Daily Prompt – Envelope Pushers

When was the last time you took a risk (big or small), and pushed your own boundaries — socially, professionally, or otherwise? Were you satisfied with the outcome?

I think perhaps the biggest risk I took was when I was going through the audition process for dance / performing arts courses when I was 18.

Daily Prompt – Handle With Care

How are you at receiving criticism? Do you prefer that others treat you with kid gloves, or go for brutal honesty?

Personally speaking, I tend to appreciate both approaches, but generally, I’d much prefer it if you just cut the crap and got to the point.

Daily Prompt – August Blues

As a kid, were you happy or anxious about going back to school? Now that you’re older, how has your attitude toward the end of the summer evolved?

For us here in ‘Straya, the end of August is just that, the end of another month. Oh and the end of winter!

19 Aug – Favourite School Grade

What was your favourite grade in school and why?

 
Generally speaking, I hated school. Kids can be nasty little cunts when they want to be.

Daily Prompt – Edge Of The Frame

We often capture strangers in photos we take in public. Open your photo library, and stop at the first picture that features a person you don’t know. Now tell the story of that person.

He generally introduced himself as Kane, but to his friends, he was Khaneesi. His parents were migrants who came to Australia in the late 90’s when he was a child. They came here fleeing rebels who terrorised, raped and murdered those in their home village, and the villages around them. By moving here, he had an opportunity to do things that you and I take for granted: have a bed to sleep in, a roof over his head; food to eat, and clean water to drink. He got to go to school and get an education, and make friends, and grow up living as an ‘Australian’.

But for some reason, he seems to have forgotten that he’s catching the train to work, and not riding his scooter. Or his arms are just too tired to carry it.

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Daily Prompt – Offside Memories

Team USA is playing today in the soccer World Cup in Brazil. Do you have any funny / harrowing / interesting memories from a sporting event you attended, participated in, or watched?

I. Don’t. Do. Sport.

Apr 15: Don’t Blow Your Cover

Did you ever tell a lie you had to keep repeating in order to not blow your cover?

I remember that when I was in high school, I once got peer-pressured into lying to my Maths teacher to get out of a double-period of maths, to go and work on a drama assessment. Now, the way that our school timetable operated, meant that my senior Drama class was run off-line so rather than having allocated school hours to complete classes, they had to run classes both after school, and during lunch times.

So, this in-turn led to a bit of a problem when we had to work in groups for assessments. Our teachers were made aware of the situation, and were told in advance that at certain times we were to be allowed time off from classes to go and work on our assessments, only if we were up to date with our in-class work and had no outstanding homework / assessments for that particular subject.

Now, I hated Maths, and was regularly having arguments with him about the relevance of whatever we were learning *cough cough trigonometry cough cough Pythagoras cough cough cough*. Yes, yes, I was that kid. The one arguing with the teachers over the relevance of learning pointless information. Looking back, I can just imagine how much they must have hated me. Anyway, that’s besides the point. Where was I…??

Right, so, this one day I told my maths teacher that I wasn’t going to be in class as I was going to work on my drama assessment. I asked for the class handouts, and would hand them in during the next lesson. I didn’t give him a chance to question me, as I took off almost immediately. I did actually meet up with my drama classmates, and we did work on our assessment, but it certainly didn’t take anywhere near as long as initially anticipated.

It was at this point we realised that we now had an easy way to get out of Maths, and nobody would question it.

So every couple of weeks, there would be an upcoming Maths double-period that we just didn’t feel like going to… so instead during recess we all got together and agreed to get out of Maths to work on our ‘drama assessment’ and then meet up behind the Food Tech rooms, and walk off to our friends place down the street, or we’d go for a drive to the local park and just kick back for an hour or so and enjoy a daily break.

Surprisingly, this went on for quite some time… I actually think we managed to get away with it almost three or four times per month, for about 3 months. We thought we had everybody fooled. We were loving it.

