A Mouse on a Mission...
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Letting Go

12/6/2017

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Last time I wrote a blog post, I was reasonably fresh back to the UK from India. I’d been there for just under 6 months as a volunteer teacher. You can read all about that adventure on my parallel blog page; Maggamouse. I knew even before I came home that I wanted to return to India. There’s so much still to do there, so much help still needed, but this is expensive. To pay for my flights, my visa, my vaccinations, my travel insurance and to cover my costs while I’m there to avoid draining the already humble resources of the organisations I want to work with will probably cost me about £3000 (25000 Rupees at current exchange rate) I knew I had some work to do with getting that cash together and began to plan all sorts of things from epic walks to Buddhist centre talks, from sponsored poetry readings to free henna art (for donations). As it was, however; when I landed, a new responsibility closer to home needed my attention and I went to live as a carer to my elderly great uncle in Essex. This took pretty much all my time and energy so my fund raising went on the back burner. This story came to an end on May 23rd when my family and I said goodbye to him at Southend Crematory. Sad as this was, I remain grateful that I was able to do what I could to make his last weeks as easy and enjoyable as possible, as well as for the merciful fact that he was spared suffering a long drawn out illness.

One consequence of his death, on a very practical level, is that his house will not stay in our family and so I am no longer able to make use of his kind offer of loft space to store my possessions (Coincidentally, you can find out all about that home on my last update to this blog, shortly before I flew to India; Number 49). As I am soon to be studying for five months on a residential course at the Triratna retreat centre Adhisthana in Herefordshire, I’m not settling down to a new home yet either and have nowhere else to store it all.
I recently re-read the last Maggamouse Blog I wrote in April, to conclude my story. It was titled ‘The Beginning’ and in it I stated:
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Number 49; Blog Post and Poem
“I have so much potential. So much to do. So much I can achieve. These things won’t come, either, in the format of all the other things I’ve ever used to judge myself or assess my worth. These things won’t be expressed by graded certificates, resigned to battered folders. They won’t be tallied by marathon medals in a dusty box. They won’t be checked by piled sketchbooks or exhibited paintings or published writings. They can’t be described at all by collected things, finally doing no more than keeping each other company in my uncle’s loft.”
I read that and I realised how appropriate those words were and how true they remain. I remembered that there are so many people in the world living with far, far less than I, in my privileged status as a Caucasian British national, will ever have. I remembered that you have to give up the mundane to approach the transcendental.
And so on Sunday the 11th of July, with the very generous help of an extremely lovely friend, I gave all except two (quite large!) bags of my stuff away at a car boot sale. That which hadn’t already been given to friends (lots of paintings!), charity shops (11 bags of clothes), consigned to the landfill (old home movie VHS tapes from the nineties), or the recycling (2 decades worth of arts education and various other tangential studies), was strewn across a field in the very early hours of an English summer morning by an eager hoard of hungry bargain hunters. The visitors to the Dunton car boot sale in Essex were freely invited to take whatever the liked as a gift, with the simple request for a donation of whatever they’d like to give to help me fund my return to India. Funnily enough, I found this stumped many people. In a scene comically reminiscent of the Life of Brian ‘Won’t ‘aggle!?’ sketch, confused browsers who were hoping for a low price, merely walked away empty handed when told the item in question was a gift, but that I was welcoming charitable donations. For every person who gave very little and took quite a lot, there was another person who made a donation without taking a single thing. It was a very strange experience but I’m very glad I did it.
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Hopefully a few people benefited from receiving some nice things they might not otherwise have been able to afford...
I never before realised that it’s as if the more ‘things’ I get rid of, the more of the entire world becomes mine. The less I focus on ‘owning’ a few square feet, filled with objects that define me, the more I seem to inherit the entire universe as my home, the more I approach a state where I can be free from being defined by the language of mundane, worldly things.

The more I give, the more I have.

I now have 2 bags (that’s still too much quite frankly, when you’re trying to carry it all at the end of a long car boot sale!), a bike and a total of £469.45 raised of my £3000 target (I took a little over £300 but already had some donations). I’ve also started training for a half marathon in October.
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This doesn't feel very minimalist when you're carrying it...

My crowdfunding page expires on the 14th of June 2017.
If you’re reading this before that date, are you able to consider giving?
Thank you.

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Number 49

30/9/2016

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When I moved to Leigh at the end of last year, I knew it was likely that I’d be inspired creatively by my environment as that seems to be something of a pattern in my work. This didn’t turn out to be quite as I’d anticipated. I think a lot of this was owing to a general, low level background of accumulative fatigue that seemed to cling for some time to everything I did and make even the simplest creative attempts feel fairly mechanical and meaningless. However, I realised in the last few weeks as I’ve been staying at my uncles, that there has been an important local environment that has influenced, or at least supported my recent experience, and that had formed a key factor in my decision to move to the area in the first place.

