Hoodies- Now I Get It

This is a little story about my visit to the medical centre this morning. Nothing serious,  just some regular blood tests that the clinic had been nagging me about.

I really resent spending time and money just to get my medication but at least these tests were free… apart from my time and and travel expenses. Oh, and the blood can only be taken in the mornings after 8am so that means Saturday morning. And it is important not to eat anything for 12 hours beforehand.

So, there I was at 8.10 am, nauseous with hunger, number 16 on the waiting list, squeezed into a narrow waiting area with 14 other people (number 1 was already under way, which was some kind of relief).  Numbers 6 and 14 were on my left and right and blessedly both were occupied with magazines.  Maybe if the blood taker was fast, and  no more people arrived, I would get out without any claustrophobia.

Stories never turn out that way, eh? Otherwise we wouldn’t bother to tell them.  Shortly after I had decided that the situation was survivable, Number 14 was greeted by a long lost buddy. They were both male, and amped up to full volume.  I slouched into the seat and willed the newc0mer away.

No such luck. Blokey platitudes were exchanged.

How’s the world treating you?

Not too shabby.

What are you here for? They checking out the ticker again?

Just getting the old  warfarin checked. What I’ve got can’t be cured, just managed. Gotta take the warfarin for the rest of my life.

Any side effects with that?

Oh, just some sore bits but not too bad.

Pretty good at home?

Yeah, can’t complain.  I’ve got two boys now. The first one is eighteen months, the young one is just coming three months. He’s pretty neat. How about you?

Oh, my boy is six. The girl is ten. Second family.

Nothing wrong with that.

As for me, I am about to lose it. What the fuck is the overweight, middle aged idiot doing producing kids when he could drop at any minute. Second family, nothing wrong with that? What did Number 14 do with his first family? Decide he could get a new one on TradeMe?

What to do when you are in a public place and about to scream, “You disgust me.  Shut the fuck up or get a room”? Survival instinct was triggered and I slumped further in my seat and pulled my hood up and over as much of my face as I could.

At this point you may be thinking, “She has issues”. Well, so what? You want to make something of it? Go on, make my day.

So, there I was, a fifty-something woman, hunched down into her hoodie, wishing I had an iPod to  blast any other noise  into my brain. Not possible for me to look like a surly teen anymore, so what was I looking like? My best guess is that I resembled a street person with a substance abuse problem (it was early Saturday morning so I was dressed in other people’s old clothes, not my weekday professional camouflage). Never mind how I looked, my hoodie (actually Dave’s hoodie) got me through another 60 minutes of inane personal details and things I never wanted to know about their workplaces and colleagues.

My hoodie experience also had a silver lining (bad English teacher pun),  because it helped me to understand why young people put up their hoods indoors. I mean, for my generation hoods are to protect one from the cold and wind outdoors, or to keep warm after sport. We get annoyed at hoodied youngsters in classrooms and malls. They are rude right? And are probably hiding their faces because they are up to no good.

My hoodie protected me from the world. It insulated me, just a little but enough, from the threat to my personal space.

Something to think about, for hoodie-hating old folk. That person hunched into their privacy may be desperately trying not to tell you to shut the fuck up and get out of their face.

What is happiness?

That is not a rhetorical question. A year ago I wrote about being part of a mass happiness experience (watching a circus act). A few days ago I got to experience vicarious bliss at the Impressionist exhibition at Te Papa. As well as making me intensely happy, it made me think about the nature of happiness again. I wonder if there is a pattern here somewhere?

I did realise, in a moment of clarity, through the blissed out peace, love and nature, totally non-chemically-induced fog, that Maslow would have described it as a peak state. The thing is though,  I didn’t do the painting.

It wasn’t even just that I was looking at pretty pictures. In fact, the paintings were nowhere near as pretty as they look in pictures. From a distance they look like their familiar reproductions. Mothers and children in a garden, haystacks, a valley, the sea. Up close, they are living brushstrokes of wild colours, not realistic but more real to the mind than a photo. More real because they express the experience of the artist as he painted that place in that moment ( of course, it wasn’t the experience of one moment in time,  Monet just waited for a similar moment to recur so he could continue work on the painting). I guess that does explain why the paintings seem so real, it was the reality of the painter’s experience,  not external  reality.

Hmm, maybe it is that I was experiencing the painter’s creativity in the same way we shared the acrobats freedom from gravity. Maybe, even though I have never created wonderful paintings,  I have experienced the same joy in nature as Monet so his experience can also be mine,  and his peak state can be mine too.  I understand a little better now why some people spend fortunes on art.

