Spring skiing

The sun is warming me through the window as I write.  There’s no snow on the ground, and a professional is pruning the trees in Joyce’s yard across the street, so spring can’t be far off, although up at Silver Star, there’s fresh snow and the base is again over 200cm.  On Saturday I had my 2 regular classes with SSASS.  They went well; the girls were in pretty good humor and met their goals of 6 and 8 runs respectively.  I learned a lot at the presentation on autism that I attended a few weeks ago.  I now talk less, avoid figurative language, present techniques in as graphic a way as possible and set goals for the lesson with the student before we leave the SSASS room.  The latter is one of the best pieces of advice I was given; autistic children really seem to want to know exactly what they are expected to do.  When it is clearly established, they do it, and nothing more.  That’s it; stick to the plan.  A person like me who delights in figurative language and likes nothing better than to wander and be surprised by something unforeseen is not a natural at this job, but I’m getting to like it.  I helped a friend on Sunday with her autistic student.  He’s a much better skier than my girls.  We used the same techniques, and even at that, he had a bit of a meltdown at one point, but we got over it and had a good ski.  I really enjoyed being on the big runs and will make sure that if I work with SSASS again next year I do not get 2 students who have to use the ‘Magic Carpet.’ 

I am making more time for Korean these days.  I really enjoy learning about it; although, I can’t speak it much yet.  Last week I learned that the noun that sounds in English like ‘il’, means: sun, day and work.  Fascinating, isn’t it.  Sunday is ‘il yo il’.  What got me thinking even more is the fact that the verb ‘ha’ means both ‘to say’ and ‘to do’.  I was raised to believe that the two verbs were almost diametrically opposed.  One of my mother’s favorite sayings was, “Do as I say, not as I do.”  English is full of such expressions:  ‘more easily said than done’, ‘talk’s cheap’, ‘put your money where your mouth is’, etc.  I’ve been rereading Shakespeare’s plays lately and copying down quotations that I like.  In looking them over a few weeks ago I realized that many of them involve the idea that thought, talk and action are quite separate functions, so this revelation about Korean makes me wonder if Koreans are any better than English speaking peoples at keeping their word.  Do words have more weight with them than with us?  Unfortunately, at the rate I am progressing, it will be years before I find out. 

Cross-country skiing has been very good lately.  I’m getting to like it better than downhill.  Since my shoulder dislocation last year, I’m nervous about someone hitting me from behind and that means I can’t just let myself go when down hilling.  John, Mo and I have graduated to the cross-country black runs at Silver Star.  They’re not too difficult, and I prefer going up and downhill rather than on the flats.  

starting out on a black run with Mo

fooling around before drinking a flat white after our ski

Balance

Dull, dull, dull, inside and outside.  I need a tonic.  I heard on the CBC radio this morning that the amount of active vitamin D in any given tablet can vary a great deal.  Maybe I’ve been taking my daily dose from a bottle of weak pills lately.  Or maybe it’s the lingering cold I have.  At any rate, I’m going to write this out of my system, move forward, put it behind me, get on with my life and mobilize every other cliché I can think of behind an effort to pull myself up by my bootstraps.   Here’s a picture Jay sent me recently that is his and now my ‘go to’ photo for bad mornings:

And here’s one of my nephew Matti’s baby, Burke Boyce.  It will now be my shot for good mornings:

In an effort to maintain a balanced tone, I will now present a high point from the last 10 days.  On Friday evening I volunteered as an usher at the Vernon Performing Arts Centre for the ‘Travelin’ Slam Poetry’ show.  It was great.  I was so ill at ease at the beginning that if I hadn’t been an usher, I wouldn’t have stayed in the theatre.  Poets, alone on stage, baring their creations to strangers, how could they do it?  But they were poets, very good ones, and they did it.  The main one was Brendan McLeod from the Vancouver arts collective ‘The Fugitives.’  He’s 33 and quite plain looking, short brown hair, blue jeans and an untuckedin dark shirt, but a gifted MC and poet.  The other 3 were about his age or younger.  Each was unique looking and a genuine poet.  One was a very tall, thin, wired First Nations man, one a round, flouncy-skirted Bahamian-Canadian woman from Montreal and the last, perhaps the shyest of them all, seemed to have a background in heavy metal and video games.  He never took his cap off, but he really ‘gave her’ at times.  They did bare their souls, but within minutes I was completely at ease.  They were used to doing what they were doing, good at it and full of energy.  The format, with judges from the audience and lots of booing and cheering was invigorating.  Brendan led and they all participated in the final set; the audience chanted the chorus and the whole atmosphere was exhilarating.

One of the expressions that has been buzzing around the CBC radio and tv this week is, ‘the aging tsunami.’  Once that network gets its teeth into an idea, it holds on like a terrier and shakes the blood out of it.  I like the CBC, it’s the only radio station I listen to but they do go on and self promote.  At any rate, they make it seem as if our generation has had quite a ride, coming in with the ‘baby boom’ and going out on an ‘aging tsunami.’  I wonder about how much debris we’ll leave behind us to wash up on the shores of the world.

On Tuesday evening, walking home from my class at the library, I saw The Big Dipper and across from it, Orion, both brilliant in the black sky.  That was a joy.  

The old cold

 I have the cold that has been going around for so long.  I haven’t had any illness since the persistent cough that wracked me most of May in Korea.  I tried to ignore it this morning; I did 2 loads of laundry while listening to Korean cds, walked downtown to the bank, came home, ate some soup and lay down for over an hour.  Now I’m sitting in front of this laptop staring at the cursor, finally admitting defeat.

I’ve been making an effort to get back to Korean lately.  If I compare this to the building of the railway across Canada, I’m at the stage of laying down track.  Sometimes the effort of remembering such strange words makes my brain hurt almost as much as if real spikes were being driven into it, and I’m still a long way from Craigellachie, let alone from buying rolling stock.  When I’m sitting in the living room listening to my cds, I can repeat Pimsleur’s phrases as if I were a lifetime resident of Seoul, but when I try to make an appropriate comment in Korean to Lucia or one of my students, I can’t.  It really is testing my determination to learn ‘anything but bridge’ in my old age to keep my mind alive.

Tonight I’m going to listen to a presentation on autism with the gang from SSASS.  We’re having a potluck before.  I was too lazy to cook anything, so, I picked up a pizza at a really good Italian deli nearby as I was wandering aimlessly around town in the warm sun on my way home from the bank.  We seem to be heading into an early spring; that’s what the groundhogs predicted, isn’t it?  Most of the snow has melted in the yard, but there’s still a lot in the hills.  I was cross-country skiing on Monday and Thursday and tomorrow I will have 2 classes with SSASS.  I was talking with Jay about the fact that since I dislocated my shoulder last February, I have not really enjoyed down hill skiing.  I’m too frightened.  We agreed that I should probably quit, so I think I’ll enjoy some easy stuff this season and next year I’ll just do cross-country.  Our decision was reinforced this morning.  As I was carrying my pizza home across a parking lot, I saw and stopped to talk with a friend from the VOC.  She had just come out of the doctor’s office after seeing him about an aching knee.  She had spent 3 consecutive days downhill skiing before one of her knees became very stiff and sore; the doctor said that the scan showed it to be pretty worn-out.  At our age we have to moderate ‘use it or lose it’, and that’s not all bad, since we are our age.