My great uncle has lived in his bungalow in Leigh on Sea for my entire life, and I believe, most of his. I’ve been visiting it since I was a baby. It was a regular summer holiday location when I was a child and it became something of a ‘bolt hole’ sanctuary for me in adult years. It occurred to me, possibly last summer, that it was also the last home I was still able to visit from my childhood years, following the inevitable sale of my mum and dad’s parents’ houses, as well as, more recently, the house I grew up in. I know full well that it is only a matter of time (hopefully a lot of time, but you never know) before this is also a place I can no longer visit and I felt that I wanted to, if not capture it, at least respond visually to some of the little practical features that may seem mundane but are, in fact, the bricks that build a domestic space. The trivial details that all houses at once have in common and yet couldn’t realise more differently. The things that reflect the personality of the people that live there, that tell a myriad of silent stories; the things that make a house a home.

That urge has been perhaps the most genuine creative impulse I’ve had (outside of my renewed love of writing poetry) for the best part of 18 months and so this new collection of fifty images exploring and affectionately recording my uncle’s home aims to do so with a light touch; a recognition that these things, despite their apparent consistency and age, will still change and pass. It doesn’t aim to pin them down like dry and dusty butterflies or set them, frozen, in temporal amber, but jot them down almost, like visual notes. A lovingly informal record of something that has been and will no longer be, but that serves to hold a great deal of value to me for all the while that it is.
Number 49 a
Number 49 b
Number 49 c
Number 49 d
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Catching Up (but not overtaking)

27/9/2016

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Well hello stranger, It’s been a while… I’ve not blogged for some time, but truth be told I’ve not had much to say. Or at least, I’ve not felt much like saying it. If you’ve been following this blog for a while (or feel inclined to scroll back a bit) you may remember that just over a year ago I made a few big changes, deciding to leave a teaching career and move from Manchester to Leigh on Sea in Essex. I’ve had a quick look through some older posts myself whilst deciding what to write and it occurs to me that when I wrote about “Winds of Change” on the 31st of May 2015 I had no idea how right I was, and goodness but they’ve been blowing ever since. It was on September the 1st of that year that I handed in my notice and set in motion a sequence of events that has brought me on a completely unpredictable and extremely challenging but incredibly worthwhile journey.
This journey started, when I moved in November and began to deal with the personal aftermath of leaving teaching. Of course, one might think that if a particular situation has caused you stress or upset, then to remove yourself from that place would solve the problem. This proved true, but only to an extent. Of course, in reality it was more complicated than that and the gradual process of really realising that I wasn’t a teacher anymore was a painful one that I found had unexpected implications on my perception of my own identity. Thankfully, my ongoing involvement with Education Support Partnership gave me a platform to work through some of that. Being asked to speak at a debate at Parliament in January (there was a detailed account of that in my last update but you can also watch a short video about the evening), as well as to participate in a radio interview on Radio 5 Live Daily in March (a recording of the entire feature is included in this post; I speak at about 13 minutes into the clip), gave me a sense that I was not alone in my experience. It also gave me the opportunity to meet and hear from others, as well as some comfort in the knowledge that in making my decision to leave, and then being very open and public about this, I had at least helped one or two struggling teachers like myself.
ESP Video
While all that was going on, perhaps especially because I was struggling to feel a sense of purpose in my new life where I was now making ends meet with bar work, I was keen to stay creative. Just before I left Manchester, I completed a new series of digital collages, developed from paintings and drawings inspired by Buddhist imagery. Titled The Impermanence Series, these were exhibited at the Manchester Buddhist Centre in November 2015, but had felt like ‘the end of the road’ for that set of work, a development of a development and with no inherent momentum to take forward.
 As I’ve always been inspired by my environment and having moved to a particularly beautiful area, it seemed natural to begin a fresh creative investigation taking this as a starting point. It was at a time of year when days were short and I had been particularly struck by views out over the Thames Estuary either at night or dusk and sunrise; and it did seem to be almost permanently in one of these states! I took some photos; I did some vague watercolours, a few sketchy ink drawings. I looked at the light around the horizon, played with abstracting it and gave the result a working title of Leigh Lights in January 2016. However, despite my aspirations to take this work into some more considered and larger scale paintings, it never transpired and I found these activities seemed pretty hollow, that I was simply going through the motions. I felt I had very little to pour into them, just wringing out the last drops of some residual creativity. It was as though I was carrying out the stages of a process because I didn’t like the idea of stopping, (or if I’m more honest, I didn’t like the idea perhaps that others would think I had stopped) not because I had anything much to say. I was merely making artistic small talk for fear of the creative implications of an otherwise accusatory silence.

Funnily enough, at that time I did find a more sincere outlet for my creative expression in the form of the written word. I have always enjoyed writing poems but never felt they were much more than a personal hobby, certainly not seeing them as related in any way to my professional arts practice. However, I decided to host a spoken word night at the pub I was working in, as much to give me something to focus on and in the hope that I might begin feeling involved in my new local community as for any genuine urge to be expressive. I was as surprised, as I think were the pub managers, when this event was so successful that we couldn’t fit everyone in the small space we were using for it and I realised I had stumbled across a flourishing local poetry scene. I was soon invited to read at existing poetry nights I’d not even known about and this, as well as hearing other’s work inspired me to keep writing. I found through this, a far more genuine and very refreshing outlet for many of my current experiences and so, in a recent overhaul of my website, I have made the poems more prominent with their own page. There are now 51 poems on line and I’ve more to upload when I get the chance.
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While this was positive, it far from distracted me entirely from the gap that remained in my daily experience where teaching had once flourished. ‘So, what are you doing now!?’ people would frequently enquire with an excited enthusiasm that I felt anticipated the adventures they expected me to relate. And my heart would sink. ‘Not much.’ I’d say through gritted teeth, trying to sound nonchalant and not give away how cutting I found those queries. ‘Just some bar work for a bit… You know, enjoying not having to take my work home with me!’ Which wasn’t untrue. But it still hurt. When I was introduced by Sam Walker on Radio 5 as ‘having left teaching completely’ and ‘now working in a pub’ I could have crawled into a hole there and then. I found hearing someone else speak that truth an incredibly humiliating experience, in the truest sense of the word. I was humbled by it.

