SNOGGING IN SLOGGIES

SNOGGING IN  SLOGGIES’

 

                Perhaps it was my argument with the train, maybe it was that old shrew Anno Domini creeping up, but suddenly, for no discernible reason I collided with a massive writers block; arthritic fingers, sore joints a mind  full of mush. My beautifully ordered little routines just refused to come out and play, the hour of creative writing first thing in the morning ran under my bed and hid, The editing  scheduled for afternoons cowered in a corner, caterpillars gobbling my winter broccoli reared up and sniggered, my new waterblaster kicked up more grime than it banished. I could not even solve the cryptic crossword.

 So I surrendered to temptation, like an alcoholic falling off the wagon, or a chocoholic at the sweet counter. I read voraciously, anything I could get m y hands on ; loaded my kindle with 99 cent mysteries and romances; haunted the library; skimmed through the Warehouse snatching bargain price books.

Ice Princess by Camilla Blackberg was on the $10 table. Scandinavian whodunits are dark and gritty, many layered but they also show subtle flashes of comic brilliance.

The main character in The Ice Princess is a female detective nearing middle age, the main theme is child abuse and its effects. A minor theme is a developing attraction between the detective and a colleague. She invites him to dinner, spends the afternoon preparing, cleaning her flat cooking the meal .  Everything goes well until they are about to hop into her bed when an appalling thought hits her.

                SHE IS NOT WEARING A LACE THONG!

Here she is with a sexy male and she is clad in her everyday, white cotton sloggies.

I discovered sloggies two years ago in Dublin. They are the most comfortable knickers I have ever worn. When I came home I searched the internet for a source in New Zealand without luck until  I asked at the rather expensive lingerie shop here in Oamaru. They have racks full of them.

I have long passed the age where I am likely to leap into bed with anything more exciting than a good book so I shall continue to wear my sloggies, black, white or flesh coloured, on all occasions. We are quite an exclusive little coterie, Oamaru sloggie wearers; the petrol pump lady; the florist’s mother in law and others, almost like Masons used to be, signalling our membership with a subtle smile of recognition, or the smirk that we wore with our Witches Britches in the seventies, remember?.

And the Ice Princess is a thumping good read.  

LOOK OUT, BIG BROTHER IS ALMOST HERE.

When I retired in 1990 Schools had just about got things right. There was a big move towards Developmental Education, classes were getting smaller, Teachers were being encouraged to keep up to date in their professional training.

 I have been out of the classroom for a long time and my only experience of today's schools has been with a wonderful little country school over at Glenavy and reports from my Grandchildren's parents who have some very valid concerns..

According to this morning's radio a lot of money is about to be spent training parents to 'modify children's classroom behaviour.' Evidently parents in economically deprived areas need help in teaching their children how to behave. If our Government is going to spend money training parents to 'improve children's classroom behaviour.' Is it going to consider:

Bringing back Plunket nurses who can help mothers learn about the feeding and care of young children so that by the time they go to school they are intelligent and physically healthy?

Cutting class sizes so teachers can construct a learning environment geared to the needs of their pupils. Fifteen maximum?

Run courses in child development and educational theory so that parents know what to expect? Mothers especially need to get off the competitive bandwagon and not push their children to perform too far above their age just to bolster their own ego.

But maybe the classrooms need to change rather than the children in them..

There are some classrooms where children's behaviour is an indicator of something amiss. Is the government going to spend money training parents to teach children to 'behave' when they should be looking at fixing the system?

How important is School in the communities where parents are deemed to be in need of training? Somewhere the kids go to while Mum and Dad try to earn a decent wage?

What is the underlying structure of our Education system? There are underlying and unchanging principles about learning that seem to have turned into whipping boys for politicians.

What are the purposes of what is in the School Curriculum? Do we want a population which accepts shoddy conditions without protest? Should we be training school children to obey authority without question? to believe that the rich and powerful are somehow better than we are?

I believe Education is too important to be mucked about with by Politicians. .




