Teaching again

It all went pretty well last week but I am worried about Maybury, where I have a class of only 7, and only 3 of them are level 2, and one of the Level 2's is going to struggle horribly with the reading and writing exams. Bellfields, my supposedly disadvantaged class of mums with children in the creche, was popular and fun, and well-attended, I got a good buzz from that class, and I have them again tomorrow. Routes into Work was a small class - a group really - but we had a funny bunch, with M from Turkey who is young, handsome and cheeky, and S from Iran who is older and has strayed from dementia towers without quite knowing why, and 2 ladies from Iran and from Spain who have no particular problems, but must be wondering what on earth they have got into. Luckily I have a volunteer for that class, who really helps me to manage them. My level 2 class is a huge roomful of 18 young adult students who are all (nearly all) very fluent in English and have plenty to say. They can be great fun (they barrack each other) and the thing is to get to know them as individuals (not easy with 18 of them) and at the same time keep the lesson moving along. No volunteer; and I have never taught that kind of group before (3 hours) so I hope to get a bit of advice from my colleague Sue on Tuesday.

Blue Jasmine

This Woody Allen film is not in the least fun. It's interesting and thoughtful, but it's bleak. There are themes: outright dishonesty is one, the murky area of being complicit in dishonesty is another, the shocking behaviour of an unfaithful husband, the anger of a betrayed wife, wealth based on fraud, the relationship between adopted siblings who really have nothing in common, the anger of a child betrayed by both parents. Emotionally it's quite exhausting.

San Francisco looks interesting; it has a completely different feel to it from New York. Cate Blanchett plays a New York woman who is completely out of her milieu, and to some extent she tries to adjust, you can feel sorry for her but at the same time you have to get annoyed with her for her lack of sensitivity to the people around her.

But the men are so much worse than the women.

When I got married

I wanted a deeply traditional wedding. I wanted a church in the country, the prayer book service, (in fact I wanted the very old prayer book service, but the vicar wasn't keen on it) and traditional hymns. I wanted the traditions I had grown up with because I hoped that this would root our marriage in the establishment, and that it would become a grounded old thing like the church, with its pews and stained glass windows and memorials; its very local history, and not some shoddy fashionable thing that comes and goes. My parents' marriage had broken up and I rather felt that this was because divorce had become rather fashionable; yes don't worry everyone is divorced these days; that was not what I wanted at all.

Also the person I married was not so much a person to me as a set of values deeply loved and respected, a set of values and a way of life that I knew would be good for me and for our offspring, if they came along (and I wanted them to come along).

But if I had got married in a registry office, to a different person, and really, if everything had been different, I might have chosen this poem. But I really have never travelled to this place, that seems to be so very beautiful.

Somewhere I have never traveled,
gladly beyond any experience,
your eyes have their silence:
In your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which I cannot touch because they are too near

Your slightest look will easily unclose me
though I have closed myself as fingers,
You open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens,
touching skillfully, mysteriously, her first rose

Or if your wish be to close me,
I and my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility -- whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

I do not know what it is about you that closes and opens
Only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses.
Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.

e.e. cummings

Beginning teaching again

I have begun teaching and stopped several times and I'm not scared, but I am nervous and I keep scratching my arm - sign of nerves coming out as eczema.

When I first started teaching the First Certificate Class I had a student who was very noisy and dominant. A dominant student always wants to be a rival to the teacher. The first thing she did that irritated me was her noisy breakfast. She would bring in a can of coke and a pastry from Gregg's for her breakfast and make a great parade of tearing the bag and opening the can, and I asked her to not make such a loud noise with it all. She was not supposed to eat of drink in class at all and eventually I said that she would have to eat her breakfast before she came into the class because it was so disturbing. She acted as though I had infringed her human rights. What a sulk she went into! I ignored it. Then came the day that I criticized her speaking. I told her about mistakes in word order and in omitting articles, and using the wrong prepositions. She just didn't believe me. She was so used to people telling her that she spoke great English, because she was fluent, but there were a lot of mistakes in there and she did not accept that. (She was very proud of the fact that she was engaged to an English man and very excited about her wedding). After that speaking assessment she was even more insulted with me and she decided to talk all the way through all my lessons - I taught that class for three hours a day. She had a pal who was also a big sulker and together they formed a partnership that would not answer any of my questions and behaved as though I wasn't there.

I really couldn't decide what to do. She had paid for the lessons - they all had, and they were preparing for an exam and it was my job to make sure they were ready. For two months I just carried on teaching the ones who were good, marking their homework and so on, and trying to ignore the hostile ones. I used to dread going into work. Then one day I walked in after the break and found that there was a conflict going on. A young Spanish man was telling the noisy girl that she was ruining the class, and after that she left the class and didn't come back until the exam. Phew!

(When she came back for the exam she arrived with the famous fiance. He looked about 15 and was about half her size.)