Because of these feelings, I knew my time in the pub could only be a temporary solution and that I would have to find a new path. It’s hard though, to determine a new direction on the map of life with eyes still blurred by the fatigue of your last voyage. I made a couple of half-hearted and unsuccessful applications to some arts opportunities. I did a bit of volunteering with a local community group, offering crafts workshops to disadvantaged children. I mulled over some options and found nothing that reignited any spark of genuine motivation in me. But my mind did keep returning to an inspirational talk I’d heard in October, at the Manchester Buddhist Centre. Delivered by a member of the Triratna Order, her description the work of a small charity called Young Indian Futures, at Aryaloka Computer Education Centre, a Buddhist social project in Nagpur that offers subsidised education to some of India’s poorest and most marginalised young people, gave me the fluttering of a memory of what I had once believed teaching was for.
Southend Half
A way of making the world better, not a method of paying the rent. Time and again I found myself thinking of this talk and the work being done there, so, in April, I got in touch with the speaker and the rest, as they say, is history.

I began an online TEFL course in May, trying to learn the finer points of a language that I am supposed to have a fairly good grasp of, but it appears don’t know technically at all well. Present perfect? Conjugating verbs? It amused me that at a time when so many people were telling me how much they enjoyed my poetry and I was being invited to write or speak about teaching, I was discovering just how much I did not know about the very tool I was apparently deploying so effectively. Nevertheless, I worked through it and was soon planning my now imminent trip to spend six months volunteering in Nagpur. After a little more running (Southend Half marathon) to raise much needed cash for the charity, see left!), it was straight into visas and vaccinations, travel insurance and flights. Most importantly though, back to lesson planning and back to a sense that I’d soon be once again helping to generate brighter futures, not just facilitating weekly hangovers.
Strangely, as the charity is founded by Buddhist practitioners, this move towards a fresh expression of my professional skills is also neatly woven into the exploration of a new, spiritual side to myself I had not known was there. Following my attendance of meditation classes and learning about Buddhism at the centre in Manchester, I felt a real sense of something missing when I moved away from that community. Happily though, I found it was convenient (if expensive!) to travel in to the London Buddhist Centre once a week, so I took up new studies there and soon decided that it was of value enough for me to hold close to the heart of an otherwise rapidly changing self. In June, I began thinking of myself, and identifying to others as Buddhist. In July, I became a mitra and in August, I formally requested ordination into the Triratna Buddhist Order. If you are interested in knowing more about that development, you can find a recording of a talk I gave last Saturday at the Varjasana Retreat Centre in Suffolk titled ‘Why I am a Buddhist’, (as well as a PDF if you prefer to read it) on another new page I have just added to this site, where I shall share and record anything related to my new spiritual voyage.
Mitra Day
So, it may not have felt like it at the time but it seems quite a bit has occurred in the last few months and I now realise that what has at times appeared to be a ‘wasted’ year has in fact been really very well spent. A field left fallow may appear to be wasted land, the soil untilled and dotted with weeds, but under the surface is intense and critically important activity. Organic matter is busy decomposing, being eaten and excreted by various creatures; at once a process of death and decay and yet at the same time nourishing the earth with the nutrients needed to provide the conditions for new growth, fresh shoots and flourishing, eventually to bring a new season of fruitfulness.

I remember once, during a heated ‘debate’ with a (soon-to-be-ex) boyfriend, being told with an air of distaste ‘You’ve changed!’ Well, yes I probably had and what’s more is that I’ve kept changing. A damn good thing it is too. ‘Stasis’ is not a word in the Glittermouse lexicon. I don’t know exactly what the next six months contain but I know I shall step back onto the shores of the UK as a very different person to the one that left, grateful too for this fact.
Oak Sapling
Well, hopefully that’s bridged the gap of the last few months and we’ve caught up… But I continue to learn the value in not rushing things, not forcing life, letting things be. I was recently read the Wendell Berry poem Grace, in which he says of an autumn wood:

‘Perfect in its rise and in its fall, it takes
The place it has been coming to forever.
It has not hastened here, or lagged.’

 
And so, though we may have caught up, I’ll be making an effort not to be running away with myself again and I’ll certainly not be doing any overtaking. After all, as Berry says:
 
‘Running or walking, the way
Is the same.  Be still.  Be still.’


