Is it just me?

I just read a blog by a lovely young woman I really admire. She is a woman of few words, but those words penetrate through all the froth and bubble and hit your heart with a thud. I love her talent for saying what she means and leaving it at that. Shawna you're a star!

I'm not going to say "I wish I could do that" as I'm not doing the 'I wish I had someone elses talent whinge' but I do love things that are refreshingly elegant. Elegance is 'just enough for a large impact' like a simple but elegant dress which packs a punch by being cut well rather than having lots of accessories or frills.
I have to say I'm not like that, either in my writing, dressing, home or anything else for that matter. I used to try to be, always looking for ways to be seen as elegant, then one day I realised I was despising what God had given me.
As I've said in previous blogs, I love colour, texture, the wild and unusual. I love to find the different, out of the box, crazy things so being elegant is just never going to happen.
But I can admire and enjoy elegance, in whatever form it takes.

Accepting yourself the way you are, in regards to your personality and style is a huge achievement, one I am embracing more and more as I grow older. I've come to realise that often the people I admire (not you Shawna), want to be someone else and so we all spend far too much time thinking 'if only'.
My advice to everyone and anyone is take a good look at yourself, find your hidden talents, idiosyncrasies, your style and embrace them. It makes life so much easier and far less burdensome. Stop judging yourself by other peoples standards, God is the only standard and He is a much less harsher task master than we often think He is. If you are honestly giving Him your heart and living your life in relationship with Him, if He is challenging you (notice I don't say berating or condemning as only satan does that) and you are listening then stop fretting.
Learning to like yourself is probably the hardest thing you will ever do but it brings such release it is worth it.

Analogies that make you go ?

I have to share these “funniest analogies” with you. They came in an e-mail from a friend, who got them from who knows where but they are funny. The e-mail says they are taken from actual high school essays and collected by English teachers across the country for their own amusement. Some of these kids may have bright futures as comic writers. What do you think?
1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a ThighMaster.
2. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
3. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Chinese chicken.
4. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
5. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
6. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
7. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.
8. Jason fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
9. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re in another city and the news comes on at 6:00 p.m. instead of 6:30pm.
10. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
11. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
12. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Brisbane at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 85 kph, the other from the Gold Coast at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 55 kph.
13. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
14. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long it had rusted shut.
15. Shots rang out, as shots do.
16. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
17. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
18. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
19. It was an Austraian tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.
20. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up

And to all of you who think that these couldn't possibly be real, I say, spend a day in my classroom.

Low level disruption can be worse than the extremes!

I found this comforting and useful, see what you think!
Low Level Disruption. Can you kick it? Yes, you can.
A stream cuts a score down a mountain until it becomes a ravine, and then a valley. It doesn’t do this because it’s powerful. It succeeds by persistence and patience, using the same weapon with which a weed splits a paving slab: time. A student can do the same to your lesson, and eventually your sanity, if they are allowed to drip, drip, drip away at you. Low level disruption is what teachers face most of all, and most often. You can forget the staffroom stories of deodorant-can flamethrowers and chairs thrown through windows (actually don’t forget about them; anything is possible), because the reality of the job is mostly a playful brook (not a torrent) of niggly, annoying behaviours that will wear you down in a thousand cuts.
Low level disruption appears, in isolation, like nothing at all. It’s hardly worth even mentioning to your non-teaching pals when you emerge from your educational cocoon at the weekend and pretend to have a normal life. But when you combine the cumulative effects of all those tiny, persistent little goblins chattering away around you, it adds up to an ocean of misery, a long night of the soul that stretches out forever. Low level disruption is like kryptonite for the well planned lesson.
What qualifies as low-level disruption? I can offer two answers: a definition, and examples. Examples are easier to start with: chair-rocking, pen-tapping, chatting over others, chatting over you, passing notes, passing wind, entering late, chewing gum, texting, drawing in their book, poking their partners…in fact maybe it isn’t so easy to exhaustively categorise it. Let’s define it instead: anything that slows down the flow of your lesson without actually blowing it out of the water. I usually define it as ‘anything that annoys me’, although that might not be very useful to you, not being me and all. It’s the little stuff, the wriggly, niggly behaviour that pupils do instead of learning when they don’t have the moxie to tell you to stick your lesson where even OfSTED won’t go.
And that’s why it’s so corrosive; because of all the things you’ll have to handle as a teacher, this stuff will be constantly with you, looking over your shoulder like Long John Silver’s parrot, pooping gaily on you and laughing, as you take the register. It’s a fact of teaching, like barnacles on a boat. Because it seems so minor, it feels like it should be easy to handle: and so it is- individually. Any teacher that can manage to inhale and exhale can deal with a lone pupil clicking the lid of his biro a couple of times. But a whole class doing it, intermittently, while others make sinister humming noises at the same time as the whole back row are placing bets on when your stack will blow, for how long, and how high….that’s a different level.
If you’re a member of the human race you will have a limit on your patience. You will also probably have a limited number of things that you can focus on and deal with before you feel like you are surrounded by a room of break-dancing oompah loompahs. It’s amazing how it only takes a few annoyances to drive you insane. So there are two dangers in low-level disruption:
It happens a lot
It’s hard to put out a dozen fires at once
Pupils know all this stuff already. They know that they can put the mercury of your blood pressure through the rafters like a fairground try-your-strength . Most pupils don’t have the guts to stand up to you directly- believe it or not, they are only kids, and despite the reputation some have for torching orphanages and selling their grannies on E-Bay, most are still pretty intimidated by grown-ups. So instead of standing up to in you lesson and pirouetting through the class, most will amuse themselves with the time-honoured past-time of teacher baiting. Unlike bear baiting, this is still legal. Understand that the motives for this kind of behaviour are broadly, in three categories:
To watch you change colour
To distract you and themselves from a fascinating lesson on Jewish food law
Because they’ve switched off so much they are trying to occupy themselves. Poor loves. What on earth is therefore them to do in a classroom? Oh yes…
Most teachers (especially new ones) are very switched on to bad behaviour- it leaps out at them, begging to be squashed. So when several things happen at once, or something happens repetitively, it gets extremely stressful, extremely quickly. The most important thing to try to do is to not let it disturb you, or get under your skin. Yeah, I know- easy right? But most of this disruption is aimed at entertaining themselves, pure and simple. If they see you having an aneurysm, there’s nothing more guaranteed to get them to repeat the behaviour. If they see that you aren’t bothered by their low level japes, then they will soon get bored and look for something else to do. With luck, it’ll be your lesson.
How do you keep your temper? It involves a change in your attitude. You have to not care so much about it. You have to realise that it’s not personal (they don’t know you) and that you’re doing a job, not raising your children. And you absolutely have to know, deep down in your giblets that any misbehaviour will be punished- if not in the classroom, then hereafter (and I don’t mean in Heaven.). The simple knowledge of this- and I mean you have to know it- will give you the satisfaction to keep your cool when even Fonzie would be spitting feathers.
Low level behaviour is also a way of keeping themselves occupied in other ways- quite simply they’re often just bored- attention wandering all over the archipelago of your educational voyage. This book looks specifically at behaviour, so I won’t dwell on the necessity of keeping lesson pace brisk and interesting- mainly because all the bells and whistles on a lesson won’t get them motivated if the teacher can’t deal with the behaviour. If George Bush were a teacher (rather than a clownish nightmare) he would have said ‘It’s the Behaviour, stupid.’ So how do you deal with the actual behaviour itself?
Apart from pretending that you don’t actually want to burst the miscreants like balloons, the main things you need to do are name taking and ass kicking. That’s it. There is no way to get around it- this is what you have to do to be a teacher in an even remotely challenging school. A bin man has to lift rubbish; a priest will preach; a lawyer will…well, do whatever lawyers do that requires me to mortgage my soul every time I need one. You’re not a failure if you have to do this stuff. You’re a success. You’re a professional. You’re doing your job right. You’ll do it for as long as you teach. Never ask, “When will I be able to stop telling them off?” Because the answer is, “Maybe never, brothers and sisters.”
The procedures for handling the small stuff is easy in theory, and soul-destroying in practise. It is entirely a war of attrition, and the key thing is for you to win. You mustn’t flinch, or blink, or break eye contact. Do that and you’ll win. Don’t do it, and you’ll be fighting the same battle for as long as you teach. So what do you want to do?
Taken from ‘The Behaviour Guru’ by Tom Bennett, published by Continuum.

