Votes for women

There is a General Election this year.  It is on Thursday May 7th 2015.  Put in your diary, make sure you are registered (https://www.gov.uk/register-to-vote) and turn up to your polling station and vote.  Vote.  I care about this and I could spend a very long time trying to convince everybody which party to vote for, but at the moment all I care about is that everyone votes.  And if you are a woman (which, let's face it, there may be more than a 50% chance if you're reading this) it's even more important.

Pip, my precociously intelligent princess has been wandering around the house saying "Ed Milliband" in various voices for the last few weeks.  She likes the sound of it, more than many people would like the reality of it, and although she doesn't quite understand his job, she knows "He wants to be Prime Minister."  That already puts her head and shoulders above approximately half of my sixth formers, one of whom, gazing at a picture of Nick Clegg displayed on the interactive white board asked; "Is that David Cameron?"  She votes for the first time this year.

However, after an event organised by our sixth form team a few weeks' ago, she is now much better informed, and she cares, she even told me she would vote.  They organised a "Question Time" style event with some of the local candidates and representatives of the main parties.  For the students, the fact that anyone cared enough about this "stuff" was enough to ignite a very small pilot light.  And it wasn't just that these people had turned up at the school, they got to hear some of their peers asking sensible, well-considered questions and they started to realise that politics wasn't just the shouty stuff at PMQs; it is wind farms and tuition fees and ooh did you know there used to be an EMA for 16 and 17 year olds? No, didn't think so.

I know people are disillusioned with politicians, but that should be giving us more motivation to vote, not less.  We have a responsiblity to find out how to use that vote correctly on a national and local level.  If you don't like the way things are done now then vote for a party that would change things. Liberal Democrats have pledged electoral reform although I'm not sure if they are still promising Proportional Representation.  If you are worried something specific then look at the figures for your local area and make your vote count against the current MP - look for the candidate that would be most likely to remove him or her. Even if you can't remove your MP this time, putting a dent in an MP's majority changes the way that candidate is treated for selection next time, so may cause a change.  Your vote can count.

Back to women voting though.  Why is it so important?  Not for the lecture, what these amazing women went through, the force feeding, the chaining to railings, although all of that counts, but because we have to make sure our voices are heard.  18 year olds also need to be heard but MPs don't always care about them, they haven't paid tax, they haven't earned the right.  Parties and spin doctors know that most people who vote are old.  Older than 18, older even than me.  I love my parents, but we are worlds apart in our interests.  My dad used to be a Labour voter and now seems to have moved so far to the right that he asked me not to talk to him last time, even though we have always had productive debates.  At the moment the Houses of Parliament does not reflect the make up of the population and nor is it likely to unless we vote for change.  While the only people voting are wealthy, or middle class, or male or old it is no wonder that they are the people who are being catered for,  Become a voter and parties have to take account of what you say.  Rick Edwards believes that 18 year olds should be made to vote at least the first time, but argues that if voting is compulsory then you need a "none of the above" option.(In his book; called None of the Above.)  That could happen.  There is a chance that things could change and it feels this time like it really might.  Vote for change.  Work out the best way of making it happen and vote for it.  But vote.

Loss leaders

A yougov poll says Nicola Sturgeon won the itv leaders' debate tonight, as the election campaign "proper" begins. ( https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/04/02/leaders-debate/)  Apparently the most "googled" leader was Leanne Wood.  I'm not really sure that is surprising since most if us probably know very little about her.  

Most of us can't vote for Nicola Sturgeon, not even me and I live near Corby.  It's also easy to see her and Leanne Wood and possibly even Natalie Bennett as the Will Self contributor to Question Time, the Ian Hislop of Any Questions, the anti establishment political commentator who can make some off-the-cuff critique of all the political system in general and offer a trite solution or even worse - the Russell Brand - no solution because they do not have an election to win; they know they will never be called to account for their policies.  Who cares if Natalie Bennett gets her sums wrong? She's never going to have to actually do them.  

I think this new type of politics offers hope for our parliament.  I disagree with all the commentators who told us that after the last election we got a government that none of us had voted for.  In actual fact that seems to me to be exactly what everyone wants, the general public does not trust politicians, and the idea of them having to work together appeals to us.  A rainbow coalition, a vote for consensus politics is what we hoped for.  