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The Recruitment and Retention Crisis in Teaching; Education Support Partnership Debate at Westminster

14/1/2016

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In September 2015, shortly after making the sad decision to leave teaching, I undertook some rather last minute fundraising for Teacher Support Network. Following this, I was invited to speak at their first event since reforming as Education Support Partnership; a discussion held at the Houses of Parliament on the current crisis in recruiting and retaining teachers. On World Mental Health Day in October last year, I wrote an article on my reasons for leaving the profession for ESP to publish on their blog and expected that I would simply be delivering a spoken version of this. When I found I was in fact to be one of a panel responding to questions concerning potential solutions to the problem, I felt a little overwhelmed. It’s one thing to read from a prepared text with boundaries you set yourself and entirely another to be openly debating such an intensely complex issue amongst well respected and expert professionals.
Though it was a great honour to be invited to speak, I was especially concerned because one thing I had been consistently clear on was that I didn’t pretend to have answers. I was happy to share my perspective on the symptoms but could not presume to begin suggesting a remedy. Of course, I had to revise this approach to contribute to the discussion and I began to wonder if my apparent humility was in fact a somewhat lazy way to avoid conflict. I steeled myself to have a long, hard think and form an actual opinion that I was prepared to stand behind.

While I spent time mulling this question over in the preceding days, jotting down a few hasty scribbles, I didn’t take anything with me as I felt it would be inappropriate to prepare anything too formal for a question and answer session.
Education Support Partnership
I immediately began to regret this decision when I saw the other panellists arranging their printed notes, yet still I tried to hit the salient points in response to the chairman’s introduction and found myself starting by summarising my main reason for leaving teaching. I have spent the last four months honing an uncharacteristically succinct response to questions on this from various individuals; mostly those on the other side of the bar I now pull pints at:
“I left teaching because I felt I was no longer a teacher, complicit instead in a complex form of educational fraud where I was unequipped to deliver the quality of provision I believe my students deserve.”
When I saw several heads nodding enthusiastically in response to these words I felt far more confident in elaborating on this and continued with the thoughts I have recently cultivated around the problems and solutions. Schools and colleges are required to pull out all the stops in publicly demonstrating a commitment to deliver quality provision but it is my perception that this evidencing is now valued above the quality of provision it seeks to achieve. Ticking boxes to prove that good teaching is taking place across the board in a ‘one size fits all’ approach despite the rhetoric around differentiation does not cater for individual needs and is not then the best way of empowering individual learners to be successful. It’s like tripping over your own untied shoelaces; the systems that are in place to assist delivery have become so cumbersome that they in fact undermine it. The solution begins not in funding but in liberating teachers from impotent bureaucracy and well-meaning but ultimately counter productive polices.
ESP 1
Christine Parker speaks on the success of Gladstone Primary School
You hear a lot about workload causing stress amongst teachers. I don’t think this is exactly the case. I never felt expected to execute an unrealistic workload. Quite frankly, I don’t believe anyone who goes into teaching expecting anything other than a hard slog is the kind of teacher we especially want to retain anyway. I’m not asking for a reduced workload but I am asking to be equipped with the right resources to meet those challenges in an effective way. More importantly, I’m asking to be allowed to tackle the right workload.

Staff need to know they are trusted, empowered and supported to build meaningful relationships with learners and to utilise their professional judgement to negotiate the right educational solutions on an individual level, not forced to jump through hoops to meet someone else’s misconceived ideals. We need to be permitted to really differentiate, not just fill in a ‘differentiation’ box on a pro-forma lesson plan so we can prove to the looming spectre of OFSTED that we know the difference between cognitive, psychomotor and affective learning styles.

When I say it’s not about funding, I mean I’m not asking for millions of pounds to be spent on swanky new state of the art buildings or equipment. Some of my most effective teaching has been delivered in pre fab huts or the middle of the street on study visits. I don’t need industry standard, highly expensive kit; I can teach the basics of painting with white emulsion on ripped cardboard and can explain what a pixel is using free packages that come with most standard operating systems. An interactive whiteboard can be handy but I’ve seen more spontaneous creativity spilled on to sheets of flip board paper with slightly-too-dry marker pens. The most valuable resource I need to teach well is time. I need 5 days a week to deliver a full time course, not two and a half including tutorial and Functional Skills. I need a class size that allows me to really get to know and respond to the students in front of me and I need to be part of a team with current, diverse practices who are engaged in their subject because they are being invested in and valued as the dynamic, creative individuals that they are. To back that up, I need an institution that will really listen to what I, my colleagues and my students say we need to function happily and effectively, a management system that is itself equipped to flexibly respond to the needs of each person, both staff and students. I need to be trusted to have the drive to do my job well, not mismanaged and undermined under a cloud of assumed apathy, with the wrong things constantly checked, hollowly monitored, and obsessively measured.
In one sense, it’s about funding. We need to take the expectation off colleges to be self-funding  pseudo-businesses so that rather than spending their cash on shiny things to attract bums to seats and wasting staff time by populating spreadsheets that demonstrate how outstanding they are at meeting erroneous central government targets, they can drive it right back down to where it’s needed.  Investing limited funding into people rather than ‘stuff’ by allowing teachers time to professionally develop and look after the individuals in their care will result in happier, more fulfilled and more effective teams. No one wants to feel they are doing a job someone else’s way and badly.
ESP 2
Pretending I'm on Question Time and responding to comments
Let me do it my way and I’ll do it better than you ever imagined. That way, will be completely and delightfully different to my colleagues’ way of doing it. This is a good thing and this is why it’s critical that structures exist with enough flexibility to accommodate various approaches, which will also result in a far richer and more meaningful learning experience for students as they encounter and develop a full range of alternative transferable skills alongside academic or main vocational subjects.