A thought for those who've lost

The 11th of September will always be a day of rememberance. If you were able to compehend the events as they unfolded, the horror as the realisation of what had just happened sank in it is a memory I'd rather forget. Not only a day when we lost our sense of security but a day that marked a change in how the majority of the world views others. I'd like to say that the empathy and concern of others won the day, but sadly hate and bitterness came along for the ride.


A young man with so much potential that I had been at University with in 1994/5 was one of the casualties of that day. Working at a dream job, achieving his goals, on the way to a bright future in politics. A man who I had many discussions with, studied with and who struck me as a man who wanted a better life for others. Andrew Knox you are not forgotten.
As I watched his twin brother read out Andrews and others names at the memorial I had to stop and think what his life would have been like; where he would be now if that terrible day did not happen?
The students in my grade 7 & 8 classes today were confused about 9/11 meant, some knew the mechanics of what happened but none had a grasp on how it changed the world nor should they. They were 2 or 3 years old at the time and had no idea of what really was behind the events or why or how things have changed since.
So how does it affect me in my life here in 'Paradise':

1. It means I have to go through more thorough security checks and can't carry things I might like onto an aeroplane (not a particularly difficult problem, more of an inconvenience).




2. The world media and politics is more cynical and sees threats everywhere which makes people feel unsafe and on edge (not good).




3. People have very opinionated views on Muslims they know little about (due to reckless and biased reporting of events and people & on the flip side we are politically incorrect if we talk about the Muslim population in Australia because people might think we are just biased due to 9/11).




4. Children grow up with parents talking about 'terrorists' as if they are around every corner unnecessarily frightening them (a definite concern).




5. Our sons, brothers, nephews are fighting and have been fighting for 10 years in a place a long way from home in a war I don't think they can win. (That is not to say I don't think we should be there, just that it is so complicated it is hard to know who's winning).




6. Innocent people have been sacrificed in the name of doing something in the months after the attacks.

So where do we go from here? As a Christian I continue on, knowing that the world is changing just as predicted in the Bible. It is not a surprise that the world is at war with one another nor that fanatics (on both sides) mete out their own justice. I would hope that people see thing as they really are instead of blaming cultures or people, Satan is at the heart of terrorism, unrest, death and destruction, these are his tools and we are to stand firm not allowing him to consume us with fear, because the war has already been won.

We need to keep our defences up, fight the battles before us until the end of time but we don't need to become obssessed. I hope I never have to watch another 9/11 but knowing mankind I know that the chances are slim. Somewhere at sometime, someone will do the unthinkable only this time we will not be as shocked or vulnerable. Which if we think about it, reveals the real cost, 'our innocence'.