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TIME OF USEFUL CONSCIOUSNESS

Is Lawrence Ferlinghetti's newest collection ( published byNew Directions ) which arrived from City Lights Bookstore last week. The title is an aeronautical term denoting the time after one loses oxygen and before one passes out. Ferlinghetti uses it as a metaphor for American History

It is also a great metaphor for life itself, Instead of drifting and dreaming of all the great things God will give us in the next world should we not be making the most of our conscious lives here and now?

I experienced a moment of useful consciousness last Thursday when I looked but did not register what I saw and drove on to the railway line. The blast of the train horn when I was half way across alerted me, I used my 'Time of Useful Consciousness' to tramp on my accelerator and move the car forward a yard or two, so the train hit the boot of my car and not me. When I stepped out of my car unscathed, but facing the way I had come, one of the good samaritans people who helped me said, "You should go and buy a Lotto ticket."

If the train driver had not used his moment when he saw me on the line and realised a crash was inevitable, to blast his horn very loud, I would not be here.

So that moment of useful consciousness is really important.

And after the crash I was surrounded by angels, one in a blue lace dress, several in holiday wear, two in police uniform, all very human, who helped me shift the car, make a statement to the police and drove me home.

Angels aren't those silly creatures with wings. They are very human beings who just happen to be passing. I find that comforting.

TWO FAT LADIES, LOTS OF SAND and TRUMPETS

On Sunday afternoon neighbour Glenys and I drove into Oamaru for our regular dose of clture = Metropolitan Opera on a big screen. This time it was AIDA composed by Verdi to mark the opening of the Suez Canal. I always knew it was the grandest of the grand operas. I knew the music and had seen photographs. One of our regular opera goers told us she had seen AIDA on the Sydney Domain and the triumphal march had real elephants

The music and singing were superb, Yes the Soprano and Mezzo soprano were big ladies, but sumptuous costuming disguised that and their voices were even bigger. The whole opera was rivetting but in particular Act 11, where Radames returns from conquering Ethiopia, preceded by soldiers, slaves, captives, horses. Phaero and his daughter sit on thrones in front of massive walls. I can see why people say AIDA should be performed outside it needs acres of stage.. The chorus was magnificent, the dancers wonderful and the trumpets lifted the hair on the back of my neck.

 I kept wondering. is there any greater human achievement than this melding of music, dance and drama? Maybe music is what makes mankind divine.

THE OTHER NEW ZEALANDER ON EVEREST

So George Lowe has died. He was the last of them, the boys with whom I learned Latin at Hastings High School from 1938 to 1942. We did not know it then but we were a unique generation.

We were born in the 1920s. The high point of our fathers' lives had been travelling to France and fighting at Passchendale. They returned, married our mothers, begot us and endured the Great Depression.

But although our parents had left school at twelve, they were determined that their children would have a high school education. I remember the day in 1937 when our Standard 6 teacher, Mr Collinge, interrupted our Arithmetic lesson to tell us.
 "You have all been granted Proficiency. You won't have to sit the exam. Well done!"

 Notice he did not tell us Proficiency, had been abolished and the school leaving age had been raised from twelve to fifteen. He made us feel we had achieved something special. He took us for a hike to Cape Kidnappers to celebrate.

So the following February a wave of children who had expected to deliver telegrams,  work in the canning factory,serve in a shop, or stay home and help in the orchard hit the High Schools. Were they ready for us? I like to think so, because that experience of High School was like the opening of a door into a world crammed with undreamed of possibnilities and all that was required  from us was effort.

Every morning at Assembly we listened to music, over four years we heard everything from the Hallelujah Chorus to In the Mood. We learned to read in Latin and French; about the 93 elements and how they combined to make compounds; about Archimedes shouting 'Eureka!. as he ran naked through the streets of Athens and Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree in Cambridge.

In the increasing prosperity of those times we acquired bikes, second hand boneshakers, but we rode those bikes between Hastings and Napier  to go sailing in the idle along dinghies our fathers helped us build.

I don't think anyone from the 1938 Form 3A was surprised when we learned that the other New Zealander on Everest was our  quiet fair haired class mate, George Lowe.