I could have stayed at the exhibition forever but i knew I didn’t need to. I have seen the shadows passing over the hills and the light on the valley and it makes me happy that Monet thought it important that others saw it too.

Russian food-recipes this time

After not visiting my blog for a while I was a little embarrassed that people were visiting it to look for Russian Food because that was the title of one of the posts, probably because they were looking for recipes. To kind of make amends I have acquired another guest writer and who has kindly provided some recipes. Thanks Lera and Lera’s mum!

Borsch

Borsch is a signature dish of Ukranian and Russia cuisines, but generally speaking Ukranians prefer a very hearty version – they use speck, which is ground down with onions and added to soup just minutes before removing it from the stove. My mum’s version is light, particularly because she doesn’t fry the vegetables before adding them to soup (as a doctor she thinks it’s healthier and preserves more vitamins), and this version can even be vegetarian. Get a big pot (5L) and and a piece of veal brisket, pour cold water to fill the pot, place meat and bring to boil. After the first boil, the meat should be rinsed with running water and the stock goes down the drain – the first stock extracts pesticides and other harmful substances from meat. Fill the pot again and cook for 1-1.5 hours. After the stock is ready add some salt. Borsch can now be cooked. (For vegetarian borsch skip this part). The order in which you add different ingredients is crucial, as for example adding tomatoes before potatoes adds acid which doesn’t allow potatoes to get cooked. Take one medium to large size beet root (depending on the desired sweetness of borsch, usually after cooking it a few times you know the amount of ingredients, everyone I know measures with eyes), clean, peel and cut into straws, add to the stock, let simmer for 7-10 minutes (until beet root gives part of its color to the stock) and add 1-2 small chopped onions (if you are making vegetarian borsch at this point add 1 tbsp of extra virgin olive oil), let simmer for another 5-7 minutes. After that add shredded fresh carrots (2-3 medium size ones) and cubed potatoes (3-4 big ones would be good, potatoes are good in borsch), leave simmering for another 5-7 minutes while you are peeling 3-4 big tomatoes. Shred, mush or roughly chop tomatoes and add them to borsch, leave simmering for another 3-5 minutes (tomatoes add acidity so it’s important to add enough fresh tomatoes, if after tasting borsch seems too sweet still, some people add tomato paste, all to taste). After tomatoes have been simmering for 3-5 minutes, add chopped capsicum, or even several small ones, simmer for another 3-5 minutes, taste the salt and sweetness/acidity, make adjustments by adding more salt or tomatoes if needed and then add a good portion of fresh thinly chopped cabbage and some fresh chopped parsley or dill (or both). After the cabbage is added, turn off the heat, cover the pot with a lid and let stand for another 5 minutes – don’t simmer borsh with cabbage as it will turn soggy; cabbage should stay crispy. Pour borsh into a deep bowl and put sour cream on the table – a tablespoon of sour cream makes it tastier. Store pot with borsh in the fridge and it’s believed that borsh is best the second day.

Eggplant/Aubergine

Homestyle eggplant: slice big eggplants into 1cm-thick circles, fry with a bit of olive oil, arrange each slice on an equal circle of ripe sweet tomato and top with crushed garlic and thin layer of mayonnaise, sprinkle with chopped fresh dill. For a healthy version put the eggplant slices on an oiled baking sheet and bake until soft, then arrange eggplant on top of tomato slices, top with garlic and 1:1 mix of sour cream/yogurt and mayonnaise, sprinkle with chopped fresh dill. Also adding crushed garlic to mayo helps to save some time.

Potatoes

Best summer dish: new potatoes! Boil the potatoes, drain the water, add plenty of butter and let it melt under the lid, transfer to a plate and sprinkle with lots of chopped fresh dill. For a herbier taste add the dill together with butter in a pot with hot potatoes and let stand with lid on for several minutes. Sour cream on top will make it truly Russian.