Maybe it can work, Germany does ok.  It's tempting to think that that is one of the reasons for the rise in popularity of minority or single interest parties such as UKIP.  I find it difficult to watch Nigel Farage without wishing he spoke in "meeps" like Beaker from the Muppets of whom he reminds me. The idea that he speaks for the common people makes my skin crawl; I've never even met a banker.  However I think our democracy is strong enough and established enough to accommodate even more than a handful of UKIP MPs.  It's tempting to believe that they will be the first to shoot themselves in the foot even without a fake sheikh to catch them in another sting.  If there are a number of parties represented with no overall majority then all policies will have to be negotiated and compromised on.  Extreme views will not be able to dictate policy.

  

One of the reasons that Natalie Bennett, Leanne Wood and particularly Nicola Sturgeon may have come out slightly better than the three leaders of the three main parliamentary parties is one of the things they should be capitalising on.  People do see Nigel Farage as a man of the people but maybe they can see the other three as women of the people.  They don't look like our idea of the establishment.  They are women.  They don't sound like most other professional MPs from the Bullingdon Club, independent education or even London.  They speak English with regional / national (!) accents.  And Nicola Sturgeon actually has leadership experience.  We may not all be able to vote for all of these parties but it may start to engage non voters in politics in a way that doesn't involve patronising working people by assuming we are fooled by a pint and a sneaky cigarette.  

Putting the stress on the right part of the sentence

I have worked hard today.  And I feel guilty for saying that since I have been sitting on my arse all day and my father-in-law wouldn't find that an acceptable way of working.  I repeatedly feel like I have to apologise for being a teacher, for not doing proper work.  And today I wasn't even teaching; I was trying to help other teachers not be sacked for being ill.

It is emotionally draining and I am knackered after arguing over and over again that it is not fair that someone should lose their job for being off sick.  This was all thrown into sharp relief by a programme on Radio 4 tonight.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b055g8zh

This was File on 4 and the title of the programme was "Sick of school". It analysed the recent workload survey and commented on the number of teachers who are off sick with stress, it suggested that perhaps we aren't all whingers, that perhaps we do work hard, even perhaps, that no end of holidays can ever compensate for working 14 hour days, 6 days a week.

What could be even more frustrating is that I can't help feeling that all our hard work is somehow misdirected.  Teachers work hard because we love our job and love the kids we teach but we are being held responsible for every aspect of parenting and education and there are not enough hours in the day.  Students spend less that 10% of the year at school, but every new initiative seems to fall to schools.  Sexting, religious tolerance, citizenship.  And GCSEs.  3 levels of progress.  Literacy.  Prepared for the workplace. Any workplace. It no longer seems to be any one else's responsiblity to train teenagers.  It's hard to know what else we can do.  In an interview on the Radio 4 "Today" programme on Monday morning Trevor Phillips was being interviewed about his new documentary "Things We Won't Say About Race Which Are True"  http://www.channel4.com/info/press/programme-information/things-we-wont-say-about-race-that-are-true
and made some really interesting comments.  He said that it was difficult to get certain statistics involving race acknowledged publicly.  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02m37ld
He said "The big educational success story of the last ten year has been London schools which used to be at the bottom of the league tables and now it's at the top...the high performing ethnic minority groups Chinese, Indian, African and Polish have exploded in numbers".  He was suggesting that we could really learn from this and rather than see this as merely a correlation in numbers, explore the reasons for the good performance of these ethnic groups and learn lessons from them in how to achieve this success for all ethnic groups.

It makes me wonder if race is the only reason that this story hasn't gained greater attention from the press and teachers' groups.  This also suggests that a school's performance may not be solely down to the teaching or the management, but may, believe it or not, have something to do with the social background of the children we teach.  In fact, the family or ethnic background of the students may have more to do with the results than the teachers.  Who knew?

I am  not trying to suggest that all the work we do is without merit, we can produce all sorts of wonderfully positive effects, but I see my year 11s for 3 hours a week, and on Monday morning, one of them always stay in bed after a night of GTA.  On Thursday afternoon; Neil always spends 15 minutes with his head on the desk saying how tired he is, 15 minutes longing for KFC and 15 minutes asking if we can watch a video.  Sometimes he uses paragraphs and I want to ruffle his hair.

But that's the relaxing part of the job.  I'd rather deal with an irrational 15 year old than an academy chain who don't want to pay middle aged women for their experience when they've had surgery and need a few more weeks to recover.  That's stressful.

