Just A Summary

There were many things I didn’t like about working in London: the long commute, the bloody tube, the long commute home, the expense…

But then there are the things I miss. Here’s a small example.

Okay, you can all tell me how wrong I am, but didn’t anyone else feel the tiniest sense of relief that finally the other shoe had dropped on Thursday. I feel like we’ve been waiting for this to happen ever since 9/11.

In 2003, the company I was working for down in London had a funding squeeze and had to make some people redundant. I jumped at voluntary redundancy because the commute from Newark was killing me. To my surprise, a lot of my colleagues mentioned that they thought the reason I’d taken voluntary redundancy was because of the dangers of working in London and so close to the American Embassy at that. I mentioned this to Gill and was surprised to discover that she too had been worried about that as well. It wasn’t something that had really occurred to me consciously before, after all, I’d been working in London during the IRA’s bombing campaign as well and that really had been worrying. But, on reflection, the worry had been there; a low level, background worry, but a worry all the same.

Something like this has been likely ever since 9/11 (and before, but 9/11 brought it to the fore). It’s terribly easy to point at the war in Iraq, our tacit support for the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, our harbouring of Salman Rushdie or whatever, but that’s not really what it’s about (although they’re not exactly helping). Who knows, maybe it’s a strike by a bunch of radical Yorkshiremen fed up with the cultural hegemony of the South East and London in particular, men who are only incidentally Muslim.

It probably is about cultural hegemony though. It is thought that Sayyid Qutb, one of the progenitors of the jihad, was moved to his loathing of the US when he went to study there and was disgusted by the licentiousness - drinking, men and women dancing together - of 1950s America. One does have to wonder how he would have reacted to 1960s America. The Jihad against the west is the reaction of a man who saw freedom and was disgusted by it, a man who had the charisma to convince others of his view.

So now what we see is the dreadful abuse of the religious instinct and we see the pain of families who were lied to by sons and lovers, and who are having to come to terms with the fact that people they were so close to turned out to be murderers. And the bombers were lied to in their turn, by men we haven’t caught yet. Suicides and murderers do not get the fast ride to paradise, they’re off to hell. Well, they’re not, they’re off to oblivion like the rest of us, but you take my point.

The ‘Big Beard in the Sky’ religion is a terrible thing. I don’t know what I like least, the threat of hell if you don’t do what the big beard (or his priests) say, or the mendacious promise of going to a better place after your dead. The promise of paradise is probably the most pernicious; after all, if you’re going to be in heaven for ever and ever, where’s the incentive for making the world you’re in a better place? Where’s the incentive for not doing something as bloody stupid as blowing yourself and any number of your fellow humans into oblivion in the sure and certain knowledge of paradise to come?

This life is all we can be sure we have. Surely the best thing we can do with it is to live it to the full.

Welcome to my shiny new weblog engine. I’ve ditched Movable Type and switched over to Typo, but I’ve also put stuff in place to make sure that all the old URLs will work. Which is nice.

Who knows, maybe I’ll start writing stuff again soon.

Coo… it’s been a long time since I said anything here hasn’t it? The plan was I was going to write myself a weblog engine as a way of learning Ruby on Rails and have it up in no time flat. Then I got sidetracked by something, I can’t remember what. Then I started getting active on Flickr and… well. I rather neglected this place.

Expect a couple of new book reviews in the nearish future and who knows, I might even implement the new backend. Watch this space.

As we left him on Wednesday, Chris told us to “Tell everyone I’m not dead yet!”

The cancer caught up with him at five this morning.

Our thoughts are with Gwyneth and Olly and with everyone else who knew Chris. He is already missed.

What a week. Christmas was fab, as usual. We spent it at the Mill with mum, dad, Dougal, Liz and the kids. A smaller group than usual, but we all had a good time.

Then it all started to go a little bit wobbly. We don’t appear to have lost any friends to the tsunami, but I can’t say that makes the news reports any less shocking. Our disasters have all been on a smaller scale.

