how to teach

Tags

2018, 4*, Academy, accountability, betrayal, career, classroom, corridors, flowers, game, ideas, infrastructure, management, OFSTED, politics, Principal, requirement, resentment, school, special measures, teaching, teaching craft, thinking

                I suppose it’s not actually your fault
                that I brought to the point of fruition

                those things which you were required
                to require to keep your sorry arse out of

                special measures and you didn’t have the
                first or second idea what to do with them

                because you had long since moved on to
                eleventh and twelfth ideas playing

                some stupid game about infrastructure
                and accountability and completely forgot

                how to teach

 

about and dedicated to the former Principal of the former school (oh, sorry, Academy … what was I thinking) where I spent the whole 29 years of my former career which had calcified even as it flowered it’s most beautiful petals and eventually snapped under so much pretty weight and fell silent and unnoticed to the ground (and a good job too, it would have been a light, colourful mess in the corridor or the classroom); all of which I am required to not name if I’m to keep the paltry amount of money given for me to just shut up at long last; even after years of escape it seems I still bear a grudge – I really must find a honey pot for it somewhere …

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

career wormhole: I am not yet ready
game wormhole: [once a] dilemminal [always a dilemminal]
management & teaching wormhole: new blue porsche
politics wormhole: looking / ridiculous
school wormhole: green and / luminant / to behold
teaching craft wormhole: Structure & d y n a m i c
thinking wormhole: Khandro Tsering Chodron

 

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I am not yet ready

Tags

2016, 5*, career, confession, eyes, faces, fracture, indentity, Luton, mouth, passing, people, Refuge, responsibility, university, work

                in the university reception
                I cannot Take Refuge while
                fractured from those around

                and those who pass, their
                faces about their work and
                identity, already persed

                beside their mouth my eyes
                trying to make the devastating
                confession for which I suspect

                I am not yet ready

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

career wormhole: after all
eyes & people & work wormhole: green and / luminant / to behold
faces wormhole: ‘God, who am I …?’
identity wormhole: lack of center
mouth & passing wormhole: two profiles
university wormhole: reading // unstirred

 

after all

Tags

2016, 4*, Alan Moore, anarchy, breakdown, career, compromise, extreme, gender, innocence, Katie, regret, retirement, sadness, sleep, society, teaching, V for Vendetta, victim, wind

                Katie tugged at the eaves, alright,
                so I roused just deeply sad

                at the end of my wasted career,
                too naïve to win, so I read

                the beginning of Evey and V’s
                encounter and knew it could

                never have been done
                after all

 

storm Katie hit the southern UK in March of 2016; naming storms makes it personal; I was also starting what turned out to be my last protracted burn-out from work; Evey and V are the main protagonists in Alan Moore’s ‘V for Vendetta’ – V is the play-through of Anarchy created by the state against which it wages vendetta, his very presence provokes the state, let alone what he says or does; Evey is the play-with of innocence nurtured by the state to fulfil her gender to which she serves as victim, her very presence is exploitative; Evey and V could never co-exist if they stay as they are: if they stay as they are, they are extreme, if they change, they are compromised; by the end of August I was retired and filled with thoughts of what could have been of those 29 years

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

Alan Moore wormhole: darkness
breakdown wormhole: I turn to wake up
career & teaching wormhole: “I need help”
compromise wormhole: sweet chestnut
retirement wormhole: dream I // dream II
sleep wormhole: good going into / that gentle night
society wormhole: found
wind wormhole: clear as vista

 

“I need help”

Tags

2015, 4*, career, dream, fear, letting go, passing, shame, speech, stairs, teacher, teaching

                vulnerable and stuck
                on the way to first lesson

                taking the short-cut over
                the main stairwell, narrow

                foot-ledge, I cannot
                continue, don’t look down,

                I cannot go back, “I need
                help, get a teacher” and

                I am not ashamed to
                call out loud, no one

                does, I cannot go back,
                a teacher passes, I

                cannot remember her
                name “I need help”;

                I realise there is a balcony-
                corridor behind the ledge,

                safety partition is loose,
                I can lean back into it,

                break the screen, fall
                back, no more fear

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

career wormhole: circuitry
dream wormhole: breathing through hypnagogia
letting go wormhole: place
passing wormhole: and // do your ears burn red?
speech wormhole: Sandwich
stairs wormhole: is this it // all the time
teaching wormhole: I turn to wake up

 

circuitry

Tags

2014, 6*, being, career, circuits, circular poem, communication, doing, echo, identity, lead, mind, silence, society, thinking, time, world

 

                                                                    so much
                    unless there were                         overrule and overlay
             can not respond to                                   forming ad hoc
                my silent mind                                         circuitry
    gathering echoes that                                           both clipped
                 demands like                                             and split
 in a vacuous world that                                           through junction
             to make the play                                          and relay
             choice is bypassed                                    massed in
           so thick over time that                         cable over lead
                                          clumped

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

being wormhole: holiday
career wormhole: breathing through hypnagogia
circular poem wormhole: in the / Citadel / Park / a leaf / new / ly fell
communication wormhole: just saying, is all VIII: keeping up toxic appearences
doing & thinking wormhole: place
echo & society wormhole: divergent // direction
identity wormhole: concordance
mind wormhole: jump start
silence wormhole: make your rickety / constructs strong with / unbending grids / of attention and wide- / open grates of let
time wormhole: lime crocs
world wormhole: I keep / waiting to be discovered and get lost in anticipation