Now it’s Sunday.  I didn’t work with SSASS yesterday.  I was coughing so much at the meeting Friday night that one of my colleagues moved away from me and everyone suggested that I stay home and rest on Saturday, which I did.  My head aches, my nose runs, I have a heavy cough that practically gags me at times, etc., etc.  Tomorrow is Family Day in BC, and I think I’ll spend it at home too.  By then the worst should be over.  The main thought I have is that I hope my dad doesn’t get this.  He couldn’t cough his way out of it; he’s so frail.  When I talked with mom and dad on Friday, I discovered that he had fallen earlier in the week and mom had found him bleeding from the ear.  They were unable to get him up, so she called the ambulance, for the third time in 8 months.  Luckily, they discovered at the hospital that the blood was from a deep cut by his ear and not coming from inside.  Within a few hours, they were back at home, but he sounded very weak on the phone and mom sounded weary.  They are at the limit of their abilities to keep themselves going independently. 

The 'real deal' Aussie flat white.  It was made by the only barista at Silver Star who actually worked at The Dome, a coffee shop Mo remembers from her time in Australia.  Mo took the picture.

Teaching and learning

It’s Friday, February 1^st.  The alliteration in this date reminds me of Martin, my Korean student in grade 11.  I spent a total of three hours this week trying to help him learn literary terms.  What a drag for both of us!  We made an effort to enliven the ordeal by inventing ludicrous examples for each of the terms so that they might stick in his head.  He seems to have a good memory, but it’s being taxed to the limit by four typed pages of terms he’s hardly ever used and likely rarely will.  I finally discovered that he had a list of about 20 of the terms written without definitions on a page that was stuffed into his binder among a lot of other disorganized material.  He seemed to be completely clueless about why he’d written them, but I thought his teacher must have had them make a list of the terms that were most likely to be on the test, so we concentrated on them.  He had not kept copies of any of the poems that they had worked on in class.  The study of English literature is beyond him for many reasons.  First, the language in “Macbeth” and even Lord of the Flies, let alone poetry is more than he can cope with, and second, the whole idea of going beyond memorization to application and appreciation is right out of his ken.  He will be able to write the definitions because he will memorize them.  I can only hope that some of our crazy examples will stick in his head too and help him to find similar ones in the works he is presented with on the test.  

Tutoring his sister Stella provided me with a much more positive experience this week.  She had asked me a while ago to speak to her grade 6 class about teaching.  I agreed and had a vague idea of what I would say, but as the date approached, I began to get nervous.  I wrote the ideas down on a sheet of paper, tried to order them and interject a few lively examples.  I had a big map of North America and bought another of the world to use to illustrate points.  I pulled out the old one-room schoolhouse bell I have kept since I found it in a cottage we bought on Lake Superior when I was in high school to use as a prop.  With only 2 days left, I actually got out cards and put key ideas down on them.  I knew I’d shake a bit; I didn’t do that in my own classes when I taught, but I have done when I’ve had to speak before, as president of the union at the Lycee Claudel or on a few other occasions.  Even when Jim and I got married in my own home, the dry grasses that I had gathered shook raspingly in my hands as I stood and said the few words I had to in front of family and friends.  As it turned out, I was marvelously calmed by the familiar smell and atmosphere the moment I entered the school, but my hands shook a little bit as I wrote the theme of the talk on the board: 

Students and Teachers

Are not such different creatures.

Then I remembered that nothing works like asking for help, so I asked if 4 kids could help me put up the maps.  Hands flew up and I had nothing but cooperation and interest from then on.  I went from a lesson I learned in kindergarten, to how I became a teacher, to what it was like teaching in a French school full of kids from all over the world, to the fact that my son is teaching in Korea and finally that Stella’s mom is trying to teach me Korean.  This was punctuated by students teaching each other about themselves by coming to the board to point out on the maps where they had been born, lived and gone to school.  Forty-five minutes went by quickly.  I had to drop some of what I had planned to say in an effort to complete the circle and end the presentation by reiterating that throughout our lives we are all both students and teachers.  I was exhilarated by the end of it all.  Then I drove to Stella’s house where her mom thanked me by teaching me how to make kimbap.  We had a wonderful lunch of miso soup with tofu and green onion, kimbap with kimchee and bolgugi.   It was all good.