Equal Rites

Lots has happened this week, topped off by the fact that as usual, I am sitting watching Comic Relief and sobbing my eyes out as I always watch the documentary bits out of guilt.  This is despite coming home so tired after work this evening that I was sobbing into the washing up as I felt too weary to even stand up.  I couldn't do a proper job; how do surgeons do it?  How do fire men and women? Police officers?  Those poor factory workers who have to work nights?  My friend who works for Coca Cola and does the same shifts as the factory workers?  Hopeless. The last time I felt like this I was waking up 3 or 4 times a night to feed a crying baby and then getting up at 5 with a toddler and walking another one to school a couple of hours later.

I want to talk about divorce settlements; women being told to get a job or claiming their husband's post-divorce income, but yesterday Terry Pratchett died.

As a massively geeky teenager whose best friends were boys, I had to do something to fit in.  It couldn't be computer games, although I spent a shameful number of Saturday afternoons watching my brother and my friends play Doom or Quake or possibly even the first GTA, I'm not sure, it was the late eighties, perhaps most of the time was spent waiting for the games to load.  I watched (and loved) Alien and Aliens, Terminator and Terminator 2, I saw Metallica in concert and owned an cd single by Joe Satriani, I attempted to play a game involving lots of talking and throwing multi coloured dice with an eccentric number of faces - that wasn't going anywhere. I couldn't quite bring myself to read Lord of the Rings so the compromise was Discworld.

I was resistant at first.  This was taking the aspirational geekdom to a whole new level.  Reading fantasy?  Time to strap on a wooden sword and run through the woods in leather skirts?  I was missing a trick actually, had I been able to overcome my crippling lack of self confidence I could have been a warrior goddess in an armour corset, a bosomy wench or a purple velvet-swathed sourcer-ductress and I would have had my pick of pale and hopeful unshaven-yet-strangely-smooth warriors.  But I was wrong.  This was fantasy, but not as I had previously perceived it through the lens of not actually having read it.

The Discworld is a wonderful place with fantastic characters.  It's a parallel world which is flat, balanced on the back of four elephants, riding on the back of Great A'Tuin a giant turtle swimming through space.  Ok, so far, so normal fantasy, but  it is so much more, Over the series of thirty something / forty (?) books Pratchett wrote satire, parody, pastiche while simultaneously creating a unique cast of characters beautifully delineated and developed over the entire series. If you were fond of Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg you could read the witches' books, if, like me, your favourite books were the detective style Guards! Guards! series with the hard drinking, seen it all Captain Vimes you could read those.  And if you like Death - well - you could find him in every book, but the ones which explored his complicated relationship with his adopted daughter Susan were some of the best.  I loved the satirical representation of the corrupt government of the Patrician and the insight into Macbeth that the witches' books suggested.  Clever literary allusions were sprinkled throughout the books but not enough to spoil brilliantly crafted stories.

Of course, as the only girl in that group of tree huggers meant that I was, even then,  rather taken by the female characters in the books.  There were many strong male characters in the books, many of the main characters were men and when there were female characters they were often cast in conventional female roles - witches, dominant queens, daughters, supportive wives, but there are also many lead women with their personalities as carefully drawn as any of the male roles.  In one of the very first books a girl tries to gain admission to the male enclave of the Unseen University - it's called "Equal Rites".  I am quite keen on Angua, a great police officer brought in with the city's desire to recruit minorities, not because she's a woman - because she's a werewolf.

Granny and Nanny firmly operate within the roles ascribed to women, but they have no problem controlling the men, and Pratchett very consciously challenges the maiden, mother, crone / whore stereotypes perpetuated throughout literature.  But Adora, Angua and most of all Susan take control in their own right and have their own place on the Discworld, it was certainly a place I wanted to be.

He aten't ded.  Not while we have the books.

Do blondes have less fun?

It doesn't seem to have been a good week for blondes; Natalie Bennett crashed and burned, and not for the first time in a interview where she was asked to explain her policies and Madonna crashed in a slightly less metaphorical way at the Brits.

Radhika Sanghani in The Telegraph ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-politics/11431987/Natalie-Bennett-doesnt-deserve-our-sympathy-or-a-hug.-Just-a-Lemsip.html) characterises the treatment of Bennet as sexist, or at least the attitudes expressed on twitter.  It's hard not to agree with her when the Daily Mail chooses the headline "This Aussie blonde's just not up to the job" (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2967671/Ian-Birrell-says-Green-Party-leader-Natalie-Bennett-exposed-poor-media-performer.html) Is it relevant that she's is blonde?  Are they implying that blondes are dumb?  Is it different when Boris Johnson is described as blonde? Or posh? Or nice-but-dim?