Russian pancakes

Russian pancakes: every household has it’s own recipe, but I prefer crepe-like paper-think yeast-free pancakes, and my mum’s recipe is the best in the world for this. They can be stuffed with all kinds of things, but also can be served plain, accompanied by caviar, smoked salmon, sour cream, condensed milk, homemade jam, honey, melted butter for dipping. You will need 1L of fresh milk, 5-6 eggs, 2-2.1/5 cups of plain flour (depending on flour, you will need less or more of it), a pinch of salt, some white sugar (lets say 1 tbsp) and 1 tbsp of extra virgin olive oil (or other vegetable oil), melted butter for covering the pancakes. Pour 500-600 ml of milk into a mixer bowl, crack eggs, add half of flour, salt and sugar, combine on low speed until there are no more lumps of flour visible, add the rest of flour and mix again. The batter at this point should be thick and a bit stretchy. Start adding milk and mixing everything together until you have no milk left. At this point the batter should be the consistency of liquid sour cream (that’s the comparison we use in Russia, and liquid sour cream may sound like an oxymoron, but the Soviet sour-cream was 10% fat at best and very liquid). Add 1tbsp of oil and mix again – oil in batter prevents pancakes from sticking to the surface of a pan. Heat the flat non-stick pan (the best pancakes come from a thick cast-iron pan, but it requires extra oiling between the pancakes, for which traditionally a piece of pork fat was used, but I recommend wrapping some clean cotton cloth around a fork, in Russia we use drug-store bandage, and dip it into olive oil, shake off the excess and use it to lightly oil the pan). Oil the pan using your hand-made kitchenware and pour a ladle of batter in the middle, turning the pan to swirl the batter around and allow it to cover the pan. You will see how the surface bakes through and at this point use a wooden spatula to lift the edge of a pancake, then use spatula and your fingers (caution!) to grab it quickly and flip. Wait until cooked and then put on a plate, wait until it’s cool and taste before you make another pancake. If you are making pancakes to stuff with meat, fish, cheese-ham, mushrooms or other savory stuffings, you will probably not need to any any more sugar. Taste saltiness, sweetness and thickness, make adjustments by adding more salt/sugar and check if you need to ladle out less batter to make thinner pancakes. Keep baking on a pan and cover each pancake with a thin layer of melted butter (pour 1/3 or less of a tsp on the edge and rub around, the middle tends to stay soft and moist even without butter) before putting another one on top of a pile. The ones that are not finished can be kept in a fridge for 2-3 days and reheated in a microwave.

For stuffed pancakes you can skip buttering, or use less butter. Generally after stuffing you need to turn them back to the pan to just heat through and let the flavours blend, but this doesn’t work with smoked fish, caviar and fruit stuffings. Stuffings can be: ground meat+rice, cooked through and seasoned to taste; mushrooms and cheese with parsley, dill or other fresh herb of choice – cook the mushrooms, add shredded cheese, mix together, stuff the pancakes. If you fry them again or reheat in a microwave, the cheese will melt and the taste will be amazing. Hard-boiled eggs, mixed with fresh chopped spring onions (also makes a traditional stuffing for pies) fish and rice, cooked and seasoned fresh fruit, with a bit of sugar sprinkled on top (apples with raisins and a dash of cinnamon are good, some fresh strawberries and sugar, too.

Forgot to say about pancakes – the pan should be big! about 24-26 cm in diameter – that’s how we eat pancakes, smaller ones are Olad’yi.

Altruism

It’s been a while since I wrote anything…a whole year in fact. My last post was about the importance of happiness and this is going to be about altruism. Pretty optimistic eh? You may not like the next one though because it will be about the joys of frugality.

What confuses me about altruism is that it is supposedly doing something good for no personal gain. It is not doing something good because you have to, or because you think you should, or because it will make you look good, but just because it is good. The difficulty for me is that altruism feels good, or to quote Sus, it is “happiness-making”. How can doing something that makes me happy be counted as doing it for no personal gain?

On the other hand, if doing good feels bad it is martyrdom and that should  never be confused with altruism. Altrusim is giving with a glad heart. It is not grudging or resentful. As soon as you begin to resent giving, please stop.

Another conflict I have regarding the whole business of altruism is that even after the buzz of knowing that I have made the world a little bit better for someone else, and therefore for the world in general, I start to find that I am getting all kinds of other benefits. I don’t go into the altruism business to get personal benefit but it just happens. Do these unintended gains disqualify my altruism?

An example. I have been helping a former student of mine with academic writing. About 4 times a year she contacts me for assistance to understand the requirements of her assignments and to plan her preparation. Then, a week or so later, she talks her essay through as she writes it. Why is this process necessary? She is dyslexic. The work is intensive and exhausting, especially since we both have demanding  jobs but I have gotten to learn so much from the experience.

I have learnt about what it is like for a very competent and ambitious young person to have to struggle with academic tasks..something that  frustrated her all though school and I didn’t notice because of all the behaviours that had gotten her thrown out of numerous English classes. Of course I have read about dyslexia but there is no way I could have gained as much understanding as I have through donating the occasional weekend morning.