 

breathing through hypnagogia

Tags

2014, 5*, breath, breathing, care, career, dream, hypnagogia, illusion, letting go, observing, passing, waking, work

                breathing through hypnagogia

                                rousing
                into congealed injustice
                                                career of my 40s
                                                all sticky
                                between breaths, under fingernails
                I can know   longer   care

                                observe
                                it will pass
                                breathe

                                                                let it disperse by itself
                                and just do the work with
strong sense of illusion

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

breath wormhole: the quiet whale
breathing wormhole: do I
career wormhole: just saying, is all VIII: keeping up toxic appearences
dream wormhole: I turn to wake up
letting go wormhole: I keep / waiting to be discovered and get lost in anticipation
passing wormhole: this time
work wormhole: work

 

just saying, is all VIII: keeping up toxic appearences

Tags

2013, 5*, appearance, breath, career, communication, decades, dialectic, lungs, managerialism, neglect, no voice, offering, plastic, professionalism, rights, teaching, toxic

                                                                                 just saying, is all VIII:

                                              and after all
                                              I had something to offer
                                              to the very fibre and vessel of teaching

                                              that was ‘hoff’-
                                              ishly and consistently denied the right to enter
                                              that holy dialectic, it was

                                              sincere and
                                              credible and beneath
                                              neglect, while keeping up toxic appearences

                                              of communication,
                                              thriving in a sealed plastic bag …
                                              … in which I have taken breath for decades

                                              my lungs
                                              now shot through, unable to
                                              speak but still reliant on a borderline-

                psychotic professionalism wasting me to the bone

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

breath wormhole: stone
career & managerialism wormhole: just saying, is all VII: // `spolitical
communication wormhole: reprieve
professionalism & teaching wormhole: wakeoutofadream

 

just saying, is all VII: // `spolitical

Tags

2013, 4*, accountability, career, compromise, expertise, just saying, listening, managerialism, message, politics, principle, production, public service, responsibility, work

                just saying, is all VII:

                the drive to de-power the worker
                in public service; you cannot
                call-the-shots-because-you-are-an-expert
                … because you are the worker

                if you are calling the shots you must be
                a manager of some thing so that
                you can then be held accountable
                for the shots you call – kept on message.

                If You Are not a Manager you Cannot
                Call the Shots. Even if you are a genius;
                ‘take a responsibility, then we’ll listen
                to you’, I wouldn’t on the principle they

                wouldn’t listen to, they didn’t listen on the
                principle that I had no voice without responsibility
                compromise; de-experting workers
                is inexorable to production, in fact

`spolitical

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

career wormhole: wakeoutofadream
compromise wormhole: gone black
listening wormhole: within
managerialism wormhole: seen but not heard
politics wormhole: this sodden land
work wormhole: weight

 

wakeoutofadream

Tags

2013, 6*, career, circular poem, contentment, CPD, defensive, defining, dream, freedom, gap, history, identity, KUE, lesson observation, loneliness, measure, process, professionalism, propaganda, sitting, stillness, struggle, teaching, time, true nature, waking

                                                                                wakeoutofadream
                       both content and free                            where I struggle
                   that is your true self                                         to take the measure
      and inhabit the loneliness                                              of the class I track and train
               and go with neither                                                  brilliant to my design
between define and defend                                                      and told upon inspection
           (nothing to stand on)                                                      I should be engineering them
                        to find the gap                                                   by process
to history or the propaganda                                                and should have been
   moving neither left nor right                                         for years now
                                   keep your seat                            what have I been doing?
                                                              just

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

career & identity wormhole: weight
circular poem: no / thing
dream wormhole: that comicbookshop … // … in dreams
history wormhole: cut while you’re ahead/cut while you’re a thread – poewieview #35
loneliness wormhole: lonely and free
professionalism wormhole: retirement
sitting wormhole: bud
stillness wormhole: still
teaching wormhole: Virginia
time wormhole: Salisbury Cathedral // suspended in everything

 

weight

Tags

2017, 8*, anatta, April, beauty, breeze, career, circle, clouds, countryside, identity, lesson planning, right angle, seeing, stone, stone circles, teaching, thought, time, view, work, world

                                                              April clouds are stone
                                              foreboding over the countryside
                                                                                   placed in circles across the land
                                                                                              over millennia

 

 

                I had wanted
                to follow thought and view

                at right-angle
                to all the world

                to find it beautiful
                in all its stark

                to lose my weight
                in perfect shifting breeze

                but had to work
                and plan the bend

                and case the sight
                and lost my sight

                (and gained some weight)
                I … had to work

 

retirement #8: when you slip out of a career and look back on what was achieved, there is only a quiet and drifting cloud to contemplate although the experience of working through it was of unworkable stone which you knew all the time shouldn’t be the case, but it was, it was; read the whole sequence as it drifts across the skies: in and out / the Avebury stones / can’t seem to get / a signal …

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

beauty wormhole: Sylvia
breeze wormhole: 1968
career & identity wormhole: strain
clouds wormhole: the // orange rose
seeing wormhole: Day Out
stone wormhole: reprieve
teaching wormhole: seen but not heard
thought wormhole: handsome
time wormhole: time travel
work wormhole: holiday
world wormhole: reading // unstirred