If we are are going to reduce politicians to stereotypes then does it matter which one?  Natalie Bennett has done some pretty rubbish interviews, but then Ed Miliband really got it in the neck after forgetting to mention the deficit in his conference speech, and for forgetting the names of the candidates for the scottish Labour party leadership and for forgetting the name of the party donor, no wait - I think that was Ed Balls - or is that just could it be a good headline?  Turns out anyone can forget things.

The Green Party didn't used to have a leader, they were and are trying to things differently in politics, although they perhaps felt that they needed to have someone for the public to identify , and not just Caroline Lucas.  She's kind of done that. And that's kind of what Nigel Farage has done as well. And Boris Johnson.  They have made careers out of seeming slightly buffoon-ish, and now, strangely, Farage looks the least buffoon-ish out of all of his membership.  Isn't there something rather British about that? You start with an idea that sounds ludicrous, but the longer it hangs around, the more acceptable it seems.  I never thought they'd ban smoking in bars.

Madonna also received a great deal of sympathy on social media.   I missed the event but wondered what all the fuss was on Facebook.   There were the expected jokes about her age, her attention seeking nature, the lyrics of her song...I didn't see any about her being blonde.

In fact, both women, while not necessarily triumphing, certainly seem to have gained some credibility.  They have literally and / or metaphorically picked themselves up, dusted themselves off and carried on.  If that's what you have to do to be taken seriously, I'm going to throw myself down the stairs more often.

Surviving half term - the penultimate

A Saturday in half term; so no ballet! No streetdance! No tap!  The chance to stay in  bed.  Or get up early and make everyone breakfast and miss out on coffee with the ballet mums.  I am never happy.

We decided to clean the house and catch up on the washing. That may have been my decision.

It was however a no cost day.  Pip and her friend made peg dollies and I put the entire contents of her bedroom into bin bags.

I rearranged her room, and once she has been through every bin bag and decided what she cannot do without she can slowly add it back to her room.

For dinner I had vegetable chili from the remnants of a huge batch I made for friends and froze.

This was made in the slow cooker with sweet potatoes that I roasted first.

Asda sweet potatoes £1.15 per kg so 60p
Asda frozen onions 85p for 500g so about 30p
Asda tinned tomatoes 31p for 400g so 62p
Tesco kidney beans in chilli sauce 295g for 65p
Asda baked beans 410 g for 32p
Asda garlic 25p a bulb so about 5p
Total cost £2.54 which served at least 5.

And my final attempt to save money this holiday was using my yogurt maker - I can't believe we don't get paid for another week.  I think mine cost about £20.  It reminded me of my mum's.  It's a 50p yogurt mixed with a 49p litre of UHT skimmed milk and a spoonful of skimmed milk powder. I had frozen fruit coulis in the freezer made of strawberries from the garden, icing sugar and lemon juice.

As long as I can keep eating from the freezer for the next week, then all will be well.  Oh and just the essays to mark. Jack Monroe will keep me going.

Surviving half term - part 5

We are back at home; in time for  a final relaxing evening before the PE kits washing, bedroom tidying, home learning and book marking of standard Sunday panic, amplified by the illusion of having had a week off. 

My parents are the most supportive, and often look after the children during the holidays, but they have been poorly, so asked us to visit.  They have never really asked us for anything, not even a swift repayment of the thousands of pounds we owe them, and unsurprisingly, I felt obliged.  With no car, we travelled on the train, so travelled comparatively light.  

My father finds it hard to imagine why anyone would want to travel on the train when they own a perfectly good car (which clearly I do not), and was almost insistent on driving me home.

"Don't be daft, I have cheap train tickets, it is cheaper than the diesel, even the way you drive dad, you couldn't get it cheaper.  And you'd have to do both ways."

"I'd drive you early on Saturday."

"I can read my book on the train, the children can walk about."

"The car needs a run, It hasn't had a long journey this month.  It needs a long run."

"It's a new car.  Missing one long run in its first six months will be fine."

It was a hard sell, in the end he dropped us at a station further south and no doubt had to sit on the M6 for 2 hours.

I forgot my cardigan, I meant to pack it, couldn't wear it under my coat, bag was a bit full.  I always forget what the weather is like.  I always forget it rains, all the time.  I always forget that it is SO COLD in their house because they NEVER turn the heating on.  But then that is why I owe them thousands of pounds.  

So I had to borrow my dad's cardigan.  

But I spent no money today, except a real coffee at the station because coffee shops are another indulgent reason my parents have lots of money and I have none.