I have also learnt about her world of Early Childhood teaching and thought about things like how competencies and dispositions that are being developed  in young children are also relevant to the teenagers I work with. Talking about learning intentions and success criteria , or principles of language teaching, in a completely different context really challenges my brain and gives me a deeper understanding of my own work.

Of course I also get the usual altruistic buzz, knowing that I make a difference, that my student has the chance of a successful career, knowing that she will make a difference to countless children because she is an excellent, caring teacher. My egotism tells me that the world is a better place because I am in it, because I do what I do.

This altruism game sounds rather selfish but anyone can play. The best thing about altruism is that it is free!

The importance of happiness

A few days ago I watched a circus act. Not the bigtop, animal variety but an acrobatic busker show with ropes and a trapeze. I enjoyed it and it made me think and those two things go so well together.

I enjoyed it because it made me feel good. In my mind I was flying and tumbling and stretching and performing amazing gravity-defying feats. I am sure that lots of other people were feeling something similar because we were oohing and aahhing and gasping and cheering in unison. We weren’t conciously thinking about responding, we just were. We were feeling what we were seeing. I don’t know what other people were feeling but my body felt wonderful and I walked away feeling light and free.

I felt happy and part of a spontaneous community of happiness. I don’t know how long that experience lasted for other people, or how intensely other people experienced it, but I do know it was a good thing. I also know that lots of little good things add up and that happiness can be built by fostering happy experiences.

Our society could use a whole lot more happiness, especially communal happiness and there is absolutely no reason why we can’t make it a priority. As a teacher, I know that people learn better when they are happy (Maslow etc) but its crazy to justify the creation of a safe happy environment on the grounds that it will promote better academic results. Happiness is worthy in its own right. Learning, mental health, safe communities etc are way more likely to eventuate when happiness is valued but happiness comes first.

Russian food

I am bad, very bad. I haven’t finished writing my own post and now I have coerced someone else to write for me again. In my defence, it was worth it! Read on and see for yourself.

"I really like Russian food.Russians eat alot of dairy, sour milk,

unsweetened yogurt, butter, tvorog, like cottage cheese) and it's

all good. Perhaps after six months in China,I 've forgotten what really

 good dairy tastes like. The only yogurt you can

get here in Jinzhou is sweetened yogurt. No cream, no sour cream, no

cream cheese. I guess it was pretty understandable that I gorged myself

while I had the chance. Tvorog is something that apparently all Russians

eat, because it is cheap and nutritious. It doesn't have a ton of flavour by

itself, and the texture is somewhat similar to a rubbery feta cheese, but

when combined with honey, it tasted oh so good. Russian sour milk is called

kaffir and I had a glass of it each morning with my breakfast. It's

basically sourcream, with less fat content I guess, it's certainly not as

thick as the sour cream we get in NZ.

Grains are a huge part of Russian cuisine. I had rye bread with almost every

meal, thick and dense with a fairly hard crust. I think you can get all

types but this was just the particular loaf that Lera prefers. Kasha is the

russian word for porridge and it comes in many different varieties. By far

my favourite is gretchka, or roasted buckwheat porridge. It's crumbly like

cous-cous and has got a great natural flavour which is enhanced with olive

oil or melted butter. I guess I also put more salt on it than I should. I

also tried cornmeal kasha, which I didn't like so much, it was cooked with

milk and tasted more like a dessert to me. But yeah, kasha can be made out

of pretty much any grain. I cooked some rice last night and added too much

water to the rice-cooker, thus failing to make decent rice but successfully

creating some rice kasha.

Russian's have speck. It's not as good as the stuff we get from Heck's but

it is okay. Heck's speck has a smokey flavour and greater depth of flavour

all around. The russian speck, I tried (to fair, I only tried three types,

and one of them was hungarian speck) just tasted like mildly salty pork fat.

The texture of the Russian speck wasn't quite as good either, it was more

slimey rather than buttery. Once again, I have to say that it was

supermarket bought speck and I'm sure there is much better quality stuff

around somewhere.

The sausage that I ate in Russia was really good. Actually, I had some stuff

that looked pretty nasty, like the sizzler pre-cooked mushy inside variety.

