Tough week, this one.
I've been helping out as a teaching assistant this week. It's the first week I've been working full time since F was born. To celebrate this, she decided to have the worst weekend's sleep she's ever had.
My wife very nobly said that I should get a good night's sleep on Sunday, ready for a pre-dawn start. The plan was that I'd sleep on the sofa bed, she'd take F and deal with any baby-related duties overnight. It wasn't, with hindsight, what you might call a sensible plan, really. Having the meagre thickness of a single door between me and the ever-increasing lung power of my daughter was never going to work.
I should never have agreed to the plan in the first place. The idea of snoozing peacefully next door as my wife coped with everything, scant metres away, gave me a twinge of guilt. Just not enough to stop me going ahead with it.
Come four o' clock, when F had been screaming for five hours straight, it was time to give in. Twice, I'd poked my head round the door only to be shooed away by my wife. She was determined to see the plan through, and if F wasn't going to stick to it, at least I bloody well should. I can't imagine it was a plan that the most competent mother could ever have seen through. Five hours of screaming, stubborn refusal to settle while your husband slumbers next door would dent even the most adamantine will to succeed. But neither of us could quite see things that coherently at 0500 with 4 kilos of shrieking daughter in full effect. I managed to take over for a while, then I had to go, leaving her with our daughter/foghorn.
After eight hours of looking after other people's children, I returned home to find a sort of fraught peace had established itself. My wife was staring into the middle distance with an ashen face and the kind of facial expression that puts you in mind of typhoon victims. F was blissfully asleep and remained so for many hours, as though sweetly incapable of noise above 200 decibels. It has stuck in my mind as a wonderful picture of new parenthood.
Teaching drama is always a lark. You're actively encouraging kids to step outside the boundaries of normal social convention. It's a bit like throwing dynamite at a volcano to teach it to respect your property. The lessons I'm helping with are drama in English; the kids are between ten and fourteen. It's just the perfect age for getting them to do embarrassing mime games in front of potential future dates.
One exercise is a game called 'What Are You Doing?'. The kids are all remarkably fluent in English, even able to improvise to a certain extent. The game involves them suggesting an action to mime to each other. We thought this afternoon's group were doing well, so we advanced to the expert stage. Rather than just miming 'I'm doing X', they had to mime 'I'm doing X with a Y'.
We were hoping for silly and challenging suggestions, like 'I'm dancing with a frog' or 'I'm brushing my teeth with a fish'. That's the fun of the game, to mime something ridiculous, regardless of how bizarre the suggestion is. And the secret of improvisation, of course, is to never say no to anything. So it was with a dutiful sense of artistic integrity that we watched a chubby thirteen-year-old mime out 'I'm raping someone with a pen.'
A few years ago, I remember reading an interview with Michael Gove in which he mentioned wanting the UK's schools to be modelled on the Swedish system (presumably not the part in which the state pays for it all). Now, I'm sure the kid was an outlier. So I hope, at least. All the same, I'm not sure that particular lesson would make it into the new curriculum.
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