M,ATHS IS A STATE OF MIND

My niece in Massachussetts sent me an extract from the New Zealand Herald about our Minister for Education  Evidently Ms Parata  is considering a return to basic Arithmetic in the Primary Schools syllabus.

She needs to study  history, then engage her brain before she sets her mouth in motion.

In 1949-50, when I was a student at Ardmore Teachers Training College ourMaths tutor, Ernest Duncan, taught us and anybody else who would listen about Numbers and how to organise them so  it was easy to understand the processes. The same Ernest Duncan left New Zealand to lecture in the United States, It took twenty years for his ideas to be accepted here. He organised the New School Mathematics programme and brilliant advisers like Joan Paske in Wellington devised programmes for teachers to put into effect. There were charismatic advisers like Nan Tiddy and school inspectors; like Kelvin Smythe who helped teachers put into practise what research showed about children's learning.

At the same time Duncan and the other lecturers at Ardmore were teaching us about child development, how a young brain works, the stages of understanding involved.

 Ms Parata herself needs to  go back to basics and learn about how children's brains  develop. Children are not sheep to  be fed through the drafting yards of rote learning. They are not in a race against other nationalities.  Right now our children are living the only life they will have, they should be developing ideas and concepts which will help them live that life with confidence. Telling them they are three seconds behind in answering an algorithm is not the way.

1. CHILDREN LEARN THROUGH PLAY.  At each stage of development every child practices the next stage through play. (Professor Brian Sutton-Smith Queens University New York; one of our New Zealanders who escaped our puritannical regulated culture).

2. CHILDREN NEED FREE PLAY WITH CONCRETE (REAL) MATERIALS. Piaget, Cuisennaire and dozens of others have preached this for decades. Children need loads of physical experience, running, jumping, dancing, throwing, catching, dropping,and talking about what they are doing ; That is the way they develop Mathematical concepts.

3. CHILDREN NEED TO DEVELOP A SENSE OF RHYTHM AND BALANCE.  That way they eventually recognise the patterns which make learning, Arithmetic especially. logical and easy.

4. CHILDREN NEED PARENTS WHO UNDERSTAND THEIR DEVELOPMENT, who don't see schooling at a mindless race.They need to be involved and their children's teachers need to accept them as allies. .

ALSO Schools need small classes, fifteen max. and young, well trained teachers. Many  enlightened ideas about child development have withered because penny pinching governments refuse to spend the money needed for educational improvement.












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BOOKS THAN CAN CHANGE THE WORLD

My Twelve year olf grand daughter gave me a book for Christmas. The Swerve, How the Renaissance Began by Stephen Greenblatt (Vintage) ISBN9780099572442 tells about the poem by Lucretius, a Roman Poet who died in 55BC called On the Nature of Things.Greenblatt tells a rivetting story about a fifteenth century book hunter,Poggio Bracciolini, seeking old manuscripts in a monastery in Germany.  When he finds an ancient parchment he recognises it as a copy of A Roman poem which St Jerome tried to supress in the 4th century, yet it was known and quoted in spite of the Inquisition.

According to the ba ck cover Poggio found 'a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas - that the universe functioned without the aid og gods, that religioud fear was damaging human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion. These ideas fuelled the Renaissance, inspiring Boticelly, shaping the thought of Montaigne, Darwin (his grandfather owned a copy) and Einstein.

)f course, after reading 'The Swerve' which is a superb stue story that reads like high quality fiction, I had to get 'On the Nature of Things'.  My copy, translated by Sir Robert Allison, was published by Arghur L Humphries in 1919.

Books 1 and 2, Atoms and the Void. Spenser translated whole chunks of it into The Faerie Queen.So did Shakespeare and Byron. . Lucretius rather contradicts the Big Bang, and intelligent design. There are atoms of infinite shape and number, and the void Over enormous stretches of time atoms swerve and meet and form new shapes, thus the universe evolves.

Books 3 and 4 Psychology, Sensation and Thought. Lucretius was a believer in  the teachings of Epicurus. .This life is all we have, there is  no afterlife.

If you are wondering how all this knowledge was lost for so many centuries ask the Pope, he and his precedents have a great deal to answer for.