Anyway I decided I had made the wrong decision with that student, and next time I would nip any such behaviour in the bud as soon as it started. The next class I was assigned was an advanced class and I was rather excited about all the interesting things we could do because of their higher level of English and the fact that they were not an exam class. But on the second or third day a student came in who ignored me completely and talked to the rest of the class as though I wasn't there. She talked throughout the lesson in spite of me asking her direct questions and asking her to listen. So after the class I tackled her and said: why do you come to the lessons if you are just going to talk? She said: "I don't need lessons. I have a job in Boot's! I am only here for the Visa." She was very proud that she had a job in Boot's. (All the students needed to attend classes for 15 hours a week because they were on student Visas.) So I thought about this and how the agony would go on and on if I didn't stop her behaviour. So I went and told the Director of Studies about her. Ida could be lovely but she could put people right down. Ida came and fetched the young woman out of my class the next day. She tore her off a strip and the woman came back in floods of tears. She had clearly been humiliated and she blamed me for this. So Ida put her in another class.

Was the result good? No. The whole class hated me. They sat and stared at me for an hour and half every day and refused to answer any questions. I couldn't make them write, either. After the break they all left except Magda. I ended up just teaching Magda. My life was still horrible, apart from the time the Hungarian came on holiday. He took lessons for 2 weeks as part of his holiday. He loved my lessons and was really enthusiastic. Apart from Magda, that was the only nice part, for three months.

So there you are. What was the better decision? I don't know.

Also, people think that teaching adults is easy. The fact is, they don't always behave like adults.

Commercial bees

There were enough pollinators around for my garden this year, and I enjoyed watching them searching for flowers and doing their job. In fact I wished there were more flowers in the garden throughout the season. However, there are clearly not enough bees around to pollinate all the orchard fruit, for on the TV there is a show called Harvest 2013, which showed boxes of bees being unloaded into the poly tunnels full of cherry trees to do their job. These bees have been laboratory bred and housed in cardboard boxes for the journey from Eastern Europe to the UK. When the blossom opens the bees are released, and they off and do their stuff. But it seems to me that there was no question that these bees would survive in the area long term. They were there solely as pollinators. They were not honey bees but probably a species of Megachilidae.

The Megachilidae Family
These types of bees are extremely efficient pollinators. This family includes mason and leafcutter bees. Some are used in commercial pollination, such as Alfalfa leafcutter bees (Megachile rotundata), and Osmia lignaria (the "Orchard Mason Bee" or "Blue Orchard Bee"), which is especially sold for use in orchard crop pollination. 
According to the U. S. Department of Agriculture researchers, only 250 female blue orchard bees (Osmia lignaria) are required to pollinate an acre of apples - a service equivalent to one or two honey bees hives, each containing 15,000 to 20,000 workers (Bosch and Kemp, 2001). 
It's possible to farm in harmony with nature, attract these bees to the land, which is better for crop yields. More about this shortly. 

This comes from a great website that tells you all about bees. Have a look!

The author is concerned that growers don't care about the ecosystem, and are giving up on attracting native bees to their growing area.

Here is an American website with more reservations about the use of commercial bees in the food industry. They threaten the local bumble bee population.

There are a number of threats facing bumble bees, any of which may be leading to the decline of these species. The major threats to bumble bees include: spread of pests and diseases through commercial bumble bee rearing or other methods, habitat destruction or alteration, pesticides, invasive species, low genetic diversity and climate change.

Commercial bumble bee rearing may be the greatest threat to B. affinis, B. occidentalis, B. terricola, and B. franklini. In North America, two bumble bee species have been commercially reared for pollination of greenhouse tomatoes and other crops: B. occidentalis and B. impatiens. Between 1992 and 1994, queens ofB. occidentalis and B. impatiens were shipped to European rearing facilities, where colonies were produced then shipped back to the U.S. for commercial pollination. Bumble bee expert Robbin Thorp has hypothesized that these bumble bee colonies acquired a disease (probably a virulent strain of the microsporidian Nosema bombi) from a European bee that was in the same rearing facility, the buff-tailed bumble bee (Bombus terrestris). The North American bumble bees would have had no prior resistance to this pathogen. Dr. Thorp hypothesizes that the disease then spread to wild populations of B. occidentalis andB. franklini in the West (from exposure to infected populations of commercially reared B. occidentalis), and B. affinis and B. terricola in the East (from exposure to commercially reared B. impatiens). In the late 1990′s, biologists began to notice that B. affinis, B. occidentalis, B. terricola, and B. franklini were severely declining.

Where these bees were once very common, they were nearly impossible to find. B. impatiens has not shown a dramatic decline; Robbin Thorp hypothesizes that B. impatiens may serve as a carrier of an exotic strain of Nosema bombi, although it may not be as severly affected by the disease as B. affinis, B. occidentalis, B. terricola, and B. franklini. B. affinis, B. occidentalis, B. terricola, and B. franklini are closely related to each other (they all belong to the subgenus Bombus sensu stricto).