Having been the first to speak on such issues, I was prepared for the fact that I would be stating my position before anyone else had declared theirs and was expecting a certain amount of disagreement. It was then a very affirmative experience to hear the next two speakers continue to not only agree with but expand upon my views, supporting them with considerably more experience and research!

Christine Parker, Head of Gladstone Primary School went on to discuss how she and her colleagues had achieved success through cultivating responsible freedom, collaboration, trust and mutual respect between staff and pupils. She spoke movingly about supporting teachers and including them in decision making processes, an approach which paved the way for Candy Whittome to discuss her current doctoral research using ESP data. These investigations support the working hypothesis that creative freedom for head teachers to respond locally within nationally imposed constraints was key to success. Interestingly, she also asked what cost we were prepared to commit in terms of staff wellbeing in order to achieve success for our young people.
ESP 3
Listening intently with unbiased enthusiasm to Neil Carmichael MP
Neil Carmichael MP, Chair of the Education Select Committee spoke last and I breathed a sigh of relief when he cited a failing perspective on the purpose of education as being at the root of the problem; a fact I could hardly agree with more. However, his idea of what the purpose should be was not in line with my own. He spoke at length about the relationship between skills and the economy, this clearly being the main purpose of education in his opinion; to bring up economically effective young people. Of course, we need to raise a generation that can support itself.
I feel however, that we desperately need a wider social shift that allows us to value the needs of the individual learner above the needs of the college, or indeed the economy. I don’t want to teach people to be effective earners. I want to teach them to be self-confident, happy people; I can guarantee you that a majority of them will then turn out to be economically robust anyway.  I feel very fortunate that following questions from the floor, I was able to put that perspective forward as a final word for the night. I sensed that though applause at the close was inevitable, there were at least one or two more vigorous bursts of clapping in agreement with that sentiment.

Whatever your political leaning, from the discussions I enjoyed after the event and the heart warmingly supportive messages I have received since, I appear to have spoken in a way that resonated with many teachers. It’s wonderful to feel that I am far from alone but this is tinged with a deep sense of sadness that so many feel as isolated, frustrated and desperate as I did. I set off on an unplanned bike ride in September feeling that maybe I could channel these feelings in a positive direction to help others by raising funds. I hope I have been able to continue this aim by speaking out on behalf of those who have encountered and continue to work with the same challenges.
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Light Hearted in Leigh

5/1/2016

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A couple of blogs ago, I related the fact that I was soon to be moving on from Manchester and that coincidentally, the final show of work I was exhibiting before doing so contained sketches and drawings from my new area. This was the Impermanence Series, shown as part of the Manchester Buddhist Centre's Arts and Imagination Festival show 'Touched by the Dharma'  throughout November 2015.
I use the word ‘coincidentally’ in a fairly loose way really as anyone who has followed my work particularly will be well aware that despite various tangents, application of different disciplines and materials and a fairly widely ranging visual language,
my work is nearly always inspired by the environment I find myself in and either my or others’ relationships with it. It wasn’t much of a gamble then, to predict that I would soon be producing work inspired by the landscape of my new area, especially not given how striking it is. Possibly a result of the lack of daylight hours in the first few weeks of my time here, or possibly because my new working routine has meant I am out and about at night more frequently than I might have been when teaching (yes, I have returned to the simple pleasures of bar work), my latest output has been directly driven by my observations of light, or the absence of it, either natural or otherwise.
Leigh Nocturne 3
Leigh Nocturne 3
Estuary Abstract 7
Estuary Abstract 7
Playing a major part in both photographic and predominately watercolour pieces, light on the estuary will form the basis of a new series of larger canvases that deliberately abstract the changing shapes and colours on and around the horizon. Well, that’s the plan anyway but we may just have to see what washes up with the tide!

In the meantime, you can see a full series of eight Estuary Abstract sketches and five Leigh Nocturne photos on the Sketchbook page of this site.
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Why I'm Leaving Teaching

17/12/2015

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I recently had to make a rather sad but very big decision. I've never run a 'teaching' blog, but since I have always felt that my teaching and arts practices have strongly informed one another (I do, sorry, did teach art after all) this seems like the most appropriate place to explain why. It's not directly arts related but it shares a flavour...

A career change can be positive, yet is bound to require careful consideration and some agonising. There are times though, when we make changes for reasons beyond a simple desire to progress and sadly, that’s where I recently found myself. After over a decade teaching Art and Design in FE, I handed in my resignation. Because I don’t believe my dissatisfaction is caused by the college I’m leaving, I’ll not be applying to teach elsewhere.

Class Dismissed.

School’s Out.
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 Put simply, I'm leaving teaching because I love teaching. The following explanation of that apparent dichotomy is a personal perspective that aims to accept as much responsibility as it delegates.

