First of all, my apologies to all readers - I have suffered a virus attack on my PC which has made writing very difficult. This is a particularly annoying virus which has succeeded in turning off my antivirus protection, reset the boot file, played stupid messages to me (including singing stupid messages to me!) and despite a stay in the local computer hospital is still not fixed. Suffice it to say I have not been sending messages to people and the laptop is now being used and I'm having to save everything onto external drive just to be on the safe side. Anyway enough of the moaning - I'm off out to bring in the New Year.
My New Year's project - I am going to chronicle the year 2009 by way of reference to quirky/interesting items in the local regional newspaper - keeping a cross referenced cuttings book and a writing journal. Of course I shall be posting any best bits/poems/musings here as well.
I hope the New Year brings lots of writing success for everyone.
Love from Sujen
A Very Merry Christmas!
A poem for all my friends; my wish for everyone is for them to find peace within their own selves, enough to last 2009 and beyond.
A Christmas poem for you all, with love ...
So the week was more than usually testing and for a number of utterly unrelated reasons. Exchanging one kind of trauma (family) for another (Ofsted) is par for the course with me and mine, but the comic elements do not usually make themselves so obvious, or so it seems.
This week started with all marking to be completed, all lesson plans completed, (in triplicate) and everything tidy by Wednesday - when you have more than 200 students, this is no mean task. But it was done - within reason and on Wednesday morning I arrived (somewhat bedraggled and very cold) on the dot of 7.45 am wearing a very endearing bucket style hat which had somehow slipped down over my eyes, so that I looked a lot like a flowerpot man, my not too clean waterproof coat, and a bag of marked folders in each hand as well as my bag on my back. Elegant is nowhere near what I was, and of course my arrival coincided perfectly with the arrival of the Ofsted inspector being greeted by our perfectly coiffed and beautiful head teacher and her immaculately suited deputy. There being nowhere to hide, and unable to drag by key fob from the depth of my third bag, I could only wait until the party made their way through the security door with me in their wake. At least, I reasoned, they would never be able to recognise me once I had removed the outer gear.
And that proved to be the case - after four days of marking and preparing and a day of delivering truly outstanding and innovate lessons in which children were unusually engaged and learned a lot - I wasn't observed. Now, if you've been in this situation, you will know the mixture of relief and disappointment I felt; it's only possible to give a shrug and look to the second day of the torture.
Which is when the weather stepped in with a vengeance. Like many parts of our county we were already blanketed with the white stuff which had fallen on Tuesday but Thursday was something different - deep, deep snow lying like icing on the road and relentlessly driving and swirling from the leaden sky. Snowploughs made little impact, we could not drive up the steep bank into the town and geography made it impossible to leave. Imagine a ring mould - the type used for making fancy rice dishes for buffets, or jelly circles for children's parties; now you see the problem - you either live on the top of the circle (great views over Weardale), in the bowl (no phone reception, protection from the weather) or, like us, on one of the sides (in our case facing outwards). Whereever you are there is no avoiding a steep hill either to leave the town or to return. With two rivers wound around the town when snow comes we are trapped.
Eventually a snow day was called - I sat in exhaustion in front of the tele watching all sorts of nonsense - and woke the next day refreshed to find that the inspection team had left and we were deemed satisfactory.
All in all a somewhat sudden end to the drama - just what will next week bring?
Having committed once more to getting some new (and maybe some old) poems posted on the blog, Friday brought some dire news - the Ofsted inspection (which means that now I feel as if I should be committed - but to where?). Consequently, all has been wall to wall with marking, planning and panicking - and therefore no poems, just wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Thanks to all new Facebook friends for visiting here, will be free of the tyranny on Friday and promise will be creative once more.
Love to all, Sujen
I am going to start posting regularly on this blogsite rather than my other blogs for a while; it can all get so confusing and life is complicated enough at the moment.
Remember some time ago, when I wailed, "My life is turning into a soap opera!"? Aah, well remembered reader - it was September 2007. Well here we are some year or so on and believe it or not I am still living in my own version of Cleaner Close. It's been so traumatic and sick and stressful that it may well be another year (or more) before any of the sordid details hit the page.
In the meantime, I'm just trying to get back to some sort of writing normality and will be posting news of my newest ventures on this blog.
For those of you new to visiting my page, I hope you enjoy reading some stuff archived there. Sujen
Author: sujen
02:52:10 pm, Categories: Links to Members Websites
Last Edited: 2008-03-09 14:52:10
For International Women's Day yesterday (7.3.08) I attended a poetry workshop which was held on my home town's Town Hall. It was facilitated by two local writers, Wendy Robinson and Avril Joy, who both work with women in a local prison, Wendy as Writer in Residence and Avril as English Tutor. They had worked on the theme with some of these women
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The theme of the workshop as The Mirror: A reflection on the experience of being a woman looking at poetry and prose from a number of famous women writers, Plath, Dickinson, Angelou etc. and the outcome could be either poetry or prose.
The scary thing about this workshop which made it most enjoyable was a session where we sat in pairs in front of makeup mirrors - fully illuminated - in the theatre dressing room and looked at ourselves as though we were strangers, making notes of what we saw. We then made notes about our paired writer and gifted these notes to them.
Using hand mirrors we then wrote notes about our profile view.
We aimed at five things noted for each section and then took these fifteen observations away with us and worked on either a poem or prose outcome. The finally worked outcomes are being collated by the organisers for distribution amongst the group and for wider distribution.
It was a very interesting exercise in observation and objectivity and engendered some very interesting discussion among the participants. With lunch and new friends made, it was a tenner very well and enjoyably spent.
For the next few weeks I shall be back in harness in the classroom. I thought I would publish this in celebration - it was my entry in the Changelings comp. and I had forgotten about it until someone added a kind comment. So for all you who like to be scared, here it is ..
Having recovered from the two week festivities, I took great pleasure today in filling in the personal details section in my new diary - in my best handwriting, of course. This is my everyday working, appointments type diary, rather than my page-a-day journal which runs July to June each year.
As you have probably just done the same, may I just make a plea to all of you ....