close your eyes and think of england

It took some pretty strong persuasion but I am coming out of a year long retirement (again) to appear on stage. I can’t actually tell you much about the play itself – I’ve only been to the auditions and one read through. I should really have read through the script about a dozen times by now but this is me we’re talking about.

It’s a play by William Douglas Home called The Secretary Bird. An English comedy apparently; which generally means not very funny and we have to put on English accents (which I cannot do.)

The concept is something like this – forgive me if any of this is inaccurate. A married couple are having issues. The wife, Liz, has taken herself a lover, and plans to run away with him. The husband, Hugh, agrees to give her a divorce. To avoid her being named as the reason for the break up he arranges to be caught in bed with his attractive, young secretary by his housekeeper. Still with me? He invites his secretary, Molly, and his wife’s lover, John over for the weekend. Of course nothing goes to plan; the husband and wife reconcile and John leaves with Molly. Fun, frolics and laughter abound. I will be playing John, the wife’s lover with the slightly dodgy Canadian-Irish tinged English accent and who is nowhere near as athletic as he is supposed to be.

I haven’t acted in a stage play for a very long time. The thought of it fills me with dread and panic. But there is one thing that is worrying me more than anything. The idea of having to kiss an old woman in front of an audience… well, I can’t imagine it – I’m trying not to.

Public kissing is not an issue for me. In my first year and a half at university I was in eleven plays, nine of which involved making out with a total of ten different people. It became passé. It was like a normal, everyday thing. But these were all people the same age, or slightly younger than me. This woman is in her sixties.

Would it make me ageist if I was slightly uncomfortable with the idea of making out with a pensioner? Would I be bad person? I don’t care. I am.

God bless Google

I was pacing round my classroom giving my year 9 drama class examples of different ways of delivering the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy when it suddenly struck me...

"If I go into Google and search using the cache feature my blog will still be there."

And so it was - all but the most recent entries anyway, and they weren't worth saving anyway. I reckon I'll spend the next couple of weeks reinstating the old ToaSNT post by post. Maybe then I'll tackle the skin. Sound fun? Yeah, I guess not; not everyone has a life like mine.

The End?

... or just another beginning.

I'm sorry folks. I did something incredibly stupid. I was doing a redesign for an ex pupil of mine - check it out over at The Thoughts of a Student with Aspergers Syndrome - and I created a temporary blog in my account on which to test it. The thing is after I'd finished with it I hit delete... on the wrong blog.

ToaSNT died.

Apparently there is no way to recover blog entries that are deleted by mistake. That seems like something Blogger should look into - you know, giving a few hours of grace time just incase someone, suffering from tequila or stupidity, deletes three years worth of blog.

Anyway, I'm lacking motivation to write anything right now - but looks like it's back to sqare 1. And, looking on the bright side, at least I can revisit some of the topics I've already blogged on - who's going to know?

Never Happy

You just can’t trust these admin types. After venting about how they blocked Blogger and all that’s good about the internet for practically the whole of the Easter Holiday I returned on Monday to find it has been unblocked.

This should be cause for celebration – A carnival of liberty. We could light a torch of freedom and run with it through the streets of London… or maybe not. It is surely nothing but good news. So why am I sitting looking at my computer screen with mixture of bemusement and concern?

Maybe you’re thinking that there’s no pleasing this man. Maybe you’re thinking I’m only happy when I’ve got something to complain about. I just have this nagging concern about why Blogger was unblocked again. They must have blocked it for a reason – I may not agree with their reasoning but they must have had one. What has changed? Why haven’t they stuck to their guns and continued to make my life more difficult? Maybe I’m a stubborn old fool but when I make a principled stand against something it takes an awful lot to make me admit I’m wrong.

I’d love to imagine that they read my post and were so moved by my argument (and insults) that they had a complete change of heart. I’d love that but I can eliminate the theory for three separate reasons: 1. How could they read it when blogger had been blocked from the network? 2. No one actually reads this blog. 3. If I were them and I read something like what was in that post it would do nothing other than harden my resolve.

