There was a time I used to write often about being in the Boston Tea Party. Then there was a time where it fell out of favour thanks to the rudeness of the staff (well okay, of one member of staff in particular) and now… well, and now it’s back in favour. A bit. It’s my second port of call on a Saturday morning after breakfast at The Plant. I had the usual Persian baked eggs. Yum. It’s a bit like Huevos Rancheros only without the refried beans, pitta bread instead of tortilla and baked eggs instead of poached. It’s bloody good though. I like Plant a lot, although it can be too warm indoors (thankfully the weather here hasn’t quite realised it’s nearly the end of September, however, and we were able to breakfast al fresco) and it isn’t cheap, but meh, you have to support the local independents in the face of the Starbucks invasion. You know until less than a year ago there was not a single Starbucks or Costa in Exeter and now there are several. Coffeehouse madness. I do admit however that I would be tempted to use them if they offered free wireless Internet as they apparently do in the US. I’m not that much of an anti-corporate snob.
So yes, it’s back to the Boston and the shabby sofas and creaky tables. The student shabby chic. Speaking of whom, the University will be cranking back into action soon, and Exeter will swell with, ah, ‘young people’ all sporting ridiculous haircuts and dubious musical taste. Ah, to be young again. I’m glad I’ll be out in the country.
As for the rest of the week, it has passed in a blur of activity and exhaustion. Meetings, more meetings, bouncing ideas for projects, developing ideas for projects, answering emails, writing emails, blah blah and more blah. Oh, and teaching lessons. Musn’t forget The Kids. They’ve been doing some cool stuff this week; Warhol blotty drawings and taking photos of details around the school. I also did walking drawings with my AS classes, after showing them my own ‘going to London’ and ‘Leaving San Francisco’ work. That was funny. I didn’t tell my Year 11 girls it was my work, just got them to talk about it, get some responses. Mostly it was positive, and even the negatives were good: “it looks like a child’s drawing”, “it looks really rushed” and so on. But they did some cool drawings walking around the school, so hopefully it was worthwhile. Nearly all of them found it challenging, particularly getting their heads around the idea that although they were moving through space, the drawings themselves did not have to concern themselves with notions of depth (or illusion of depth). The only person who didn’t find that a challenge was one who has grown up amongst a lot of Eastern influences, which I thought was fascinating. So we talked about Eastern art traditions versus Western, interest in two dimensional surface pattern and decoration versus infatuation with creating illusions of three-dimensional space. This is about as close to teaching multi-cultural individuals as you get in the heart of Devon.
In terms of new technologies I’ve been struggling to get things moving with any kind of focused pace. Everything seems to take so long; always someone wanting to fret over the little things, to keep control. I’ve taken over responsibility for monitoring students who get their web access disabled. They get knocked off after ten ‘banned’ pages. Banned sites seem to include Amazon, Ebay, anything with the word ‘games’ in, and, well, just about everything kids might be interested in. I’m starting to find it unfathomable. We’re ‘punishing’ them for doing normal kid things. One young person, who has a reputation for being a very difficult student, keeps cropping up. I check out the pictures he has been trying to look at, fearing the worst. And it’s trucks. Lorries. Toy trucks, monster trucks, whatever… And that’s deemed ‘inappropriate’? To coin a phrase, WTF? And my time is being wasted because of this. I feel the need to implement some sweeping changes soon.
Warning- tech geek stuff coming up
I’m also getting very cross with Navaho, who supply the proxy equipment for the school. Ever since OS X 10.4 launched, there have been issues (to various degrees, but all ultimately crippling) running Safari and Firefox browsers. Neither of them will properly interact with the proxy server to verify passwords. Safari just crumbles and stumbles and falls, whilst Firefox seems to want to authenticate for every single file in the web page (images, CSS file links etc). It basically means that we cannot run 10.4 on our machines, which is very frustrating. We’ve been in touch with Navaho to see if they can identify the problem, but all they say is that it’s the browsers. Ironically, the ancient and no longer in development IE works fine! So presumably it is something in more advanced browsers with greater security levels that cause problems with the proxy… that’s logical, right? But oh dear no, Navaho just say ‘it’s the browser’, and have been noticeably silent ever since I asked them if they had by any chance possibly tried to replicate the problem or indeed if their system had been tested using OS X 10.4 and Safari and that they could therefore categorically state that it should all work.
And don’t even get me started on the SWGfL. Argh!
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