Goodbye Mr Chips

This week I have individual zoom meetings with all my teacher-training students on one course. They need to read an academic article about Classroom Management and tell me about it in English, which is their second or sometimes third or even fourth language (but mostly second). 

The article offers a number of tools for creating trust with the class, promoting a good atmosphere, and motvating the pupils. It's a nice article. 

So I'm discussing classroom management with a twenty year old student teacher, and she tells me how films can show good teaching and you can learn a lot from them. She can't remember the name of the film, but she wants to tell me about a great teacher who inspired the students and there is a film about how it was done.

"Dead Poets' Society?" The student looks at me blankly. Of course, it's way before her time (1989). I'm laughing to myself inside because before I thought of  Dead Poets' Society, I really wanted to say, "Good Bye Mr Chips." (1939 - before my time, 1969 - my favourite, and 2002 which I'd forgotten about and anyway, wasn't as good as the 1969 version.)

I googled it later, and the student was thinking of Freedom Writers (2007). I've not seen this film but I want to. I think back to other inspiring screen teachers of my youth - To Sir With Love springs to mind. I'd like to show it to my students but it would be wasted on them because times have changed so much. Or would it? 

All these films have the same principles at heart. I gave my students an academic article written in 2019, that basically says what we all know about good teachers from watching films about good teachers. (And maybe from once being pupils ourselves.) I don 't remember any of the names of the authors of the inspiring articles I set for this course, but last year I did want to be like Rita, the Swedish teacher from the Netflix series (but without so much sex and no smoking).

In the age of Google translate, even the EFL powers that be, are turning away from reading comprehension and towards communication. This past year on zoom opened up a whole new way of teaching. When digital replaced print it was easier and much more fun to use video than it was to look at texts. 

However, there's no denying that the personal connection was missing. It was great to return to my primary school last week and enjoy actually being with the pupils. With residual capsules (or bubbles, or pods, or whatever you want to call the smaller class groups) I don't actually have a classroom with a computer screen. So I try to be elements of Mr Chips, and Sidney Poitier, and Robin Williams, and Rita (without the sex and cigarettes), albeit adjusted for 3rd to 6th graders. 

Academia is considered dumbed down if we watch it rather than read it. But only by old school academics who remember screen time as purely recreational. The screen generation has no patience for all the reading we had to do. Why should they when a you can find a personal teacher on You Tube to show and tell you everything? 

So our students and pupils watch role model teachers, teaching in films, when traditional teaching is almost obsolete. As xyz (Einstein?) said, "intelligence is not knowing the answers, it's knowing where to look for them." And where to look for the answers is more and more on a screen rather than in the library - which actually looks more and more like a computer room than a library. 

But maybe it's not good bye Mr Chips after all. The methods have changed but the important characteristices of a good teacher are the same - trust, respect, listening, nurturing, the journey over the grades, leaving your ego at the door, etc...

The irony is that even Mr Chips emerged from the the original print by James Hilton (1934) and had far greater success on the screen. 

Overheard on the Bus - Holocaust Remembrance Day

Tonight and tomorrow is Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel and in the Jewish world. I lit my candle and now I'm going to tell you a story I overheard on the bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in about 1990. I can't be sure of the year but the lady who told the story was about 55 years old so that would fit with her being born in about 1935. My dates are approximate but my memory is clear. The bus was crowded. I had a seat and she was standing next to me in the isle, talking to another woman. She was slim, with wavy black hair layered to her shoulders, and spoke with a New York accent. This is the story she told her friend.

"I was born in Germany. I was one of three. We were triplets. We came early as multiple births often do, and we were very small. After a week or so they sent my mother home to recuperate and kept us three baby girls in the hospital to grow stronger. Our father visited us every day after work. 

One day a nurse took my father aside and urged him to take us home immediately. The situation for the Jews was already compromised and he understood enough to take her words seriously. He had come straight from work so he had no way to take all three of us home on the bus without a bassinet or any way of carrying us. He could only manage one baby, and he took me. 

The next morning my father went back to the hospital with a bassinet to collect his other two daughters. It was too late, they were gone. The head of hospital told him that they had died in the night. There were no bodies and no further information could be dragged out of any of the staff. 

Soon after that we moved to New York. My two younger brothers and I always knew that I was one of triplets but my mother was always adamant that the other two had died. She couldn't cope with any other scenario. My father never contradicted her but we knew he believed otherwise. 

I became an art teacher. Many years later I was teaching in a high school in New York when a college student came to do her training placement with me. One day she told me that her college supervisor would be coming in to observe her lesson. We told the class and we waited to start until the supervisor arrived. 