Recently I’ve no longer felt that I am a teacher. Though in college my official title is 'lecturer', my goal is the same. We could debate semantics until Geoff Petty comes home and argue that you can't 'teach' anything, just facilitate opportunities in a 'learner centred environment' but that's beside the point and the chance to do either of those would be a fine thing. A chronic misalignment between my perception of the role and what I feel equipped to deliver has caused a great deal of personal stress which ultimately resulted in illness. Trying to do a job without the necessary tools is never easy but if you’re driven enough to achieve the outcome, you’ll get by. I can’t imagine anyone goes seriously into teaching without passion, determination and a genuine interest in the development and wellbeing of others, values that fuel us to persevere, find ways around difficult situations and dig deep into reserves of energy and goodwill long beyond the expiry date of our own mental health. This is neither noble, nor in the best interests of those we support so it was with no pride that a week after finally resigning, I realised I had left it too late. I was sleeping poorly, experiencing recurring headaches, stomach cramps and an elevated resting heartrate at over twice what is normal. With chest pains, shortness of breath and tearful episodes I realised I was not well enough to professionally take a class and felt no choice but to call in sick. My GP agreed this was work related stress and when I sought treatment through CBT I was advised by the counsellor that these techniques may not work as ‘they are designed to address irrational feelings’. Not a pleasant way to feel vindicated.

Now I’ve had space, I see this has been a long time coming. In the last few Septembers, I've thought 'it's got worse than last year' before berating myself for catastrophizing and determining to buckle down, get on with it and do my best for the young people I have the privilege to meet. Facing their challenges with them, communicating my love of art and supporting them to find creativity in their own unique ways. Helping them make their own tools to write their own stories, I never expected it to be easy or gratifying. Like many teachers, I found myself sharing more mistakes than successes and representing an institution to rebel against as adolescence was battled before me. I watched potential bloom in unlikely places, relished being proven wrong and occasionally enjoyed being proven right. I expected to be constantly pushed, questioned and tested. Those challenges are all part of the deal and worth every second of tight-for-time coffee-scented staff room complaining when you harvest those glimpses of personal discovery and success.

Sometimes you’re thanked for it but that's a bonus, not a right. Parents sob when progenies 'fly the nest' but teachers experience thankless abandonment annually, watching successes launch into promising sunsets and those who have yet to find their feet sadly coast for another year. All that emotional investment poured into a future you'll never share in. That's expected too and well worth absorbing any stress to buckle down and get on with. Bit less time this year? We'll manage. Few less staff in the department? We'll cope. The planning you did to respond to that new policy now needs completely re writing in order to meet requirements of the one that's just come in and strangely mirrors the one we had before the last new one got scrapped? Sure, let's do it. Not because it noticeably benefits the students (though we’ll make it if we can) but because we can then get it out of the way and focus our energies on the stuff that does. Because that's who matters right? The students?
It was no surprise to return after the summer to an email from senior management (although I think they now call themselves the ‘Strategic Development Team’) stressing that this year “high attendance and outstanding retention is critical.” When have teachers ever not wanted classes to be so enjoyable they’re rarely missed or courses so inspiring they result in achievement? That’s the human perspective though and humans are becoming milled into statistics because for each ‘planned number’ comes a fixed sum for the college, which leaves if they do.

I’ve stopped counting the ‘motivational’ talks I’ve witnessed aiming to demonstrate the sincere concern of the institution for individual lives. Pictures of happy faces achieving, stories of triumph over adversity, celebrations of our positive impact. It’s never long though, before these give way to pie charts, bar graphs and data tables, to statistics, targets, benchmarks and suddenly all the ‘real life’ smiles dissolve into a mire of political rhetoric and institutional dogma.
I’m not naïve enough to think stretched national funding doesn’t need criteria for local distribution but equally, I’m not cynical enough to ignore the counterbalance to each aforementioned success. These are the lives we can’t help because they fall the wrong side of this cut off or fail to meet that requirement. Recently this balance is tipping and for each achievement, I’ve encountered a different young life who’s had another handful of tacks scattered under the wheels of their ambition because they simply didn’t tick the right boxes.

Those who find themselves fortunate enough to meet entry criteria that are increasingly geared to funding targets instead of individual needs aren’t unaffected by the politics either. For all the talk of ‘quality’, they get what they’re given as staff attempt to squeeze into a 15 hour week everything needed to coach them through ticking yet more boxes. Demonstrate you can tick this box and jump through these hoops then you pass. Where learning was about experimenting and evaluating mistakes, without the staff, time or physical resources this genuine process increasingly takes a back seat to its own documentation. These are the futures further compromised by classes cancelled due to lack of cover or inadequate assistance in class for learning difficulties when staff have been ‘redeployed’.

I’m not framing senior management or national government as shadowy, malevolent figures secretly conspiring to undermine future generations. I know it’s impossible to help everyone and things can never be perfect but as long as teachers, support staff, managers, governors, MPs, parents and society generally are complicit in maintaining this system then it’s never going to be better than it is. I’ve no interest in apportioning blame, nor do I seek somewhere to point my finger. I’m willing to shoulder my share of stress as long as it achieves something but I no longer know what we are achieving. The longer my colleagues and I try to function effectively in an environment that erodes our ability to teach, the more susceptible we become to symptoms of stress which impact further upon our students.

