On another day in another place.

The gray sky hangs low, pressing you into the ground, opening out the horizon and forcing everything else to admit its insignificance.
Yet on this unpreposing canvas the reds and yellows of the trees glow. Green grass seems brighter. Buildings are whiter, and every little scrap of litter on the ground shines out in lurid [...]

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On a Really Goode Job.

You are supposed to be job hunting at the moment but you are putting it off. Or rather Putting It Off, the capitals being entirely justified by the lengths to which you will go to avoid it.
This is partly because the wonderful world of state school teaching seems oddly uninterested in you. Surely they are [...]

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On guerilla war.

Apparently your husband and your brother got the Star laughing today.
While you were out at work.
They won’t tell you how they did it.
And the trainees didn’t give you any flowers, even though it was the last day of the course.
It must be a Thursday.

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On how to endear yourself to your tutor.

You’ve just finished writing an essay all about the qualities of a good teacher and the kind of teacher you’d like to be so you thought you’d round it all off by listing some of the greatest moments you’ve endured while attempting to teacher others how to teach English as a foreign language.
You probably ought [...]

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On korrect speling.

When you were about nine years old you were extracted from the classes that everyone else was attending in order to do extra nature study.
It was one of those half arsed efforts schools make sometimes towards catering for ‘gifted’ children, the quotation marks there being entirely justified as the lesson you were lifted out of on the grounds [...]

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On the joy of Tuesdays.

Another post about work. This isn’t supposed to be a blog about work. On the other hand:
You are actually teaching for the first time in over a year now. But only in the mornings. Which in fact means more work as you start earlier and have to squeeze lesson planning (and marking) into approximately half [...]

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On how not to endear yourself to your tutor nos. 3 through 371.

You’ve been working in the teaching English as a foreign language business now for over ten years.
A lot of things about it you love. Rootling around in the mechanics of grammar and such is very satisfying. You get to meet a lot of foreigners too, which is always a source of excitement to someone who started [...]

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On Mayerling.

 So there you are hanging off a handrail in the despised underground on your way to Covent Garden Opera House on a works night out to the ballet discussing why one of your number hasn’t managed to persuade her other half to come with you all.
“Perhaps he thinks it’s always sentimental and pretty pretty?” says [...]

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On activating your schemata.

You can be very boring on the topic of grammar. And punctuation. Particularly commas. The rules are comforting, even if you do treat them as something of an abstract concept when it actually becomes time to apply them.
You are considerably more interested in how we actually use language, though. And the routines we follow and [...]

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On comparative linguistics (again).

It’s the Easter concert term at your choir, and you are having a Mary fest. The lynch-pin of this is Dvorak’s Stabat Mater.
The blurb to your copy of the score says that during the period he was writing it no less than three of his children died. I think this is supposed to lend poignancy to what is, after [...]

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