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May. 18th, 2011 08:37 pmI want to ask, archly, "Did you miss me?" This is mainly because I have been having so much fun (with no computer!) and done so much stirring that I don't want to stop annoying people. being arch annoys people, I'm told, so I want to be very arch indeed.
I was at Tuross Head (NSW South Coast) as one of three staff members for a creative arts camp. It was part of the ACT's mental health program and was just the most amazing event. About two thirds of the campers were my Wednesday students, and some of the remaining ones had been checking out my Wednesday classes recently, just to see if they wanted to camp with me. They thought I hadn't noticed...
Tim-the-Artist and I kept poaching each other's students and each other's students' work and we all ended up creating a huge installation on the lawn and then walking through it, acting out the poetry and explaining it. I started it - because my people were working using the five senses and I said that the five senses involved the ocean a couple of blocks away and the green grass below us and the wind in our hair and the smell of the breeze - but we all made it work.
Alas, it had to be dismantled at dusk, because dew really wasn't a component in the charcoal and pastel on paper elements. That worked out well, though, because that left us the right amount of time to traipse down that slope to the beach and watch the full moon rising over the Pacific. After that we donned masks and glad rags and had a bit of a banquet. By "a bit" I mean a very big bit.
In the evening, the card players competed with the story tellers. I'm afraid Evil Gillian put in an appearance, and almost everyone learned a Goldilocks clapping rhyme normally taught to five year olds. We played parlour games and we refused to tell ghost stories. I refused to tell ghost stories in such a way that poor Tim started to get very jumpy. (Evil Gillian was quite active, alas.) All one has to do is say, "I won't tell you a story about the glass in that door, for instance, and how it will suck your soul after dusk. And you don't want to know what's buried under that tile." I was being very mild, actually, because I know the sensitivities of my students and didn't want to cause nightmares, but Tim was so convinced that ghost stories would be good and he is so unused to being given quite specific information about the evil trapped in the far corner of this very room, just behind the table...I am an evil stirrer and possibly deserve all that is coming to me.
I worked very hard, and all the campers worked harder. We made origami (lots!) and wrote notes to the sea and wrote sonnets and so much more. Fifteen backpacks were full to the brim with their creations by 2 pm this afternoon, when we left the campsite behind. Each of us was much fatter, too, because Laura and her assistant cooks did a superlative job.
This was the first time most of these people have been on any sort of camp. A couple had done camping as kids (in tents, though, not school camp buildings) and three had been in the Boy Scouts. They wanted all the experiences that they knew of through other peoples' memories. We gave them that, from singalong to walking along the beach, but we also did a lot more. It was full-on - I had fifteen minutes time out from rising in the morning to going to bed at night (not fifteen minutes every day - fifteen minutes in total ie one rest period) but it was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life.
Teaching intelligent adults who want to learn is always a pleasure - giving them the things you've loved to do is even better. Best of all is seeing an adult woman jump for joy (not in any metaphoric sense) as she explains about seeing the sun rise on the ocean and tells you that she's just waiting a few more minutes before she finds herself a companion (we insisted that people go offsite in at least pairs) and sees the high tide reach over the ledge and to the base of the sand dunes. Or the quiet and very private smile of the woman who discovers that she *can* make masks and that the ones she creates are divine. Or the satisfaction on the face of the man who is watching a group giggle at the cartoon he has drawn me. Or the deep silence on the beach when I explained to one woman that the sand can tell a story. She was digging the sand with her restless feet, so I said to her "What if we made up a story about a woman on the beach, dragging her toes backwards through the cold sand, lonely..." It wasn't my best example. As teaching, however, it was magical. She had a moment where she understood so completely what we were doing with the five senses and she explained it back to me, so very excited, and she read everything anyone wrote for the three days and now she reads differently. This morning she joined the writing group and we all wrote letters to the sea and to each other and folded them into elegant origami envelopes and sachets.
Multiply these moments by twenty and you have the number on each of the three days I was away. There were so many special moments.
I was at Tuross Head (NSW South Coast) as one of three staff members for a creative arts camp. It was part of the ACT's mental health program and was just the most amazing event. About two thirds of the campers were my Wednesday students, and some of the remaining ones had been checking out my Wednesday classes recently, just to see if they wanted to camp with me. They thought I hadn't noticed...
Tim-the-Artist and I kept poaching each other's students and each other's students' work and we all ended up creating a huge installation on the lawn and then walking through it, acting out the poetry and explaining it. I started it - because my people were working using the five senses and I said that the five senses involved the ocean a couple of blocks away and the green grass below us and the wind in our hair and the smell of the breeze - but we all made it work.
Alas, it had to be dismantled at dusk, because dew really wasn't a component in the charcoal and pastel on paper elements. That worked out well, though, because that left us the right amount of time to traipse down that slope to the beach and watch the full moon rising over the Pacific. After that we donned masks and glad rags and had a bit of a banquet. By "a bit" I mean a very big bit.
In the evening, the card players competed with the story tellers. I'm afraid Evil Gillian put in an appearance, and almost everyone learned a Goldilocks clapping rhyme normally taught to five year olds. We played parlour games and we refused to tell ghost stories. I refused to tell ghost stories in such a way that poor Tim started to get very jumpy. (Evil Gillian was quite active, alas.) All one has to do is say, "I won't tell you a story about the glass in that door, for instance, and how it will suck your soul after dusk. And you don't want to know what's buried under that tile." I was being very mild, actually, because I know the sensitivities of my students and didn't want to cause nightmares, but Tim was so convinced that ghost stories would be good and he is so unused to being given quite specific information about the evil trapped in the far corner of this very room, just behind the table...I am an evil stirrer and possibly deserve all that is coming to me.
I worked very hard, and all the campers worked harder. We made origami (lots!) and wrote notes to the sea and wrote sonnets and so much more. Fifteen backpacks were full to the brim with their creations by 2 pm this afternoon, when we left the campsite behind. Each of us was much fatter, too, because Laura and her assistant cooks did a superlative job.
This was the first time most of these people have been on any sort of camp. A couple had done camping as kids (in tents, though, not school camp buildings) and three had been in the Boy Scouts. They wanted all the experiences that they knew of through other peoples' memories. We gave them that, from singalong to walking along the beach, but we also did a lot more. It was full-on - I had fifteen minutes time out from rising in the morning to going to bed at night (not fifteen minutes every day - fifteen minutes in total ie one rest period) but it was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life.
Teaching intelligent adults who want to learn is always a pleasure - giving them the things you've loved to do is even better. Best of all is seeing an adult woman jump for joy (not in any metaphoric sense) as she explains about seeing the sun rise on the ocean and tells you that she's just waiting a few more minutes before she finds herself a companion (we insisted that people go offsite in at least pairs) and sees the high tide reach over the ledge and to the base of the sand dunes. Or the quiet and very private smile of the woman who discovers that she *can* make masks and that the ones she creates are divine. Or the satisfaction on the face of the man who is watching a group giggle at the cartoon he has drawn me. Or the deep silence on the beach when I explained to one woman that the sand can tell a story. She was digging the sand with her restless feet, so I said to her "What if we made up a story about a woman on the beach, dragging her toes backwards through the cold sand, lonely..." It wasn't my best example. As teaching, however, it was magical. She had a moment where she understood so completely what we were doing with the five senses and she explained it back to me, so very excited, and she read everything anyone wrote for the three days and now she reads differently. This morning she joined the writing group and we all wrote letters to the sea and to each other and folded them into elegant origami envelopes and sachets.
Multiply these moments by twenty and you have the number on each of the three days I was away. There were so many special moments.