These problems are complex, but I believe a key issue is in the requirement of colleges to operate as businesses in order to minimise reliance on public finances. Priorities shift from people to targets that generate statistics to justify business plans. We use limited resources to form partnerships that invariably benefit employers more than students. As a result, we’re losing sight of our purpose. Since when was passing skills to the next generation a business opportunity that can be qualified in a spreadsheet? When was the human mind commodified? I don’t pretend to have answers that will drive out through the classroom into the wider socio-economic and political worlds to solve public sector financing and indiscriminately rescue every troubled teen or anguished adult learner but I do believe we must be the change we want for the world, which is why I’ve stuck with teaching for as long as I have. This year though, I no longer believe I can change the system from inside; I don’t have the resources to be a good teacher and the only way I know to address this is to get out.

Feelings of professional inadequacy have now given way to a whole host of others around my poor mental health. Shame and humiliation before colleagues and students that I apparently ‘can’t cope’. Resentment that we’re silently expected to operate in unacceptable conditions. Relief that I made the decision to leave before I became ill, but anxiety that I might now appear to have 'gone sick' for reasons of laziness. Frustration that I’ve had to take responsibility; it’s me that’s sick, me that’s not managing. Scared of what it will mean for my future. Beyond these emotions however, one stands out; sadness. I felt grief in reaching the point where I decided to leave teaching but now I’m additionally bereft of what I’d planned as a positive last term.

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 No clean break. No real closure. Thanks to my contact With Education Support Partnership, I now realise that despite feeling alienated I am far from alone. That’s cold comfort but if my story shared or voice raised helps others feel less isolated then perhaps some good will come of my current predicament. One day I hope to return to the profession I love and continue working with inspiring young people and colleagues to make their world a better place. Until that time, class dismissed.

Put your chairs on the tables before you leave, please. Don’t forget to turn out the lights.


This blog was originally written for and published by Education Support Partnership on World Mental Health Day; October 10th 2015.
You can see more of my (slightly barmy) fund-raising efforts for them here.

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The Impermanence Series

25/10/2015

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When I last updated in August, I mentioned that I had been working on some drawings exploring impermanence as a deeper investigation into themes inspired by Buddhism and Buddhist imagery. I felt quite drawn to these principles, especially as I had been encountering a great deal of uncertainty and change in my personal life. It seems somehow poetic then, that the result of these developments, culminating in a series of five digital collages titled Impermanence Series, should be receiving an airing as my final exhibition of work before I leave Manchester for pastures new. Even more so as the images contain drawings made in and around the area I'm moving to! The new work will be in display at the Manchester Buddhist Centre's Arts and Imagination Festival show 'Touched by the Dharma'  throughout November 2015.

I have always found my work driven by responding to the  environment I find myself in and so it's no surprise that place  and my movement from one to another should be featured in my work. I can only imagine what inspirations I will find following my relocation to the Essex coastal town of Leigh-on-Sea but as it has already found form in my work I think it's a fairly educated guess that it will affect the future of my creative practice, whatever that may be!
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Impermanence Series 3 - October 2015
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Everything is Changing

17/8/2015

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Having taken a laid back and flexible approach to producing work for The Serenity Series, (as would only be appropriate for the subject matter!) I didn’t set out with a goal in terms of how many pieces I expected to produce. 
This is especially true as I didn’t really feel there was a very clear aesthetic link beyond a general idea and that the whole thing had happened quite accidentally. Since recognising how influential Buddhist iconography had been and then choosing to learn more about it however, it feels right that perhaps having reached a better level of understanding it would be time to move on. Upon completion of a seventh canvas in May, I was able to collate the images and realised that actually, the little ‘family’ of apparently hotchpotch pieces did have quite an identifiable visual link and didn’t just rely upon the conceptual to unite them at all. 
Driving on in a conceptual vein, I have decided to begin exploring notions of impermanence, a key principal I have discovered in Buddhism, and personally very relevant to some of my recent experiences. Whilst I very much enjoyed reconnecting with painting and mixed media, in moving forward I have again reverted to drawing and sketching. This has seemed especially appropriate as the theme I have now chosen to explore encourages recognition of our desire to ‘capture’ moments in time which are necessarily fleeting. Photography is an obvious tool for attempting this, recording a fraction of a second with the highest shutter speeds, however drawing, and the time required to sit, observe and translate the three dimensional and dynamic world around us into a static two dimensional form brings with it an interesting dichotomy of process and goal. Interestingly, it also embodies another Buddhist ideal; that of mindfulness and integration of ones experience with the present moment. 
I’m not yet certain where these new sketches will take me though I’ve titled the book ‘Everything is Changing’ and I’ve enjoyed their creation so far, which can only be a good sign! I’ve now added some them to the Sketchbook pages of this site and have recently published two new poems, (linked below and also on the More Words of Mouse page) which instead engage with the concept of impermanence from a literary perspective. 
In writing this update, I have also just noticed the title of my last posting; how right I was!
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Winds of Change...

