Reflections on the last seven weeks…

What other job would let you walk into work, dressed in a silly green top hat and scarf, to spend a chunk of time pretending to be Scrooge? Where else would your feeble attempts at drama be met with a round of applause from impressed eleven-year-olds?

In what other job could you read silly stories like Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale as part of its requirements? What other job requires you to be on top of all the latest children’s fiction, in order to be able to sincerely recommend it?

Where else would you always be the most powerful person in the room, the one who decides upon every activity that takes place in the room? Elsewhere, how often would people turn to you, with an implicit trust that you will have their answer? In what other job could your mind be opened in a brand new way, by a single insightful comment?

Where else can you teach a word like “inferior” and then read twenty-four essays a week later that include it (often with the right spelling and almost always in the right context)?

In what other job can you care so much about a group of people and be determined to do your all to help them achieve their very best? Where else would you receive an “aww” or a round of applause when you explain that you won’t be there after the holidays?

How often does a job have perks like a free performance, where a bunch of youths display their musical talents? Choirs, solo singers, brass bands, pianists and more. In what other job could you watch a free production of Grease, where an all-star amateur cast of adults put themselves on display for the amusement of others? Or where, if you felt brave enough (which I didn’t), you could join them?

The last seven weeks have been exhausting. I’ve never had a moment to myself. Stress has kept me awake many nights. There have been times when I’ve cried. And cried. And cried.

But I wouldn’t want to do anything else.

Spreading the word...

I've been googling myself again. I know, I know. Egotistical freak. Actually, I was wanting to see whether my email address was floating around at all (which might explain a recent influx of annoying spam).

What I found when typing in part of my email address was bizarrely disturbing:

http://nylonsmovies.com/download-The-Da-Vinci-Code-1168.html

On this page is a review by "E. Taylor "elizabeth_jane_taylor" (24 September 2011)". And it is indeed a review I wrote. But I didn't write it on 24 September 2011 and I didn't write it on that website. It was written on amazon.co.uk years ago, just after The Da Vinci Code was first released on DVD.

Not that I really mind my words being spread around, but it was strange to see it re-published without my permission. Really random, too. Having glanced at the other reviews on the page, I can only think that the website owners were looking for reviews that compared to the book to the film. Maybe it's a new site and they wanted to make themselves look popular by stealing reviews from elsewhere and claiming users wrote them on their pages.

It's still rather disconcerting. And shows how things don't simply disappear from the web once you publish them. They can, apparently, randomly reappear after years of being forgotten.

Be careful what you write: you never know who might be reading or where it's been published.

Another nice quote

This is from the same episode of Fry's Planet Word (I guess it's hardly surprising that I enjoy a lot of what he says about the written word!). In describing reading, he says:

“It’s like a will o’ the wisp, one book lights another book, which lights another one, which lights another one.”

Lovely way of describing intertextuality, one of the joys of reading.

That episode also moved on to speculate over the future of the written word. One particularly interesting thing about the ebook, which I hadn't thought about before, was mentioned: the possibility of a multimodal text. As technologies advance, an ebook novel could be a hybrid of all sorts of different things like written text, images, videos, sounds and more. What a curious thought! What would that mean for the genre of the novel? It could take it into all kinds of strange dimensions... Well worth watching that episode for food for thought.

It's half term at the moment. And also my birthday tomorrow, which I keep forgetting about. Happy birthday to me... I have lots of planning to do for my teaching. When I go back after half term, I'll need to be ready to teach A Christmas Carol, The Canterbury Tales (a play version), Media and GCSE English Language. It's going to be a busy week!

Quote!

Here's a lovely quote:

"I can never forget the moment I first saw a novel I’d written that had arrived from the printers. I put it on the table and I looked at it and I lowered my eyes to its level, I sniffed it, I opened it, I walked and circled it, I simply couldn’t believe that something I had written could end up as that magical thing - bound, printed text, a book."

It's by Stephen Fry and comes from Episode 4 of Planet Word, a BBC series currently airing about language. Ahhh... how I dream of that day! It would be, as he puts it, magical. Today I received some books - real, printed books - from one of my writing buddies and that was amazing in itself. To think that one day, perhaps, it could be my words in there... It's all part of the dream.

I'd recommend the television program to anyone who is even the slightest bit interested in language. So far the series has been about language acquisition (fascinating topic), the many languages and accents across the world (very funny episode), the uses and abuses of language (lots of swearing), and the one I'm watching at the moment is about writing itself.

Wonderful. :)

One Direction to Insanity

Been a while since I blogged, though I'm not sure how much I should blog about day-in-day-out of life at the moment because of 'safe-guarding'. I'm not sure I'd want the wonderful children at my school to find this...

