. The impression I get is that every single person goes every single night. Now I know this can't possibly be true, but so far I haven't seen my theory disproved! I've been invited to go tonight, and I was there last night, and the night before, and the night before . . . you get the idea. The pub, I've been told, is the center of British social life. You can just hang, smoke cigarettes (blech), have a pint, watch Sport, play poker, and meet all sorts of folks. The pub is just what people do. They unwind with a pint and friends. It's a pretty beautiful thing, actually. I just can't keep up with them quite yet. And I imagine the other staff will tame it down a bit when term starts . . . on Monday.

The new staff spent Wednesday in new staff training. Which was a lot of sitting in a cold room listening to people who we will never see again talk. It. Was. Tedious. The plus side was that they fed us steak, wine, and cheesecake for lunch! Another British thing: lunch is the big meal of the day. What they call "supper" is very light. Then Thursday was a training day for the whole staff, and it was Even. More. Tedious. Goodness, I was glad to get out of there at the end of the day.

Today was a day of running around between lots of different meetings pertaining to my different types of responsibilities. Now that I know a bit more about what I'm doing beyond teaching, I think I'll fill you in.

My job has three primary facets, and each different zone of my job has a few duties it entails. The three facets of my jobs are these: 1) academic teaching, 2) pastoral care, and 3) coaching sport. I think each of these warrants its own few paragraphs.

Academic teaching is the one that I've already begun to explain. This is all the time I spend in lessons teaching the kiddies chemistry and physics. It is the biggest time commitment of the job, and the one that I think I'm the most excited about. It's also the part that I think I will be best at. But of course, I won't know until I have met the five different rooms full of kids that I have to teach. So far, I've been practicing giving lessons to empty classrooms, but I think having real (as opposed to imaginary) students will make a WORLD of difference. Some time next week, I'll let you know how the teaching is going :)

Pastoral care is the facet of my job that I haven't understood much about until today. Essentially the "pastoral" component of British boarding school life is everything outside of your full day of work. Where you life, what you eat, who looks after you . . . these are components of pastoral care. Much like Yale, Oundle has different houses. There are 13 of them, but these ones are girl/boy segregated. Each boarding student is assigned to a house, as is each staff member. The kids live there, and the staff members have duties that they perform for the house. That's where I step in!

Part of the pastoral system is a grouping of Tutors with Tutees. I'm a tutor assigned to Kirkeby girls' house, and hence I have six Tutees who are girls that live in that house. My duties toward them are essentially to check in on them every week to make sure they are doing what they should be doing. We meet formally for the first time next Tuesday (!!!!) and then its up to me to go out of the way to forge a friendship and to support them throughout the school year. I'm both nervous and excited for this part of the job. Being personally responsible for overseeing the lives of teenage girls is a bit of a daunting task. And then I actually have one student who is moving in TOMORROW, and I'm going to meet her and her parents at five. Yikes! Not only do I have to make a good impression on her . . . I have her parents to impress to. Nervous nervous nervous.

The second component of my pastoral duties is "house duty." The means that one night a week, I am the adult who is "on duty" in Kirkeby boarding house. I am personally responsible for making sure that about 60 teenage girls show up for dinner, do their homework quietly for 1.5 hours, get ready for bed at the right time, and turn out their lights promptly when I tell them to! HAHAHAHAHAHA. Are they serious?!! I CANNOT imagine that they make this system work. One person has to corral all of these teenage girls and get them to behave? I will believe it when I see it. They say that the girls are pretty obedient, but I'm waiting to see the system in effect. Dubious dubious.



The final component of my duties is to coach sport. This is the part that seemed funniest to me when I was hired for the job, but strangely enough, EVERY member of the staff is expected to participate in sport coaching, just as EVERY single pupil is required to play a sport every single season. For the younger kids, their sports are assigned to them, and starting in the 5th form, the kids get to chose their sport. Staff have to coach a sport for 2 out of the 3 terms of the year, and can you guess what I'm coaching? No, you probably can't unless you paid attention at the very beginning of this post. In my very first term, I am the assistant coach for 3rd form BOYS FIELD HOCKEY. Hahahahaha. That's right. I am coaching a sport I know NOTHING about. And it seems like this happens a lot. In fact today, I attended a pretty dreadful 3 hour meeting specifically for staff who have been assigned to coach field hockey, but know nothing about it. I'm sitting here laughing and thinking that its a DARN good thing that I'm an assistant coach to someone who (hopefully) has played this sport before. And is a boy, I hope. It seems like a bad idea to have me coaching an obscure boy's sport, but I have been reassured that really it's fine. Ok. I guess I'll see.

But THEN in the next quarter, I get to have a little more fun. After Christmas, I am an assistant coach for GIRLS RUGBY! Yesssssss. And I met up with the head coach at THE SHIP and he's very very very excited to have me on board. He didn't have an assistant coach last year, and he's just thrilled that there's a young lady who knows a little about the game and is excited to coach it. So basically, hooray! If I can make it through a term of coaching boy's hockey, I get the reward of coaching girl's rubgy. Eyes on the prize, me. Eyes on the prize.



Blargh, I wrote a list of a few more things to write about, but I think I've rambled for long enough tonight. Maybe later I'll write about what it was like in London or about the friends I'm making. I might even write about my lovely housemate Alie who's been living with me since Sunday. She and I have really hit it off, and even though we both went to Yale, somehow we never managed to meet each other. Haha, well I'm glad we have now. I'm finding myself in the best living situation I've had since I lived with my parents in high school. This is good :)

Ok, tonight I leave you with a picture I plucked off the internet of the Oundle Great Hall, which is the building where we have larger assemblies and lectures for kids in the Upper 6th Form. Looks a bit like Yale . . . only authentic :-P

Cheerio, chaps. Much love to you all.

<3 Freddie