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Sunday, January 18, 2009

Tomorrow and tomorrow


My getting up at a reasonable hour had little bearing on my complete indolence for the rest of the day!

Except, can it be called indolence if one is reading. I spurn to put a question mark at the end of that sentence as it is clear rhetorical. It has to be rhetorical or I will have wasted a substantial proportion of my life in self indulgent wandering in the pernicious pathways of prose. And that simply mustn’t be true!

I have finished reading another novel by E F Benson called Across the Stream. This was published in 1917 and concerns the life story of yet another member of the ‘nobility’ a groups whose members litter Benson’s early work. This life divides neatly into two parts. The first part concerns the childhood of Master Archie and is interesting because of the fascinating perspective that Benson captures seeing the world expanding from the point of view of a young child’s growing experience.

The second part is not as effective and develops the spiritualistic elements in the first half and builds them up into a good versus evil battle in which the erstwhile hero is saved the by love of a good woman. Ugh! Having delivered the exclamation there are still interesting social, historical and moral attitudes which make this book worth a read. I have to say that I have just found a site which promises to make all the Mapp and Lucia books available for free download so that my reading of early Benson oddities may well be rejected in a self indulgent re-reading of the true camp ironic masterpieces of a very funny writer.

Though possibly not next week when I hope that my mind and intellectual efforts will be more directed towards making the five days that I have in school productive for what, after all, could be a place of permanent employment in the near future.

I have realised that it has been a considerable time since I have stood in front of a class of secondary pupils and actually tried to teach them anything. I suppose that it is a positive feature that the kids that I will meet tomorrow are English learners and not native English speakers this will mean that my usual digressive form of discursive teaching will miss the mark for the majority of the pupils and I will have to be uncharacteristically focussed to ensure that they follow what they need to learn.

It will be learning experience for both sides.

If it goes properly!

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