The classroom door opened and another member of staff brought the supervisor in. Everyone in the room gasped. All the kids could see it. The supervisor was my identical double. And she was wearing an enormous cross around her neck. All the kids knew that I am Jewish. When she saw me she went white, but she sat through the lesson and then quickly left. She didn't speak to me afterwards, which is very unusual, and I never saw her again. But I know she was my sister and that somewhere out there there's another one of us."

I was eavesdropping so I couldn't ask any questions. Luckily the friend asked what I too wanted to know. "Didn't you try to find her?"

"No never. I discussed it with my brothers and we decided not to even tell my parents. My mother had lived all her life insisting that two of her daughters had died. What would it do to her to have to face a different truth now? And the woman with the big cross around her neck - who knows what she has been through? Who knows what kind of life she had? I was the lucky one who got to grow up with our parents. It wasn't up to me turn her life upside down. She knew where to find me if she wanted to. She never did."

This is the first time I've told this story overheard on a bus in Israel more than 30 years ago. The lady would be about 85 now if she's still alive. It's an incredible story but not unusual for Israel or in the Jewish world. As time goes on we hear these incredible stories less and less. In another generation they will be second-hand stories. I am the generation who heard directly from the people who survived. We must continue to tell the stories. 

Achieve anything in a month.

I didn't make it up. I think it was an author who wrote that her mother used to say that you can achieve anything in a month. I'd like to think it's true so I decided to test it during April. Obviously it says 'anything', not 'everything' so I had to choose my anything. 

I would've liked to have chosen 'learn to play the piano (again)', or, 'improve my Hebrew', or even, 'write the first draft of a novel'. But I know myself and I wouldn't be able to concentrate on a big project outside of work whilst there are loose ends in my life. By this I mean smaller projects that I've been ignoring. They sit on my shoulders, gently taunting and generally hindering my concentration. So during April I'm going to tie up all the loose ends.

April 1st - That side table.

I picked up this table from next to the dumpster on the corner. I've never taken anything from the dumpster before but I've been watching You Tube videos about people who restore furniture from thrift stores and I fancied a go. I brought the table upstairs and there it sat for months with its horrible blue legs and formica top. On Thursday I finally did something with it. 

I had an old tin of primer in the cupboard under the sink. I think it was from when the decorator painted my front door which is laminated steel. I know you need primer to paint over formica so I was half set.

For paint I raided my daughter's craft box and found some white, in liquid form that looked like it would do the job. It didn't look quite enough so I mixed it with the black to make grey. But that didn't look enough either so I mixed in the red to make an aubergine colour. Not what I would have chosen in a paint shop, but better than the horrible blue and formica. 

I primed and then I painted. I should've used a gloss paint, or finished off with a laquer and maybe some beeswax.... I'm making this up from what I've seen on the telly. Bottom line, I didn't spend anything on this project and thus, the top, whilst no longer looking like formica, did look a little dull. And then I found two place mats from Kakadu that fit perfectly on the top.

Voila, one loose end done and dusted. 

April 2nd - Those empty glass jars. 

A friend opened my food cupboard a few weeks ago and burst out laughing. She too had a whole shelf of empty glass jars saved from coffee, jam, pasta sauce, etc... And like me, she had no idea why she was saving them or what she was going to do with them. 

I do use old coffee jars for storing dry goods like rice, barley, couscous, salt, sugar, and oatmeal. One small jar is always in the fridge with homemade salad dressing. In previous years I've decorated jars and filled them with sweets or nuts for Mishloach Manot on Purim. All this does not excuse about 30 glass jars and counting, sitting idle in the cupboard. 

Today I used up all the leftover vegetables in the fridge and some from the freezer to make an enormous batch of soup. I filled seven jars to go in the freezer. Then I made another batch of soup and filled six more jars. One jar didn't have a lid so that was chucked out, and one jar was used for the leftover paint from the table (thereby creating another loose end as I've nothing else to paint). 

That's 15 jars cleared from the cupboard. The rest are sweet little jars that I will have to find a use for because I can't bear to throw them out. 

Nine other loose ends for April.

Editing and backing up the Midlife Singlemum blog.

Editing my digital photos which were done in December but need updating.

Making another photo album for myself as the one I made in December was for DD. 

Decluttering paperwork which is loosely filed but needs tidying up. 

Taking loads of decluttered stuff to the second-hand shop. 

Decluttering and organising my computer files. 

Doing my tax returns for 2020 as I've finally collected all the relevant forms.

Decluttering my phone, especially the phone contacts. 

Decluttering and organising my emails.

It's a challenge, but it wouldn't be a test if it weren't a challenge.