BigBlog

from blossoms

crushed underfoot

ripped by foreign doctrines

but not destroyed

The secretive scent lingers on

Long after the visions

of flowering fields fades

The essence of souls

linked to an Eternal source

beyond the physical worlds

is indestructible.

We are here to follow pathways

Already mapped out

by the master topographer.

C. Ilana Leeds

Obviously some people do not understand the teaching profession because my career and reputation as a teacher is shot to pieces. The loss of my employment at MLC is the final death knell.

It does not matter how passionate I was and am about my former profession and the fact that I can write and express myself better than 90% of those people aspiring to be English teachers... because of the fact of the matter remains they would rather have idiots masquerading as teachers and pretending that they are teaching when they are not. I no longer understand it.

I really do not know what I am going to do and I do not believe that I will get another teaching job because teaching is all about references and the sudden loss of my position when they were happy now points to the fact that they probably did ring up GJ of Narrandera High School and Deniliquin High School and decided to put me off. That means I face the uneviable task of going from job to job and when they ring up to check where I have been before that, I will lose my job so there is no longer any point. I just wait now for the debt collectors, to be thrown from my house because I am not able to pay rent and to live on the streets with my son who they will take from me because I have no job and am unable to look after him properly. It was already suggested to me by the person who is my case manager that the fact that I have lost my job means I will now possibly sink into depression and 'might not that have a negative impact on Nir?' and maybe the implication is that he may be better off being fostered to a family until I sort myself out and if and when I get a job.

The latter being unlikely because I am 54 and an older single mother. Who wants a cretin of an ex teacher and all the negative talk will be believed and I will just be unemployable and there is nothing I can do. I even lose my son and he me. My means of providing him with a stable and secure childhood has been taken from me. That is exactly what 'dear' Gerard wanted and is sleazy little ditribe in the foprtnightly school newsletter against older women looking after young children and its detrimental effect on them I fully understand now.

I hate and loathe fundamentalist do gooder Christians who feel it is necessary to force their views and beliefs on others despite the fact that others may have their own set of beliefs that they adhere to. Did the fact that I was a Jewish convert to Orthodox Judaism present some kind of magnificent challenge to you people? You wanted to smash me down so I would come crawling to you beaten and bloody and say 'Oh yes I do accept your load of cow shit and yes I am now prove myself an intelligent being by accepting your stupid doctrines' because I can't support myself without my job and I will agree to have my son baptised and saved from the devil BLAH BLAH.

Well I have news for you and the rest of the Christian Shit heads - I would rather die and my son too than to be a Christian.  You are evil and conviving people with no respect for the beliefs of others and small minded.  I am proud to be Jewish and always will be whether I have a job or am in the gutter. And if I am meant to be in the gutter as an example of the putrid intolerance and injustice of some people and their lies then that is where I will be.  As for the stupid cow that worked in the Narrandera High School Library and her lies and prosletising - I hope you get paid in kind one day.

Yes my teaching career is over and I am sure you would love to hear that I committed suicide or the the like as you so nicely suggested both at Deniliquin and Narrandera. It would be the final finishing touch on your work, wouldn't it?

Sorry but this post is very depressing. I spent the day at home in bed and reading. Nir wanted to go to Shule and kept pestering me about it but I really just wanted to be at home with my head stuck under the doona. I really don't have the energy to get out and about at the present time. I also heard something that depressed me even more than losing my job and the fact that I have now got nothing to depend on as far as a profession goes to support myself and my son.

I found out that the sister of a friend is very judgemental about me and it had more to do with me being a single mother I am sure and an older mother at that, has been speaking very negatively about me and I feel an intense sense of betrayal apart from the fact that I have never done or said anything negative about this person and her family. NOR am I ever likely to do so. I don't believe in adding fuel to the fire already raging. Gossip and evil talk about other people serves no real purpose except to cause pain to others and why would I inflict on others the pain I am feeling at the moment? What makes this worse is that she was one of the people I had looked up to and I don't like it when people who set themselves up as paragons of virtue show themselves to be flawed. Yes she has good qualities, many of them, but what have I done to her, that she should be so negative about me?

I have decided to ignore it because as it is said, 'keneged, keneged'. Hashem keeps accounts and there is a reason for everything that happens.

Nir is watching Bee and that is a cheerful little movie and I am moping around the Net channels. I should be working on my case and also on my short story for Monday. I may get up at 4 am tomorrow to finish it as I do my best stuff at odd hours of the day. When I feel like this I just want to stay home and cook, write and clean and mope reading blogs and feeling blecky!

I fell asleep in the middle of prayers fully clothed last night and woke up at 3 am and at 5 am shaking and weak. This tooth is really infected and I have got stronger anti biotics from the dentist at South Melbourne community health but my boarder didn't come home last night so I couldn't go out and get the stronger version of anti biotics.

I feel nausea and pain not only in my face and head but my whole body. It is a crown that is loose and has a lot of decay underneath. I have to be on antibiotics until the 19th of September and then they take it out at 9am and they need to cut away some of the jawbone to do a surgical removal. Lovely event to look forward to. I mean I can hardly wait sounds like a fun event. I am of two minds whether to go to the Dental hospital and tell them I really don't want to be awake for the event.