So I’m confused.

While in the mood for complaining let me add this; what on earth am I going to use as my excuse for not updating this more regularly now?

student politics

Our year 12s have started a petition to be allowed to go on study leave early. The head boy just brought it round to get me to sign it half an hour ago.

I was a bit confused - I don't even teach the year 12s so why they felt my signature would lend any weight is beyond me. I looked down through the list of names and comments and I realised that there were quite a lot of teachers who were more than happy to wave good bye to their GCSE classes, including the head of year who seems to have given the whole thing his blessing.

I, as is the mode, am in two minds. I don't trust kids enough to work on their own at home in the build up to big examinations. This cynicism comes from my own experience. I did practically nothing to prepare for my own GCSEs and when it came to A-levels I did nothing. In fact during my A-levels I was out every night.

Maybe it's unfair to tar this present crop with my brush; but I just can't see how sending them off early is going to improve their chances.

Having said that I am impressed with their initiative. Getting the whole thing sanctioned by their head of year was a stroke of genius - it lends gravity and makes the rest of us more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt. If they have completed the course and have handed in all the coursework why not set them free to fly. Apart from anything else it'll free up some time for the other classes.

Me? I sat firmly on the fence. I signed the petition but wrote the words 'I'm too busy marking to take the time to form an opinion on the matter.' The head boy wasn't impressed.

Real teaching - the substitute way

let us live our lives!

I’m angry – really angry. I’ve tried looking at it for every point of view, tried to work out their thought process, but I give up. The powers that be in terms of IT provision in Northern Ireland Education have decided that Blogger is too much of a risk to young minds and blocked it from the C2K network. This means that anyone trying to access a Blogger or Blogspot blog from any school in Northern Ireland will be shown a blocked access page instead.

I am appalled. As an English teacher I teach the variety and uses of blogs, I encouraged pupils to express themselves using blogs, I used blogs to look at the concept of writing for a specific audience. Now I am completely unable to look up any of my trusted sites.

It’s not just blogging that is suffering from C2k blocking. When I was a learning support teacher I regularly used word games from the East of the Web website. These were incredibly useful and fun ways to improve all kinds of literacy skills. Within six months of discovering them I lost them again – apparently in their clampdown on gaming sites East of the Web got the chop again. Surely even the IT geeks in Belfast running our network can distinguish between educational games and games where little cartoon tanks firing atom bombs at each other – maybe then they can explain why my pupils can play the later but not the former.

From a personal point of view it’s a pain in the arse as well. For the better part of two years I’ve been adding posts to ToaSNT during my lunches and free periods. Now that’s impossible – well almost.

In their efforts to avoid our impressionable young folks seeing anything with bad language, sex or violence C2K have blocked even the tamest of sites. By blocking hardcore porn the pupils moved to softcore, by blocking that the pupils moved onto ‘mild references to’, when all of that got blocked pupils moved into chat rooms. But, as we all know, chat rooms are evil and eventually got blocked. The pupils then moved into social interaction sites. Then Bebo and Myspace made headline news and Youtube became the home of happy slapping – so they got banned. This meant that anything that allowed pupils to upload photos, share ideas or actually express an opinion (horror!) had to be blocked and so we get to wave goodbye to blogs – well almost.

You see, here’s the thing. With everything of interest blocked the pupils had to get inventive. Every week they discover a new proxy site and, before it gets blocked, use it to check out their bebo pages and prank youtubes. Of course the proxies aren’t exactly discerning types and so we see the return of hardcore porn and sickening violence.

Ironic, eh?

So C2K please, for the sake of my sanity and a sex ed teacher’s ability to research lesson plans, get off your power filled, litigation fearing censor fest and give us a system that lets us teach… and maybe write the odd blog entry during our frees.