Drink for thought?

'Now is the time to get drunk! To stop being the martyred slaves of time, to get absolutely drunk - on wine, poetry, or on virtue, as you please.'

~Charles Baudelaire, "Enivrez-vous," Paris Spleen, 1869

Good old Charles! But where to start? Spending most of the weekend in bed, working on Cam*Era and spending a Saturday night 22nd birthday party half asleep has made me realise how much I am actually wasting my youth. These are maybe my last months as a student and somehow I have to find a way to celebrate that a little bit more! The PGCE is rubbish for extensive shenanigans because I have to be at school at 7.45 every day, but after all that's what weekends should be there for. Staying in bed and playing Mario Kart half of the day is not really the ideal image I have of myself (bless Schopenhauer).

General boredom and the wish to escape life once more in the following weeks led me to ponder my two favourite questions: 'Who/what do you love?' and 'What makes you happy?' It turns out that after some months of inner calm and business, the answers are not as easy anymore. All I know is that my festival work is one of the answers to both questions and that teaching has fallen off the radar a little bit which was unexpected. But that also means that I now have to find a way to hang on to the event organisation stuff as much as I can.

Before I give up on education however (and I doubt that will ever seriously happen), two exciting events are still waiting for me. In four weeks time I am going up to Edinburgh to attend a seminar on democratic schooling, as mentioned in the last days. I think part of the reason why I am not so enthusiastic or rather idealistic about education anymore is because I am working in an environment where everybody is counting the days to the next holidays and dreading tests. Meeting some people again who love the concept of education and actually want to make things better for everybody might just be the spark I need. And then of course there is the AERO conference this summer- can't wait!

Finally there are going to be some adventures abroad again!

Homeschooling?

I started this article this morning at 6.30 when I was just having breakfast, listening to last.fm, and thought I would share two quick, education related things that happened yesterday.

The first one was a professional studies session on 'homeschooling'. As part of the PGCE, we have professional development for an hour a week and generally somebody from the school comes in to tell us about how to get a teaching job, consider special needs or approach A-Level teaching. So all in all very mainstream stuff. But behold, yesterday, the schedule came up with the interesting idea of 'homeschooling'. As you can imagine if you have followed this blog for a while, I approached the session with a keen interest to hear about the school's provision for children who can not/ do not want to come to school and who are online affiliated to and supported by it. Of course I was wrong. Homeschooling in fact related to the idea of liaising between home and school, so talking to the parents/ guardians whenever their child had done something great/very bad. While this was interesting as well, it was really not the glimmer of hope I was after and I felt clearly mislead by the term homeschooling. Although the homeschooling I had imagined is not illegal in England, it is still fairly uncommon. Currently, there are around 50,000 children who are educated at home.

The Easter holidays are now approaching faster and faster and I have decided to go up to Scotland for a seminar on European Democratic education. My flights are booked and hopefully I will be able to learn a lot which I will also be able to use able to use for my AERO workshop in June. I can't wait to see all of the lovely people at the conference again and wish I could stay more flexible with my plans for next year so that I had the option to just stay in the States. Unfortunately that is not possible due to general life admin (including the need to book flights in advance) and the dream might have to wait for another year.

The second education related thing that got me thinking yesterday was my first parents evening. A friend of mine who is doing the same course described it recently as 'speed-dating'. Everybody wants to hear something truthful but on the other side you really want to try to get along. In Germany, parents evening is only for adults while in the UK, students go together with their parents. I have to say that I approve of the UK version and it's nice to be able to talk to the kids one on one as well. Meeting the parents was fascinating and in a lot of cases explained a lot! A little, stroppy boy from my Year 8 class for example was clearly not even half as bad as his aggressive and defensive mother! I was there with the lady who normally takes the class as unfortunately I had only taught this group of kids three or four times and listening to her talk with extreme care and political correctness was really interesting.

I am not a parent and so can not imagine what it must be like for somebody else to criticise your own child. It was however very nice to see how a lot of parents clearly wanted to help their children. Funnily enough there were two sets of German/ Austrian parents and they were especially interested in how they could support the learning of their kids. Both groups mentioned that the amount of vocab learning is much smaller and that the expectations are much lower than in German speaking schools. This is really fascinating as I have not been in contact with German schools in a while and sometimes forget how much work we actually had to do for our language lessons- and I had English, French and Spanish in my last two years. At my school, the kids are barely given any homework in comparison and although I don't believe in homework being the answer and hope to inspire intrinsic motivation, maybe the parents were right and the standards are quite worryingly low- and nobody realises.

On a quick, film-related note I met this amazing young director last week at Screentest and I just asked him to come along to Cam*Era to talk about his work. It is very inspiring to actually find a really good young film maker amongst hundreds of good, but not remarkable ones! The quality of his film 'Who's afraid of the Water Sprite' is outstanding and I can really recommend to have a look at the trailer of his new film 'Bovine' here.

Only 8 1/2 teaching weeks left!

So Christmas and New Year whizzed by and as you can see we are already two and a half months into the new year. Madness.

I thought I'd update you on what is going on with my PGCE. Before the PGCE students went into the second block placement (6+6+5 weeks intersected by half term and Easter break), we were told that February was going to be a dark month. No sleep, continuous preparation, classroom management issues, missing support and lots of marking. Oh, plus our biggest assignment yet: 1C, with 8000 words to write on a study that we have to design ourselves. Now, I would love to be melodramatic and go: Boy, were they right! But the truth is that I am doing fine.

Yes, I have been very lucky with my school (which is only a few minutes away from my house), my mentor (who is awesome and tries to adapt the program to what I want to get out of it) and my classes (which the exception of one which I swear is made of monsters in training). I would not go as far as saying that I enjoy it all the time, which I don't, or that I don't feel challenged at times (see the monsters), but overall I am ok, sane and fairly healthy. This however is quite a stark contrast to a lot of the other PGCE students many of whom have not been as lucky as I am in either of the three respects above and sometimes don't get home until 6pm and then have to get onto marking books.

Through a miracle I am only teaching 9 classes a week and have time to be chair of the NSFA, run the Cambridge Student Film Festival and visit my friends in Oxford and London over the weekend. I have to say that the latter three contribute hugely to my emotional balance and that in a way, they make me enjoy my time at school much more because of the diversity of the things that I am doing. This afternoon for example I am going to meet up with people from the university to discuss collaboration opportunities for Cam*Era, the film festival. Sometimes it feels like the film projects are my real work- they demand more attention but also give me much greater high points once something works out. Last week for example, I paid in a cheque of £3000 sponsorship money for Cam*Era.

The one thing that is really exhausting about the PGCE is the continuous assessment. Being a teacher on a training course is a little bit like being an actor who has three auditions a day- you have to be good all the time. Professional teachers observe your lessons almost every single time and write comments on very scary blue sheets of paper with one copy going to the faculty of the university and one going to your personal mentor at the school. It is sometimes quite funny to see how a really positive lesson can turn into a nightmare on paper or vice verca!

I am still glad that I am doing it and it will ultimately also be very beneficial for my CV. As the majority of the PGCE students I have also had my doubts, but now there are only 8 and a half weeks left and I am sure that I will be able to complete those as well! What comes after will be another matter completely and I doubt very much that it is going to involve secondary school language teaching but that my future will rather lead in back into the direction of film or event management... We will see :-)