However, it was actually really good, apparently it was the most popular

type of sausage during Soviet times. I also had sausage/salami which was

very tasty, however the texture was a bit tougher than I prefer. Actually,

I'd previously eaten that kind of sausage when Lera brought some back from a

trip to Moscow. The Moscow version was tasty and had a nice texture, one of

the best salami-type sausages I've ever had.

I had smoked salmon a couple of times. My god it was good. Once again I must

qualify this by saying that cold smoked salmon is probably my favourite food

in the whole world, and that it does not exist here in Jinzhou. I hadn't

tasted this wonderful, wonderful delicacy in nearly six months. After my

first bite of smoked salmon, I just sat there and sighed. I felt like

weeping, my mind was already dreading going back to the smoked salmon-less

culinary desert that is Jinzhou. But yeah, I couldn't stop eating it, like

seriously, even when I was full, if there was smoked salmon on the table I

would eat it. I also tried some caviar, and yeah, it's not as salty when it

is fresh and not from a tin. However, I'm not a big fan of fish eggs so

yeah... I'm sure caviar lovers would have enjoyed it.

You know when you cook too many boiled potatoes for dinner the night before,

and then fry the leftovers the next day for breakfast? That's a classic

russian dish. Go figure. There are a couple of other traditional dishes that

are pretty much identical to what we make at home. Blini are basically just

pancakes, maybe I'm not a pancake but they tasted just like normal pancakes.

Leras mum's recipe produced thin crepe-like pancakes, but each family had

their own recipe. I also had some meat patties, that tasted exactly like the

kind I make sans a ton of garlic. Speaking of classic russian dishes, I had

some borsch. This wasn't the heavy meat laden winter version, it was

actually a vegetarian summer version. The overwhelming taste for me was of

dill, I don't feel particularly strongly about the herb either way. The soup

was refreshing, but I didn't love it. I went down to the riverside with Lera

and her parent's on a sunday and we sunbathed, swam and ate shaslik. These

are meat kebabs marinated with vinegar and onions and then cooked over a

woodfire. They were pretty good, I asked about the recipe and was slightly

disappointed when I was informed that it was a bottle of store bought stuff.

After the all the meat was cooked and the coals were dying down, some

potatoes were thrown in to cook. They weren't too bad either, although I do

have some reservations about carcinogens in the charred skin that you can

never fully remove. Getting potato ash on your skin after a barbeque is a

traditional thing as well. .

We pretty much had raw vegetables with every meal, tomatoes, cucumber and

capsicum. I don't know how much of that was a russian thing and how much of

it was a Lera's family thing. Apparently they don't normally eat red meat,

just vegetables, dairy and grains. I tried some vegetable caviar that Lera's

grandfather made. I think it is like 99% eggplant, well, maybe not but there

is alot of eggplant in it. It had a faint taste of burnt onions, which I

liked, but which Lera told me is not supposed to be there. I liked vegetable

caviar more than the regular stuff anyway. I also got to sample a spread

that he made out of fish livers. Unfortunately I failed to see Lera's

warning gestures in the background and bit into a piece of bread with this

foul mixture on it. You would intuitively assume that fish liver spread

would be disgusting and indeed it was. I managed a good job of not gagging

and offending the poor guy. But yeah, food was had to come by when grandpa

was a kid and so he cooks and pickles just about everything. Apparently he

makes pickled watermelon flesh with aspirin, that no one actually likes or

eats. I guess it would come in handy during World War 3, when there is no

other food and all the weeds and cockroaches have been eaten.

That's about it really. I went to a couple of Italian restaurants while I

was in Blagoveschensk but they were nothing to write home about. But all in

all, I'd say that the food I had in Russia was really good. "

My pretty city

This is my favourite time of year in Christchurch..well right now it is my favourite time of year though I may well change my mind in the lazy summer, or when the leaves are faded velvet or when the mountains are first covered in snow next winter. It is my favourite time because though it is not officially Spring, the air is soft and smells of damp earth and new leaves and just opening buds.

It is the perfect time to park the car in Cranford Square and be amazed again at an inner city park so open and green, encircled by old trees and empty benches and no other person in sight apart from the occasional cyclist just passing through. I promise myself that I will soon come here again and sit on the grass with my thermos of coffee and serious book but that must wait till the soil is warmer and the trees are weighed down with summer leaves.

On this first day of  spring (though not officially The First Day of Spring) the air is soft and earthy and even humans can feel the change that has pushed the crocuses through the bare earth and opened the magnolia buds closest to the sun.   Pale sunseekers stretch across the new grass between the sharp shadows of naked trees.