This hypothesis was supported by a recent study led by Sydney Cameron, Ph.D., published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They found that the western bumble bee and the American bumble bee had significantly higher infection rates from a fungal parasite than more stable species.  They also found that these two species had lower genetic diversity than species that were not in decline.  Research is currently underway in Dr. Cameron’s lab to determine whether or not this fungal parasite was introduced from Europe via the commercial bumble bee trade. You can read more about their study and its implications here. The Xerces Society is currently working to urge the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to regulate the commercial bumble bee trade. You can read a status review that includes more details on this issue and the decline of three bumble bees that was written by Dr. Robbin Thorp and The Xerces Society.

It is tempting to write about current events

But there are already commentators far better informed than myself. Also, if I say one week that I am so glad that Cameron was not given a mandate to support Obama in the move to intervene in Syria, and get on my high horse about interfering in other countries by finding moral grounds to bomb them; the next week all that is irrelevant, because Putin's decision to intervene is so much more interesting and likely to be successful in one way or another. I suppose I am continuing my previous post about the perspective of time. I think it's better to comment after events have run their course.

It is really amazing that Putin decided to publish his arguments in the New York Times, but it is also rather wonderful, because he is taking the debate to the people - although I don't think he encourages this amongst his own electorate. As someone commented in the Guardian website, could Obama address the Russian people in a similar Russian paper? The answer is yes, surprisingly, which shows how I would make a hopeless political commentator.

 you have no IDEA about the extend of freedom of press in Russia - in Russia main TV channels are indeed controlled by Kremlin (though cable TV is not) - but that's all - you can publish in Russian newspapers ANYTHING - read Pravda (which is a media of Communist Party that is opposition to Putin's United Russia party) - they bash Putin on daily basis... The most popular newspapers in Russia are the nationwide tabloid-like daily Komsomolskaya Pravda and Moskovsky Komsomolets - if Obama buys a page for ads and publish his article, then it would be published - but in contrast to USA , nobody in Russia would pay attention to it- Russians simply don't give a hoot about what Obama thinks...

 Putin knew his arguments would not be represented as he wanted them to be represented by any intermediary. The commentators who decode his statement have had a field day - see the Guardian here it is . Putin has perhaps had FUN finding sentiments that his US readers must agree with (or they're UnAmerican) and using them against the US position.

Recently Cameron said, in defense of Putin's belittling of the UK, that we had invented every sport in the world. This is where he clearly needs to take advice before speaking: but I love the idea that we invented sumo wrestling. I don't think we were right in the forefront of skiing or bullfighting, either. Polo was invented out east, somewhere like Mongolia, at around the time when we as a nation were heavily into bear-baiting. Not saying we invented that.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

This is a classic novel which I had never read. I expressed an interest in it and a Spanish student gave it to me as a leaving present. She loved it!

In a way I loved it; it seemed a very encyclopaedic way of looking at life: there are the children, the parents and the grandparents, there is the home town with all that goes on there - industry and businesses that spring up and then fade away, there is the geography of the town - is it on a river or the sea, is it on the road to somewhere? - and then there's the weather that must surely have an effect - what grows? what can be produced?

Then there are the characters: inquisitive or not, industrious or indolent, loving or selfish, lustful and vigorous or not? (in this book they generally are.) Garcia Marquez takes his characters from birth all the way to the grave and shows great understanding of how in the course of a lifetime people change, although the merciless way he tells of his characters' senility, which in some cases goes on for a long time, is hard to bear. There are many small miracles in the book - one day it rains flowers, another character's love attracts butterflies, another character's love affair causes his animals to be prodigiously fertile. At one time it rains without cease for 3 years and everything rots and the animals die - oh the ennui for the poor people of Macondo -, immediately afterwards it is dry for 11 years. There is also a war and a terrible atrocity which is all too believable. Then the truth is all covered up - again, all too believable.

My favourite character is Ursula because she has such energy and foresight, she saves money for future needs, she makes money by selling candy animals, she insists on honesty when the family finds a fortune, and she ensures that her illegitimate grandchildren are baptised. She is rigorous. The importance of the women in the family is huge. Without them there is no family as the men seem so prone to wandering off or hiding away with their own preoccupations.

Sometimes you ask yourself if it is only over a number of generations that an individual's life has meaning.  Maybe you can't understand the significance of your own life from your own perspective.  Some religions encourage their adherents to be present in the moment, to grasp it fully. For some people there is no aspiration for any other perspective beyond the next treat. Some of the characters in the novel are Catholics and see their lives from a long way off - from an idea of eternity.

David Mitchell is very good on the question of perspective - he says that we are too complex a species to live in the moment and not have some kind of narrative in mind, but, if we take the perspective of a hundred years from now, not much matters anyway. I think that because Garcia Marquez takes the perspective of a hundred years, you do end up feeling that the whole saga didn't add up to much in the end.

Here is David Mitchell explaining time perspective. It's brilliant.