But I'm suitably outraged to write an interesting blog post, so feast your eyes on this:

I heard about this particular ebay item last night on CrimeWatch. Last night, those two tickets were selling on ebay for about £2000. Which was outrageous in itself! But I was curious to know just how much it would sell for and watched the item with my ebay account. The price you see is the one it sold for, as far as I can make out. (It's disappeared from the listings now).

Almost doubled in one day.

Three thousand seven hundred pounds!

Where to begin? I seriously am flabbergasted. I can't see how you could justify a figure like £100 for a single night's entertainment (though people in Cambridge regularly do it with their crazy May Balls), but this is of a totally different scale!

Think of all the things you could do with that kind of money! You could go to somewhere like Australia for a substantial holiday, or around all the roller-coasters in Florida. Or it would get you a cheap second hand car. Or you could buy a million books... The possibilities are endless. But there's one similarity to everything in MY list: if I'm going to pay thousands for it, at least it'll last for quite a long time!

And to see a silly boy band, of all things! I paid £65 for David Tennant and Catherine Tate in Much Ado About Nothing fairly recently, because the cheap tickets had already sold out. I wasn't entirely happy about it, but it seemed worth it overall. Brilliant experience. Yet, if the tickets had been any more than that, I'd simply have passed. Even something like an opera in London is only a couple of hundred pounds, and that's for one of the highest forms of art...

Ridiculous.

I mean, I'm half inclined to suppose it's fake and that it's someone's idea of a publicity stunt. If so, then hats off to whoever thought it up: you've successfully conned me into doing some advertising for you.

But if it IS real...

Even cliches like "some people have more money than sense" don't cut it. It's so extreme.

...

All I can say is... if you have £4000 to throw away, can you please throw it in my direction? Thank you.

Angry Rant about Student Finance

I imagine there are other people like me. I've been brought up to live within my means, to buy when I can afford, to abhor the 'buy now, pay later' culture. I abhor my student debts and I've lived like a pauper for the last three years so that I'll be able to pay it off as soon as I possibly can. I HATE the fact that it hangs over me. And I don't see why I should pay a penny in interest, when the costs are already ridiculously large at the beginning.

I'm a lucky one. I feel sorry for people born three years after me, who will face the £9000 debts a year, just in terms of tuition fees. Who won't have a choice but to have the debts with them until they're about 50 or however long it takes for the debts to be written off.

And so you can probably understand why this absolutely sickens me: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14836202.

I can image that other people share my mentality. Who'll decide, when faced with £9000 of debt each year, to go to local unis to reduce their debts and who'll save as much as they possibly can during that time (with part time jobs and things) to try get rid of the debts as fast as possible. Not because they'll eventually become "high" earners. But because they can't stand the fact of living in debt all their lives.

And to celebrate such honest, hard-working people, the government wants to introduce penalties for paying off debts early. It won't apply to me, of course, and once again I can only feel so thankful that I was born in 1989 and not a few years later. But my heart goes out to anyone in later generations who has a similar mindset to me. It really does.

Hopefully such an evil scheme won't go through... The think tank says it won't be cost-effective, so hopefully the government will reconsider. After all, it's all about money.

I've always been in favour of a fair student "tax", which works on a sliding scale depending on your income. Tax sounds so much better than debt. Effectively, the government debt scheme is trying to BE a tax. So I don't get why they didn't just introduce one in the first place. It must be numbers. They think they can get more out of people by introducing a debt that builds interest. Horrible.

Well, angry rant over.

Goodreads

September. *blows out the dust again* Time for a new blogging resolution to blog a bit more regularly. I've had quite a lot of ideas for blogs recently, but haven't actually got around to writing them. It's a bit frustrating...unless you blog it right when the mood hits you, you sort of lose enthusiasm with it (and 2am is an annoying time to turn the computer on). Maybe that's why people like Twitter--a handful of characters isn't very time consuming...

Anyway, you've probably heard of this blog topic before: Goodreads, a place to record the books you read and what you thought of them. I was a little unsure what to make of it when I joined up, but since then I've added a few books and I actually quite like it. It's nice to make a record of the books because with my bad memory, it's always quite hard to remember what I've read...

For some reason, there's also something satisfying in totting up the books into a nice, ever-growing statistic. We like stats, as humans, don't we? Even though most of them are nonsense (99% of statistics are made up on the spot...geddit?). My Goodreads only lists about 80 books, but that's because I can't be bothered to wrack my brains *too* hard to recall everything I've ever read. Still, I'm trying to start a habit of adding every NEW book I read, and the number's creeping up now.

The website also gives you updates on the authors you've read before, whenever they publish something new. Like a while back, I found out through it that Mary Hoffman has a new book out. Not the Stravaganza series that I like but something standalone. Whenever I have a spare moment to read something of my own choice (doesn't happen very often!), I'll get around to reading it.

You can have friends on Goodreads and compare your reading tastes, which is quite interesting, too. More fun stats. Unfortunately I only have two friends, so if you're reading this and aren't a complete stranger, feel free to add me... my profile is here.