Soon there will be noisy children discarding ice-cream wrappers and tourists with clumsy feet crowding the rose garden with cameras and water bottles expecting more and ready to move on but not yet. Soon there will be hordes of families and dogs pissing on the daffodils, letting their toddlers maul and trample  but it is early for that yet. The rose garden is silent and bare so I respect its privacy and follow the river past the oblilgatory ducks and canoes, pausing to admire the blossom tree on the far bank. This  postard perfect Christchurch we sell to tourists so I keep walking and look instead for little treasures in the undergrowth, azaleas and irises.

(Only a little more today, I know but…better than nothing! I still want to learn how I can link this to the matchingphotos on flickr)

More food

There were more pictures, so there is more food (descriptions of food, that is).

I have probably mentioned Rare Fare but it deserves much more than a passing reference. It is the source of all things good and natural and nutricious (apart from fruit and vegetables) and definitely makes meat shopping easier and ethically satisfying.

Rare Fare has Akaroa Salmon, soft buttery fresh fillets and whole sides. This can be marinated in soy, mirin, garlic, ginger and brown sugar and baked in foil. On Monday night this was served with rice and spinach steamed with garlic. Last week it was crusted with pecan and brazil nuts. Rare Fare also has hot smoked and cold smoked salmon. Perfect as snack meat (if you know Mikey you are already familiar with the concept of snack meat) or as a croissant filling with dill mayo.

Next is Highland cattle beef. We usually go for the ribeye because it has more fat and fat is good. Last night it was marinaded in crushed garlic, fresh rosemary, salt (of course) and olive oil, grilled, and served with baked potato and stir-fried orange and green capsicum and onion. Mikey topped his steak with Hollandaise sauce and loaded the potato with sour cream and grated cheese.

Pork is the reason I made the effort to make my first visit to Rare Fare. I love pigs only a little less than I do pork so I desperately needed to find a reliable source of ethical pork from happy pigs. Havoc Pork makes me happy anyway. It truly does taste better as well. I can choose from Rolled pork roasts (to be stuffed with apple and sage ), butterflied chops and loin fillets.

Food (light reading but not light eating)

It has been such a good morning for visual treats that I shall repay the travellers by describing some home comforts.

These days I have to do almost all the cooking myself so I have had to lift my game. Living with a lapsed gourmet cook is definitely a challenge but I think that I am starting to cope with it.

Last night I made Chicken Kiev…free-range cornfed chicken breasts, gluten-free crumbed, with lemon and garlic butter; Dauphinois potatoes… baked in cream and parmesan cheese; salad; apricot pie with a golden flaky pastry lattice top served with… more cream. This morning I am off to the gym and pool for two hours to work off come of the cream that I have already stored as fat while Mikey sleeps and hopefully converts some of the cream to fat.

The last few weeks’ highlights have included: Akaroa salmon crusted with brazil and pecan nuts; risotto (yes, I have finally learned to to cook it for myself) with grilled peri-peri chicken thighs; chicken pot pie (chicken, potatoes, bacon and wine and cream under a flaky pastry crust); free-range pork roasted with apple and sage; Heck’s Nurnberger sausages with fried onions; and Highland beef ribeye with fried potatoes (parboiled, sliced and cooked with bacon, rosemary and pinenuts).

Hmm, for some reason my stomach is feeling a little heavy so I shall take it to the gym now but if you give me more pictures of far away places I will give you more words.

Learning difficulties (2)

Whenever I think about teaching, I always eventually end up hearing Carl Rogers’ wonderfully sensible voice. Maybe I am going bonkers, because of course I have never actually heard his voice. Another more recent realisation about teaching, is that normal people are not teachers so perhaps being bonkers is part of the package.
The latest Rogerian moment of insight is related to thinking about working with students with learning difficulties. I don’t know how they think or how they got to the place of learning difficulties, or in fact anything important about them at all. They don’t know how I think, or why learning is easy for me or how I can help them or why I might be able to help them or anything important about me at all. If we were a Venn diagram our minds would be circles floating in random isolation.

What we need to do is create an intersection. A common space where we can work on the learning difficulty together. I am not psychic and neither are my students, so we have to put the relevant bits of our experience and skills and understanding into the common space where we can work on them together. I need my students to teach me how to teach them. That concept of a common space is what brings Rogers back to me and improves both my teaching practice and my mood. I am most effective as a teacher when I am part of a learning community and my students feel that they are members of that same learning community.

I have been a much nicer and better teacher this week. Carl Rogers would have been pleased.