31/5/2015

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Having completed the last painting for the Serenity Series at the end of January, (Hangzhou Magnolia) I had a fairly good idea of an image I wanted to work with next, so I got stuck in quite quickly on a new piece in February. It would be untrue to say I have worked on it every day since then, but it has been a fairly lengthy process as I have re worked several parts of it on more than one occasion. The piece is developed from both a photographic record and a pencil sketch made on site at the Chong Shan Si Buddhist Monastery in Taiyuan, China. The painting further explores the image of a carved wooden figure I was interested by at the temple complex when I visited in August 2013.
Photo Chong Shan
Photograph, Chong Shan Si, Taiyuan, August 2013
Drawing
Pencil on Postcard, August 2013
Guardian of The South
Chong Shan Guardian of the South, Acrylic and Collage on Canvas, May 2015
The sculpture is one of the Four Heavenly Kings, huge figures that are often represented at Buddhist temples as guardians of the buildings. Zēng Zhǎng Tiānwáng (The King of the South's Chinese name) is the 'one who causes good growth of roots', which seems particularly relevant for a spring painting! He is also ruler of the winds and is associated with the colour blue, which I have tried to emphasise in the work. His symbolic weapon is a sword held in his right hand, that he uses to protect the Dharma (the teachings of the Buddha as an interpretation of the laws of nature in a system designed to reduce suffering.

The concept of allowing the growth of strong roots is one I find interesting and can apply to more than one area of my life at present. It seems especially relevant to this whole series, which is certainly proving to be a 'slow burner' as I evolve my own understanding of it from slight bemusement (Why am I making these?) through questioning the value of them (is this a bit self indulgent?) and now on to recognising that there is an intrinsic value in producing work that people can simply enjoy looking at without trying to address any wider social issues. (If you're not familiar with my older interests, that statement might make more sense if you look at some of the PlaceMaking and This Place Is project work). Of course, there is always slightly more concept than that, even with work that has an obvious aesthetic appeal and I have been interested to watch these pieces pop up almost as elements of visual grammar to punctuate my own changing approaches to life. Learning the purpose of slowing down and taking a little more time over life objectives (letting strong roots form perhaps) has been a key feature of recent months for me whilst questioning our modern, Western, hell-for-leather-must-be-done-yesterday attitudes and how productive that kind of lifestyle can really be in the long term. The slower, seemingly more purposeful, Eastern attitudes I have encountered in my work and leisure travels in recent years are certainly exemplified in the Buddhist imagery I've been using.

CRITshow; May 2013 (thanks to irenasiwiakphoto.co.uk)
It seems The Guardian of the South has been sending the winds of change in other directions too and it was with surprisingly little regret that this week I also made the executive decision to call it a day for CRITgroup, the artists' networking group I have been managing since 2011. Due to changes in various practices, other creative commitments and a myriad of other 'life things', attendance had dropped off recently, and despite  continued verbal expressions of interest, it became clear that the group was no longer providing the same motivation and stimulus for many. We tried changing to a bimonthly schedule but the meetings did not become better attended and I no longer felt the investment of time and energy was generating a sufficient level of return for either my, or anyone else's practice.
In many ways, the initiative has been far more successful than I could have hoped and it feels like a genuine achievement that so many people interacted with and through the meetings. I feel we can take real pride as a group in the many genuinely productive sessions we enjoyed, as well as the high points that were the collaborative projects and the group CRITshow (pictured in the slide show above), 2 years ago in May 2013. I am also incredibly grateful on a personal level to all the speakers who gave their time to share work with us, and to everyone who contributed in other ways, be that through full engagement with a collaborative project, helping out with bits of administration and organisation, or simply providing an interesting opinion. One thing must end for another to begin however, and I'm sure we'll all stay in touch. Who knows, maybe now we've chopped out a bit of creative dead wood, our roots can grow stronger and there will be some new, hardier shoots in the not too distant future.
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A Gentle January

13/1/2015

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Heart Sutra
Heart Sutra, Acrylic on Canvas Board, 2015
It is then with a quiet simplicity that my first post for 2015 shares just one piece; the newly completed Heart Sutra; Go Beyond. This painting is a development from a Peaceful Places photograph of the entrance arch at the 'Big Bell' Buddhist temple in Tamana, Japan, in the summer of 2013. The text on the arch refers (I am reliably told) to the Heart Sutra, one of the most important Buddhist mantras. It is translated by the 14th Dali Lama as “go, go, go beyond, go thoroughly beyond, and establish yourself in enlightenment.”
The painting also includes visual references to designs that feature frequently in surface pattern on Persian textile and ceramic pieces, themselves inspired by Chinese representations of lotus blossoms.
The winter months are, for just about every species of life on planet Earth except humans, months of rest, recovery and rejuvenation; an important opportunity to build strength and resources in order to make the most of the more naturally bountiful seasons. I have been trying to learn from this observation and have attempted to keep my usual expectation to be continuously and both-feet-first into multiple projects in check. This is certainly in keeping with the essence of the Serenity Series, which has become, from apparently nowhere, the main thread of my recent creative practice.
Big Bell Arch
Entrance Arch, Big Bell Temple, Tamana, July 2013
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    Glittermouse has a background in  visual arts and education. You can read more on the 'home' page of this site. 

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