Things I love about visiting Melbounre

1. I can't lose my teaching notes, build an eighteen inch high tower of paper while looking for them, then discover I left them somewhere quite obvious, ready for my next class.

2. I don't have towers of paper to sort.

3. I can't deal with most of my non-urgent emails (meaning I have a bit of a build-up to handle this week).

4. If I don't know what day it is, I can ask someone.

5. Spending time with people who are just as intense as me and even more specialised in their work and being able to get excited about their work and my work without anyone looking at us oddly. (This applies mainly to when I go to conferences.)

6. Meeting people who haven't heard my jokes before. This is quite different to 7, although it should not be, for my jokes are all delectably funny.

7. Being with people who laugh at my jokes (Canberra people either blink very rapidly, groan or pun these days.)

8. Not needing maps to get lost.

9. Being able to say "I don't live here, and I only remember this part of Melbourne the way it was thirty years ago, but if you're willing to risk that, then I suggest..." It's amazing how many tourists discover they have Google maps on their phones at this point.

10. Talking to strangers who are envious of me having gone to pre-school with the fictional youngest daughter from a comic skit that's nearly 3 decades old.

11. Hearing "Gill-i-yan" sung from under the dining room table (this would be my goddaughter, who has an extraordinary understanding of how simple things amuse me).

12. Being with teens.

13. Wondering if immediate family will ask how I am and what I'm doing (my tally this time is one member - last time was three - I want to take bets on this number next time).

14. Making Yarra jokes.

15. Chocolate shopping for Conflux.

(no subject)

After all my fuss about my teaching notes, I left them behind. We worked on creative narratives demonstrating bias* (since the class watched Richard III in my absence) and on how these narratives help create the memory of a thing or person. We also learned how to summarise complex issues in pithy poems (our source material for this were current issues emerging from the Papal crisis, but also from the Great Schism). Word of the day came from a student who wanted to demonstrate how place names manifest in botany.

My Wednesday class used my forgetfulness to rise to great heights, in other words.




*since we'd already written about Richard, they created an evil teacher and a normal teacher and worked out how their poems played on expectations and developed material for the written record. I so hope that I am not known only by the bad teacher version. They were great poems, but they gave an entirely new set of meanings to 'evil.'