Notebooks

Clearly I'm not ok and I hear that the virus is a nasty one - the effects linger. I hunker down with bell, book and Kindle, little black radio, cat purring at the end of the bed. I should just lie back and let it all be, really. But I don't. I am not comfortable being there for too long, even though the bed itself is fine, the mattress good etc. Apart from the fact that too much lying down in the day usually makes my muscles feel worse, the room, already too small for the stuff that is in it, fills up with my restlessness. Get up, go downstairs, fetch hot water bottle, shiver, crawl up stairs but I have forgotten to bring a drink - down again, up again, listen to Jenni Murray on Woman's Hour and have no idea what anyone is talking about. I catch sight of myself in the mirror in my red and white pyjamas and grey V neck pullover that I probably found at the same time I found my purple trousers, in a charity shop. I look cool - yes, even in my reduced state - dramatic dark shadows around my eyes and the unmistakeable silver/grey halo framing my head, real roots, old brown Uggs on my feet.. I am still the Queen of Grunge.

Why have I got so many old notebooks lying around the place? I was trying to find something in them but damned if I can remember what. Something to do with teaching classes, I think. Open one at random and read an entry about encouraging students to keep writing in the holidays. I feel as though I'm spying on myself:

"They asked me what they should write about. I am weary but don't show it. Write about the candle you noticed bleeding wax onto the shag pile carpet. Write about the pine needle lodged in the arm of the sofa. Write about the crack in the turning of the year when things don't quite fit together and angels slip through and young men become werewolves howling in the forest and the girl in red treads a path through the trees. Write about your grandmother picking her teeth. Write what you see, write what you don't see, make believe. Pretend. Or don't pretend. Just watch. I don't believe in magic either but I pretend I do. Or rather, I do believe and pretend I don't and the pretence is killing me. That's why I write, to keep alive - what's your excuse?

Last year at Epiphany I went to hear the a poet who said he had woken up that morning with words speaking in his head from a dream. I took the words home and wrote them in my book with leather covers. They seemed like a key to something, or perhaps they were just words. Putting the words down on paper is important - a subversive act, especially if you don't get money or fame or nobody sees the words in your notebooks. At the end, when you are asked to account for yourself, you will have the notebooks along with the time you gave the last biscuit with jam on it to someone who looked sadder than you. Jack Kerouac said that only first drafts are preserved in heaven. In other words, the notebooks that never see the light of day."

And so to bed.

Teaching Classes

When I first began to teach writing classes, in the early days, long before the new achievement-measuring, paperwork-obsessed regimes, and no-one even asked to see your lesson plans let alone learning outcomes, I used to keep a record of what happened in each class. I noted the paticularities of each student and these would inform the kind of lesson plans I created. At one point I was teaching three classes a week and because each group was different, so were the lesson plans. I had the freedom to change direction at any point if that seemed right. Later on, that would prove difficult to do because if you had put one thing on your Scheme of Work form and were then seen to have done something else it would create all kinds of confusion. What if an Inspector came and noted the discrepancy? How could anything be Measured unless you stuck to your pre-constructed Plan? Later on I would find ways to circumnavigate these difficulties, but in the early days I just kept notebooks. My brief - the one I gave myself - was to create an environment where whatever it was that wanted to emerge for a particular student could be enabled, that people should experience the intense play that is a part of the process of working creatively with words and language, that they should begin to express themselves in a way that was authentic.

The other day, in a hunt for something else relating to the project I'm now working on, I came across one of my notebooks where I had recorded the progression of a particular class. Lots of descriptions of students that bring them again vividly to mind, and I realise a large part of the work was this holding in my consciousness of the different people. So much of what happens in a class, or any group (or relationship, for that matter) moves invisibly, and slowly, before anything concrete or substantial manifests. Which really makes a nonsense of the idea that you can state a learning objective for a particular student at the beginning of the class and then measure to what extent it had been achieved at the end.

At one point, in the notebook, I recorded that "they want to know where I come from. No, not London, Primrose Hill, Hackney, but where I really come from, you know, originally, because of that look about me. Something foreign. And the way I speak. I tell them my parents were refugees from Germany before the war, but that I am from here and that I lived in Germany for some years as a child.
"Oh," she says, "I thought you had a speech impediment." Everyone laughs loudly to cover the indelicacy of such a remark and she doesn't understand why they are laughing. She noticed something about the way I lightened on the letter L and thought it was a speech impediment. That's all. She doesn't see what is funny about that."

LOL :)