At the moment I can hardly stand and I really don't know what is wrong with me but I feel shocking.

I know Grotty's husband is sick and I wish him a speedy recovery and hope it is not cancer. I have a friend with cancer and did a bit to help her tidy up her flat. It was a disgusting mess. I literally have crawled on hands and knees to tidy up when I have been unwell because I can't stand mess. Mess makes me feel worst and I would rather pay for someone to clean my house (if I can't do it) and be in a clean place and poor than to be sitting on a million dollars under a mattress and the place a pig sty.

OOPS, I have had a heated moment and it is too early in the morning, and too early in what promises to be a good day, to have such a moment. Reading Dougalo's crazy comment makes me realise that there is a lot wrong in this world and especially in the NSW Department of Education and the way it treats its teachers. They are lucky they have a core of people who are dedicated to education despite the department's best efforts to destroy and demoralise its teachers. Those people must have hearts of iron and strong family support and good counsellors.

He (Douga)  can join 'He Who Appears At Formal School Assemblies Dressed In A Nappy To Show All the School and the School Community His Nobbly Knees And Borders On Kinky Telling How He And Wifey C Practised Fitting Said Nappy On Little Principal's Bottom For Honourable Occasion Of Formal Assembly' at the bottom of my list of people least worthy of esteem and respect. Douga, I have lost all respect for you. Is there something with some of the fanatic Christians that they think they have to discount the intelligence and learning of people who don't believe in JC. Fine you believe in it and if you want to believe that his mum was a virgin do so, you want to believe that he rose from the dead and you want to believe that he was the Messiah, DO SO!

BUT I AM NOT AN IDIOT BECAUSE I DON'T BELIEVE IN JC and Douga do NOT TREAT ME AS IF I AM OR INSULT MY INTELLIGENCE BECAUSE I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN!! YOU MAY CONTINUE TO BELIEVE IN JC I have no problem with that. BUT YOU NEED TO RESPECT THE FACT THAT I DON'T BELIEVE. Believe me when I say that there are more non Christians in the world then Christians and you are tolerated, but back off. Anyway who says numbers and the majority make right. It doesn't not.

I believe in TRUTH.

Today I taught at a school that I really do not want to go to teach at. It is sad but there are so many cracks in this place it is a wonder that it is still operating.

I taught this bunch of nice Indian kids in their early to mid twenties that have been given an essay to write on Global Warming with no preteaching of language items or issues awareness. Their teacher handed them some books and gave them a question (badly worded - I might add - which makes it even harder for the students to answer in essay form) and some notes on what is global warming. (???) Apparently she didn't give them any texts on global warming to read so they could get some idea of the language and format as well as a deeper understanding of the issues.

Personally if it was my class and I wanted as outcomes, the students to have an awareness of global warming and related issues, I would have brainstormed what they already know about the issues and what it means to them and then I would have given them at least three articles and a cartoon and a visual text from a TV program. The latter I would have gone over with them in class and pulled out vocab and issues and discussed  and written a few contentions with supporting arguments. Looked at the perspectives taken by the composers of the texts and the techniques used and examined bias and how it is shown in the texts, BEFORE I got them to write anything of substantial length.

Also I would have gone over the structure of an essay - especially an essay that is dealing with a controversial issue. I mean you just don't give students an essay and say 'Off you go guys, WRITE an ESSAY!'

Is it an exposition, is it an argumentative essay or what? How is it to be structured? What is your approach going to be?  These people were handed a book or two which they had to include in their bibliography. This guy tells me that he wants to know how to write a better essay and do his bibliography. He hands me some book called 'Scorcher' by Clive Hamilton which is all about the politics of climate change. Not forgetting that he is a pre intermediate student. So I asked him if it was a good book and how much he has read of it. He shrugged. Looked at me helplessly. I was in awe at first because I thought to myself, 'He is reads this book and he is a pre inter student. WOW!'

It turned out he hadn't read any of it. So I asked him, 'Why are we using this book in our bibliography then? ' Maybe they also hadn't been told that a bibliography is all about the books you have read and used for your essay. I could write some wonderful bibliographies if I was to write them like that. HUmmmmm.

They also do not know what a TOPIC SENTENCE is or SUPPORTING ARGUMENTS. Neither did the teacher (sweet little kid fresh from England, just graduated last year) who is taking them tomorrow. (???) Now that was a worry. She assuaged my concern by saying 'Never mind I will work it out by tomorrow when I have to teach it.' Good grief, I thought quietly to myself, didn't her English teacher in year 11 teach her anything. In fact the year 10 teacher should have taught that to her. I used to do that with a year 9 group at Fairfield High in Sydney as well as the year 10s. It has to be drummed in until they do it automatically. Structure their essays that is.

