Today’s lesson

… is in not leaving things where the dogs can reach them, in this case, an X-box controller, now sculpted.  Pictured below the jump is Edwin (not guilty).

Thank you, too for your thoughtful comments to the post on bullying. I will respond to them at greater length tomorrow.

Within the pack 3: what you can get away with

Anna and stargazer of The Hand Mirror discuss bullying at school in New Zealand. Anjum pulls no punches in her thesis statement, which implicitly asks the reader to site themselves in her triad:

everyone is involved in bullying at school. you were either the bully, the one who was bullied, the one who watched and did nothing, or one of the few who had the courage to try and stop it happening to someone else.

An anonymous commenter to Anjum’s post contends that “My point is that someone told me years later that she thought all children saw themselves as the victims of bullying, that we all saw ourselves as the friendless outsiders”, with which Anjum goes on to disagree.

I would like to consider this point. My contention is that long-term incidents of bullying don’t occur as if at random or by magic; that these arise out of a classroom or school-wide culture that permits such incidents to happen, often by explaining them away. This is not helped by the fact that there is always an explanation, often apparent to adults and outsiders, which is invisible to those dragged down in the brutalising culture. Thus, all involved can feel they are bullied outsiders even as single incidents of targeted bullying stand. It is against this generalised culture, as well as dealing with the specific incidents (the process described by Anna in her post is I think exemplary, and might well be put into the “too-hard” basket by many adults) as they occur, that a stand needs to be taken by all.

Within the pack 2: Polities and evangelism

It is a commonplace of teaching international students that these students learn better in diverse ethnic, cultural and national groupings. This I have generally found to be borne out in practice. Therefore, although my Japanese exchange students have worked hard always to speak in English, inside and outside class, and to make the most of their opportunities, they are not subject to the same learning advantages that students in a more composite class would experience.

Within the pack 1: On the couch

To live with many dogs is to be part of a pack. Much emphasis is placed, in the dog training literature and media, on being the pack leader, keeping the many in line to exercise your will. By and large, this is what the pack leader does, and is paid back in adoration, grooming and being followed round by dogs. To summarise only thus far, however, is to ignore the functioning of the pack as entity and to consider the ways in which it expresses its collective will.

I may direct the pack, but the pack continually pushes back. Sometimes this is in straightforward acts of resistance: the rare not coming when called and the far more common pretending not to come when called. Sometimes the pack attempts to carry out surreptitiously what it has been told not to do. Have you ever seen a dog dig or chew while pretending it is neither digging nor chewing? Sometimes the pack will direct its junior members to carry out the forbidden acts. There are also more benign pressures. Many of us have heard the story of the pet border collies at a house party who, over the course of the evening, subtly herded all the guests into a cluster in the living room, then sat contentedly to survey their work.

If my pack had its way, my day would consist in staying very still in a selection of locations in which they could pile on top of me: the bed, the couch, the other couch. I would only get up to feed them or open the door. While pack law dictates that this wish cannot be directly expressed (by standing on the couch and barking at me, for example), it can be conveyed in other ways: through disappointed silence as I work at the desktop or in the kitchen for example; through polite and theatrically selfless waiting outside the bathroom while I shower.

Fundamentally then I see the pack as a sophisticated system that is both part of and extrinsic to its members, containing them, serving their needs and developing, over time, into a composite world view. My presence in the pack means that in many ways I live like a dog, sensitive to their social ordering and particular needs. In exchange for maintaining the pack’s solidarity, I get to be the object of their affection. This works well for both me and the señor, the pack’s adjunct senior member.

A small room with large windows

A room in which I teach this intake, for just one hour a week, is one of several I worked in regularly five years ago.  The room is much as it was in that time past, decorated with old secondary students’ posters promoting the discipline, along with other images showing slightly awkward graduates leading interesting lives as a result of their studies.  These pictures are starting to date too; the women’s hair seems frizzy and piled unduly high and the male graduates’ haircuts are at odd, flat-toppish sort of angles.  Strange that I should measure the passing of time by the changing of hairstyles, but there it is.

What’s the most different for me, however, is the way the room itself seems to have shrunk.  When we moved there from our previous set of teaching rooms, which could barely hold sixteen students at a time, these rooms were spacious and filled with natural light in comparison.  I hadn’t realised how much my teaching spaces have grown in the subsequent years, and how groups by whom I used to feel dwarfed — perhaps 20 students — I now take in my stride.  My overall feeling is one of having aged, not in the negative way that word is usually bandied about (for women, especially?) but of having acquired something like working experience.  It’s nice to feel, in between challenges, that I’ve grown to fit better the classroom, without realising.

Day soil, night soil, caveat lector

Friends, it pains me to say this, but maintaining a working composting dog toilet is not as simple as I thought. You may remember my celebration of its installation in the second half of this long entry. So far as I can tell, there are problems with what I will tactfully call pace and volume. I am still thinking about how to resolve this. While I am sure you are all of strong stomachs, those of you for whom this discussion is already sufficiently detailed may not wish to read beyond the cut below.

L’invitation au voyage

Around here, keeping a blog is as much about style as it is substantial. This is why, I think, I will never be a blogger in the sense of a commentator on what is contemporary or political: I cannot subordinate the selfish pleasure of constructing the prose to the necessary requirement of getting blocks of text so swiftly up here, were I to have words on the matters of the day.

This is thought I need to hold in mind when I feel weary at the thought of recording the minutiae of my day-to-day, which have stabilised considerably since the (comparatively) bad dysthymic days of my later twenties. If style’s the thing, then why not set my mind to constructing confections about whatever trivia hold my attention? It’s a safe way to eat a cake made entirely of icing, and you won’t as readers get sick, I hope. Esoterica, hurrah!

Five, alive

I’m still alive, but sunk deep in domesticity and now, work. So by way of keeping my presence here active, here is a writerly pentacle in which I’ve been invited to participate.

A Note on Marking

There is the heart’s drop when I type a student’s unexpectedly elegant phrasing into Google, and the moment of relief when the phrase is not found elsewhere on-line.

Culture high and low

A Short History of A Short History

Yesterday I took the half day’s leave which would originally have been devoted to cable connection, and embraced a small range of recreational activities, largely sedentary. I am reading this, a delightful and slightly-old fashioned narrative history by an author whose enthusiasm for his subject is palpable, not least in his considered but engaging tone. He takes up lightly some of the tropes of the time of writing; you can almost see the invisible, ironic quotation marks around phrases such as “the Japanese race”.