On Monday night, we set fire to the Newark house. We’d got in and it was cold, so we set a fire in the woodburning stove and were getting nice and warm and reading our Christmas presents when an ember dropped onto the hearth from rather higher than one would expect. On closer inspection, the huge oak beam that runs along the middle of the ceiling and holds up our bedroom was on fire. Five minutes later (literally) the fire brigade were shedding their boots to avoid tramping dirt into our carpets and inspecting the fire before putting it out with a hand held water sprayer then ripping the chimney soffit apart and looking everywhere with a heat detecting camera to make sure it was really out. It seems that, instead of lining the chimney as he was directed, our builder simply covered old (wooden!) soffit with flame resistant board and ran a short flue up into the space above it. So, when an ember went up the flue and came to rest on the end of the oak beam … well, you can guess the rest.

For bonus points, the part of the beam that burnt away, whilst small, amounted to half the width of the beam at the part where it was supposed to be resting on an RSJ. So that meant a late(ish) night phone call to mum and dad in search of an acroprop to support the beam until the insurance people could sort out a repair. They duly arrived half an hour later bearing a very lovely prop which proved to be about 6 inches too long. Bugger.

Luckily, the firemen had some acroprops but, for reasons which escaped everybody, they weren’t allowed to use them. Apparently it’s something to do with ‘Health and Safety’, which bemused Gill, a former Factory Inspector, who couldn’t think of anything in the regs backed this idea up. So, the firemen lent us an acroprop (it’s not like they would be using it in a hurry, what with not being allowed to) and we put it in place.

Right now, we’re waiting for the building company that our insurers use to get back to us. Hopefully this isn’t going to screw up the sale of the house, but I’m not betting against it.

It’s been a while I know, mostly because I’ve been staggered by the workload associated with the teacher training course. Such a staggering workload in fact that I’ve decided to drop out for the time being and get some more experience in the classroom as a teaching assistant before hopefully reapplying for a more local PGCE course next year.

Why? Frankly I was completely unprepared for the course. I had problems with time management (I’m not quite sure how, but I’ve managed to get through life so far without worrying over much about time management beyond knowing that my wife keeps the authoritative version of our diary), paperwork (everything’s on my wiki, why do I need to print it out?) and in managing to frame my lessons in terms that all the kids could understand (this last had implications for behaviour management: kids who don’t understand get bored, and bored kids cause trouble. For the life of me I still can’t understand why the year 7 bottom set were so well behaved; I managed to bamboozle them in almost every lesson).

I hope that getting some experience working as a teaching assistant will give me a slightly more gentle introduction to the art of time management, and also give me plenty of opportunity to see how experienced teachers explain mathematical ideas to children. I found that, because I was trying to explain topics that had never given me problems I wasn’t able to anticipate where the kids were having problems; observing more lessons, and working one to one with kids, should help with that.

Now I’m a larval maths teacher, I have to set homework, and that means I have choices:

1. I can use the homework associated with the textbooks we use
2. I can cut and paste past exam papers and things together
3. I can write my own homework assignments which I can either
   1. Write out longhand and use a photocopier
   2. Generate in electronic form and print out

The first two options aren’t exactly bad, and I’ve used both of ‘em before now, but the resulting homework sheets can look scruffy and, well, inconsistent. My gut feeling is that kids respond better if, not only do you have high expectations of them, but you treat them with respect. A mongrel collection of homework assignments with no consistent style to them doesn’t say “The teacher has made an effort, so I should make one too”.

Ideally, I would set my own homework. I’d write it out longhand in a beautifully legible italic script which survives the rigours of photocopying and teaches by example the correct way to set out mathematical work.

So, I’m using a typesetting system. The geeks among you will be unsurprised to discover I’ve settled on TeX (actually, LaTeX for now, but I’m giving ConTeXt a serious look) and, after a certain amount of swearing I’ve got it so that I can use Tekton for my body copy and for numbers within mathematical expressions, which means I’m producing good looking, readable and consistent homework assignments for my pupils.

But that’s not what’s shiny. What’s shiny is that I’ve just installed the latest version of auctex for Emacs and added its sister package, preview-latex and it’s like magic—the preview thing detects any expressions in the text, chucks ‘em at LaTeX then hides the input text with a rendered image. If you move the cursor back to the expression, it hides the graphics and lets you edit the input again. It’s really, really lovely. I recommend it to you wholeheartedly.

Oh.

Bugger.

Photos I took at the weekend of my brand new nephew Stan Frank Dougal Cawley, and some other photos taken in the flat of my grandson Isaac.

Click the photo to see the full set.