So anyway it will be the blind leading the blind. The director of studies so wanted to be, oh so helpful and was telling me that she would give me material and there was no need to worry about this or that. Now any teacher worth their degree doesn't need the director of studies to provide them with material. They should be told, you are doing the theme global warning and students should have the vocab and the awareness of issues to be able to produce an extended text at the end of the unit to enable their teacher to assess how well they have understood and assimilated information on the issue.

For ESL students you can always throw in a few cloze activities and a vocab word and meaning quiz as well as some multiple choice comprehension questions and open ended questions on the texts to help with assessment, but it is simple really. No big deal. However I do feel sick and nauseated by the whole lack of experience of superiors and colleagues, their lack of professionalism and being treated like an idiot. That is why I feel I will not go back to teaching as a career but rather look for something else in a related field. If I had money I would start my own school and retrain the teachers that come into it. Some of the teachers are so impoverished literacy wise.

How can you teach kids to write an essay that is coherently structured, when you can't even do it yourself?  How can you teach kids to spell if you can't spell the simplest words yourself? How can you teach kids about topic sentences, contentions, supporting statements, concluding statements and clarity of expression, if you don't know what it is yourself?

I will probably have to up my antibiotics and get a rest tonight. The class are good but I am in panic and am trying to control the feeling of illness and just not wanting be there and thinking about what is going to happen to me or my son financially if I can't work.

I will have to get into another profession. I see the mistakes and there is nothing I can do about what these people do. It is quite insane. Education is about learning and not about bullying overbearing behaviour.

and I have had to ask for an extension on a final draft of a short story. It was supposed to only take about two or three hours to finish off. However I went to check up on a friend who has been fighting the big C for the last six to eight months and I found her in a dreadful state. She was in her flat, thoroughly depressed and so would you be if you were her and had no family to speak of and fighting a rather unforgiving disease by yourself. So the time I was to spend writing and editing - I spent on helping a friend.

Am I procrastinating? No I don't think so. If you see a friend who is really overloaded and helpless you need to drop a few things and help her before she sinks into the quicksands of life and illness.

I fight depression by doing things and the more I fill my life with activities, you can be sure, the more depressed I am. Others sink down into apathy and let their mind rule with all its funny twists and turns. It is a form of escape. Also the best cure for depression is to do something for someone else, which reminds me I have an elderly friend that I must check up on and I don't mean lonz or Grotty. This lady is amazing and she is over 80. I love very old people and the very young. There is something about the transition gateways that attract me. Those that have just arrived look at the world with new eyes and those that are going look at the life before them with many different perspectives and look at where they are going usually unafraid and clear eyed.

After being fired from MLC I really do not know what to do and what we - Nir and I are going to do about food, rent and the like for now. I have a feeling I will not get a good reference from the Director of Studies because I am sure that there is something more behind why I was put off.  I do not trust anything anyone says anymore. It is all a bunch of lies and fabrications and I need some time out and space to get over this. Ten weeks of work and BOOM gone. I can not cope with this change after change after change. It will play right into their hands the fact that I lost my job just now.

A friend has told me that it would be quite likely that the pressure to sack me may have come from other sources too and it is in the interests of some that I be seen as a total incompetent.

I got a call from another woman who is at another ELICOS college and I really don't want to work there but I need the money but have no expectations and do not trust these people one bit any more.

What I can't understand is how you can have a teacher whose expression and grammar is abysmal; she gets to keep her job and I lose mine.

I will see my counsellor before I do any work there and will really have to look at giving up teaching altogether now. I have to do my diploma course in PWE at CAE and then try to get work at home editing manuscripts. The thought of being in a classroom makes me want to retch at the present time, but I must go back as I must support my son and put him through school.

His father actually sent him some clothes finally and some toys. Good that he remembers that he has a kid and was able to save some money from the pokies and his drinking and smoking. Nir actually liked the shoes and the two cars plus the Bee movie. It is good that he has at least allowed the kid to know that he is around. However by the same token why should he waltz in and out of the kid's life and if he is not going to be consistent in his parenting, then what is the point?

I have friends here and one family that I will ask to be guardians for Nir and a friend and I know that I will rest secure knowing that these are good responsible people and they know how to raise kids. His father, well I am not so sure. You know those parents that go and play the pokies and leave the kids in the car..well I would expect that sort of behaviour from his father and also that he would take him to a pub. Pubs are not for children and not even for some adults.

I think they are miserable places where people who have problems go to drink and drown their sorrows and depressions. I find them really depressing places just walking past them.

I am quite horrified by the discovery of google.com.au maps that have all the major cities and THE SMALL COUNTRY TOWNS mapped on their websites so you can virtually see every house in every street in Australia unless you ask for it to be blocked out.

What an invasion of privacy! I personally think people who have received death threats and the like to get in contact with the relevant people and get your house or institute pictures taken off the site.

There are many streets in America on it and it is crazy to do so. I searched through the world in different countries and it was surprising what came up. Someone ought to investigate why this site is going up.

The UK and Israel and some of the European countries are clever because they have not allowed a full street map. Why is our government giving the terrorists such a golden opportunity to create mischief. Didn't 9/11 teach them anything about security.

Personally I don't want my house views its details freely available and I am just a no body with a liking for privacy.