Snow

Inspired by a short trip to the UK that coincided with the worse snow in decades:

What is it about snow that can send shivers of excitement through the body, make the mundane spiritual, the earthly heavenly and the ugly exquisite? How is it able to convince the photographer to walk just one more corner further from home and respite for a glimpse? Turn couch potatoes into red faced, out of breath, snowballers?

It certainly isn't the cold. This can numb your digits until they feel like another’s, Shatter soft, plump lips like a rock thrown through a frozen pond; leaving nought but shards.

It’s as though the contrast has been turned up on the senses. pushing everything into either the black or white, pleasure or pain, cold or hot.

The dark hues of naked branches become jet-black against the pure, white snow. Those animals unfortunate enough to have to venture out into it show up like spots of blood on white bed sheets. I’ve followed foxes across kilometres of snow covered countryside, their red hair like a siren on a rock. Your sense of smell is stabbed by cold air and soothed by the moisture that sheaths it.

Red shell like ears throb and have trouble hearing the sounds that cannot escape the sticky clutches of the fallen snow, dying a sickly sweet, and cold Brownian death. Other sounds seemed clipped, but strengthened by the cold; travelling further in the crisp, still air. A strength it needs to be overheard over the rich crunch of snow underfoot.

Its effects on your sense of taste are delayed and can’t be felt until until you’re safe and sound at home once more, your gloves steaming on the radiator and your shoes turning from rugged to bedraggled as the snow melts. There food will explode and sugar will hit your blood stream like intravenous heroine

Technorati Tags:
weather, snow, Milton Keynes

That taught me

If I cast my mind back I can recall many occasions after I’ve explained something or other to some person or other, I’ve been told that I’d make a good teacher. Coming from those it did I could consider these words compliments, but that carcinogenic chuckling demon inside of my mind would remind me that those same words could be an insult if spoken by the very same brand of idiot who would put me off the idea of teaching.

I sometimes considered teaching to be my destiny at best, or, my fate at worst. These are not a concepts I’m either comfortable with nor believe in, but ones to which I often leave the most important decisions of my life.

With these two points in mind I took no steps to pursue teaching. If it must, it could find me.

Find me it did. I arrived in Spain in possession of only a love of the English language, and knowledge about some of the bigger cogs that power it and a few pages of conjugated Spanish verbs memorised. Teaching English was the only job I could hope to do.

I became a teacher of English. English grammar, English conversation, English pronunciation and modern Anglo Saxon cultures. I’ve taught many ages and abilities, and with my appalling Spanish I’ve often felt as though I’m the student learning practical Spanish “on-the-job”. That they got a great deal out of it too meant I could sleep at night. I have a 90% pass rate when my students went for exams and jobs.

Giving people the knowledge and information they need, arming them for the professional and academic fights they’ll face is when teaching is at its most satisfying and important. It’s up there with those who collect rubbish, practice medicine, farm and police.

It’s when these jobs become diluted, drop by drop, that workers, once passionate and idealistic, become frustrated and disillusioned.

For those other professions I imagine this comes in the form of paperwork and targets, introduced either in response to those who’ve abused their powers in the past, or by those who have to prove they’re not abusing their own.

For me it’s teaching people who don’t have a passion for the language, practising bad to incorrect English to help children pass tests by their ill-informed, misinformed and uninformed English teachers, rather than learn useful, transferable English

Perhaps that was what they meant when they said I’d make a good teacher..

Technorati Tags:
ElGuiri, teaching English, learning Spanish, reflection