Investigation of something new
A detailed search for a clue
What, why, and when?
Questions grand
Just some things to understand
Our curious minds on these things turn
Driving our instinct to learn
Padre
Investigation
education
Inactivism
With my apologies to Pastor Niemöller I offer you the reasons you should join and be active in your education union:
First they cut the cleaning staff, but I wasn’t on the cleaning staff and things didn’t look too bad, so I said nothing.
Then they reduced the number of catering staff, but I started carrying my own lunch and said nothing.
Then they did away with lab assistants, but that didn’t affect my subject so I said nothing.
Then they increased the responsibilities but not the pay of teaching assistants, but I wasn’t a teaching assistant so said nothing.
Then they came for my pay and conditions and there was no one left to speak out for me.
Padre
Return
All is ready, it’s time to go
To the place with learning to bestow
As normality’s return we undergo
Padre
Summer’s End
It is the last day of academic summer, and preparations for school have begun. The care-free days of the long holiday have now, in a single span of 24 hours seen a sea change. Gone is the casual lounging in the garden, and the months of preparation, delivery, and marking are at hand.
School clothes washed – ironed
Schedules checked, papers arranged
Lesson plans reviewed
Final walk in the garden
Academic year begins
Padre
Colleen has challenged us to try our hand at the tanka prose form. She notes, that “We typically write tanka prose in the 5-7-5-7-7 or a s/l/s/l/l five-line syllabic structure. Tanka prose should contain a title. There is one basic requirement in writing tanka prose: one paragraph, and one tanka.”
Two Blues
A true institution of learning lies
Upon the banks of the Cam
Where great minds let ideas fly
Unlike that place on the River Tham
You know the place presumptious
Where the Oxy-Morons they do grow
Dark blueis the hue they do wear
Not the light blue of us in the know
Padre
School’s Out
It was that moment: the culmination of a dream
School was finally over
And it wasn’t as bad as it had seemed
Padre
“Snow Day”
Holly and Tim booted up their laptop and prepared for another day of online phonics and fractions. As the computer came to life, there was something unusual on the school’s Google Classroom links. As they went through each of their lesson slots they saw that the connection was down. It seems the entire server had crashed – the Covid lockdown equivalent of a “snow day.”
Padre
Distance Learning
Gigi assembled her planners, her calendars, her pens, pouches, and post-its before her on the desk and stood over them like a general surveying maps. Useless, she thought to herself. If she were indeed a general she would have called a retreat. What good was all this stationery in a world of e-Learning?
Pushing it all to one side, she opened her laptop and scrolled to find the tutorials for Google Classroom and Google Forms. She also cleared away some clutter from behind her desk to give a more professional background to Monday’s upcoming “live” lesson. It was going to be a long weekend, and General Gigi now knew how Napoleon must have felt at Waterloo.
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Padre
Distance Learning
Distance learning done at home
A world of knowledge to discover
Though you study alone
Padre
Worlds In Your Hand
It’s time to value your education
Take every opportunity to learn
Remember that things like reading
Are not activities to spurn
For knowledge leads to wisdom
And wisdom helps you to grow
And there will always those around you
That will value the things you know
Remember too that employers
Hold the clever in high demand
And with a little education
You can hold whole worlds in your hand
Padre
Padre's Ramblings 