One day we all turned up for a lunchtime Drama class, and the class went as per normal. Our teacher got us all to sit down after our warmup theatre-sports game, and everybody was in a good mood and she stood up and addressed the class “So, how’s everybody’s Maths classes going?”

OH. FUCK.

…BUSTED!!

Everybody kinda glanced at each other feeling quite nervous about what was coming.

“It would seem that I’ve been quite the task master, giving everybody so many group assessments to work on…”

…UH OH!!

“…because apparently, all of you have been skipping out on your Maths classes together to work on a string of group assessments. Funny thing is though, I haven’t actually set you any group assessments. So imagine my surprise when I get called in by the PRINCIPAL and questioned about it!!!”

…FUCK. FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK!!!

“But because I am without a doubt the most amazing teacher you ratbags will ever have, instead of dobbing you all in and giving you two weeks of after-school detention, I drew upon my amazing acting skills, and pretended that I knew exactly what he was talking about, and didn’t realise that it would require so much extra work from you all. So I think that you can all just line up and let me bend over so you can all KISS. MY. ARSE. for saving yours!!”

Everybody in the class erupted into laughter, including the teacher… but then she quickly followed up with giving us all lunchtime detention for a week for being a bunch of shits. But she did specify that our detention was going to be spent playing theatre-sports and playing dress-ups, so really, it wasn’t actually a detention at all.

 

Daily Prompt: The New School

You get to redesign school as we know it from the ground up. Will you do away with reading, writing, and arithmetic? What skills and knowledge will your school focus on imparting to young minds?

I wasn’t a fan of school, probably because I was bullied and none of my teachers cared enough to step in or reprimand my tormentors.

If was able to completely redesign school, it would involve a complete overhaul.

I would make english, maths and health the only mandatory subjects, but I would structure it like my senior years in highschool whereby everybody had to pick enough subjects to make up 12 ‘units’. That way, all students would be free to choose the topics that they want to study throughout their high-school years. You wouldn’t be forced to study science, or geography, or history if it didn’t interest you.

There’d be better systems in place to deal with disruptive students and those with learning difficulties… basically I would take everything that was completely wrong with my high school and do the complete opposite so that it would actually function properly…

…and I wouldn’t end up sitting in the back on an English class full of dickheads who think it’s entertaining to throw a pot of glue and bananas at high-speed ceiling fans so they explode all over the class room, and everything, and everyone contained therein.

I wouldn’t force people to learn useless mathematical formulae that will be completely pointless for majority of students once they finish highschool… I’m looking at you trigonometry… You still never told me what x was…

I would have a zero-tolerance approach to bullying. I would have a school counsellor available every day, rather than just once or twice a week.

I would make P.E. mandatory and make it 3-4 times per week. Given that the world is talking about an obesity epidemic, and that it’s a major problem for children and teenagers, I’d be introducing major changes in an attempt to combat this problem. If the school had a tuck-shop / cafeteria, then it would only serve healthy and nutritional foods. There would be no sugar, and either natural sugars, or specific types of sweeteners would be used as subsitutes. We would have a smoothie bar, and nutrition would be a part of the health curriculum, as would healthy cooking classes, in order to give students a better idea of healthier meal choices they could be making and creating on their own.

I would introduce a system whereby every student can have three half-day study leave passes each month. Had a late night and didn’t finish your assingment that’s due tomorrow arvo? That’s okay, use a study leave pass, skip your classes for the morning, spend it in the library and finish your assignment, and pick up your homework from the morning at the same time.

All years would be able to have all homework tasks delivered via email, or school intranet, but all classwork would require to be handwritten. Only essays and assignments will be allowed to be typed, in order to provide a focus on creating humans with legible handwriting. For those with illegible handwriting, they would be required to make it part of their core English subjects.

There would be better behaviour management systems in place to remove disruptive, unsettled and delinquent students from the classroom to allow them more one-to-one attention, counselling and testing.

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