66. Thelma's Story

I would have been 6 at the time. I must say, I don’t remember a lot. I do remember thinking it very strange that my dad was driving Uncle Garrie’s and Aunty Linda’s car. And I remember being all dressed up and being told we were going somewhere very special. Looking back, I think Uncle Garrie was just too excited to drive, and that was why my father drove the car. All I can remember of the drive was seeing the trams, and the tram lines and the overhead electric wires … And we came to this place, it was a big two storeyed building, like a hospital, and inside there were lots and lots of babies in all the rooms… lots of babies. And Uncle Garrie and Anty Linda had come to choose a baby to take home. As I said, I was only six. Maybe I thought that that was how families got babies – they went to a hospital and picked them up. Birth and sex and all of those things were not out in the open as they are today. I don’t remember exactly when I was told about your being adopted. I just remember that Mum called us all inside one day – Val, my sister, and Ray, my brother, and me – and we were told that you were adopted, and we were sworn to secrecy, and told that we must never, ever tell anybody, or talk about it. So we didn’t. That’s how it was in those days. If you’re parents told you not to mention something, you didn’t. So it was never mentioned. You were our cousin, and that was that. We didn’t think of you any differently from the way we thought about our other cousins – Lynette and Faye. That’s how Thelma tells the story. I wonder, though. It’s true, though. It was never mentioned – at least not in my presence. Not once, during the first 66 years and 50 days of my life. Not until I was almost an old man. And yet I did feel an outsider. Not quite accepted, not quite included. My mother felt it too, I think. I’m not sure if it was that she felt excluded because she had only one child, or because that child wasn’t quite accepted by the extended family. But then, there is an orphan in all us. We all feel excluded at times, orphaned, not quite wanted. We stand around on the edges of the circle, desperately hoping someone will invite us to join in. We feel slights – the parties we aren’t invited to attend, the way people turn their heads away when we are halfway through a story – distracted easily, not attending to us, because we don’t quite measure up. We look at other families whose lives seem so much more interesting than our own. So we sulk, and feel sorry for ourselves; or we stamp our feet, and demand attention; or we show off so that others will notice us; or we pretend we are ill; or we save injured birds or stray cats because we ourselves are injured, or strays; or we become angry with the world, and act out our misery, and make them pay for the pain that life has inflicted on us. As for me, I’ve done all of those in my time. Mostly, though, I’ve chosen a few well worn strategies. I’ve spent a lot of time, up on the high board, attempting dives at the very limits of difficulty. I’ve also spent lots of time looking to re-create Eden, a Utopian community wherein I have my place. And like all of we sad and sorry humans, I’ve longed for – and at times found – a sustaining intimacy with another.

65. Barry, 3 months

The inscription of the back of the photograph reads ‘Barry, 3 months’. In all likelihood the photograph was taken on Saturday, September 11, 1943. There are two people in the photo itself. The man was in his 38th year at the time. He is dressed for a special occasion; he is wearing his Sunday Best suit. Most people would guess that he came from an Italian background; there’s something about his build, his face, his suit and tie that suggest this.

He looks a little uncomfortable. Ill at ease. Perhaps it is in part because this simple man feels out of place in a suit. He is an unskilled labourer who left school at the age of 14, in 1919, unable to read or write. For years he had been ‘kept down’. When he left St. Fidelis Catholic school in 1919 he was still in Grade 5. That must have been a heavy burden to bear, being 14 and illiterate, and surrounded by 10 and 11 year old who could both read and write. In September 1943 Australia was at war, but this man had been deemed unsuitable for service in the army, because of his flat feet. He was working, at the time, at Davis and Coop, a brick works in Brunswick . A year or so later he would change jobs, move to a factory in Macauley, a rabbit works, where he would spend his days gutting and skinning rabbits.

Working class men, like him, unskilled and poorly educated, rarely wore suits. Suits came out of the wardrobe for special occasions: weddings, funerals, baptisms, confirmations, church on Sunday. And when they did, they smelt of moth balls. But he was not one for church on Sunday.

Nor was his older brother, Arthur, who held radical views, who was a socialist – and possibly a communist, though he denied it in his later years. He was a street orator in the war years, railing against conscription on street corners in the city of Melbourne and on the Yarra bank. Arthur – or Arturo, as he was named at birth - had also left school at 14, but was self educated, widely read in the works of Marx and Engels and Lenin, a man who spent the Saturday afternoons of his adolescent years in the aisles of Coles Book Arcade in the City of Melbourne, reading economics and literature and politics texts. Arthur was an avowed atheist, and his younger brother – the man in the photo – was a lapsed Catholic.

Unlike Ina, their younger sister, who never missed Mass, and who prayed two and three times a day, for an hour at a time, fingering her rosary beads and muttering ‘Hail Mary, mother of God, full of grace …’

The man in the photo holding the baby is Herbert Garibaldi Carozzi, son of Annibale Carozzi, an Italian jeweller and linguist who migrated to Australia via Berlin and London in the mid-late 1880s. Annibale met, and later married, Caterina Mazza. Caterina was the daughter of Gianni Mazza who had left his native city of Genoa, in northern Italy, in the early 1860s to travel to the Victorian goldfields, there to make his fortune. Or not, as it turned out.

He married a girl who had been born in Daylesford in 1852, a girl named Margaret Burnside. Margaret’s mother was Mary O’Leary, an Irish orphan girl from County Cork, who had been sent to the colony by the Catholic nuns during the worst Potato Famine in Ireland’s sorry history.

The 17 year old Mary O’Leary met 32 year old Alexander Burnside – Sandy as he was known – in Willaura in South Australia. Sandy was a wayward Scot, the son of a Glasgow doctor; he was an alcoholic ne’er-do-well who was said to drink half a pint of whisky a day, and who died of alcoholic debilitation at the age of 64, and laid to rest in the Presbyterian section of the Daylesford cemetery, beneath an imposing headstone. Mary outlasted him by 20 years or more, but lies buried in an unmarked grave in the Catholic section, with two other dead Catholics.

As Alexander approached death, so the story goes, Mary said to him, ‘Will you be buried in Catholic ground?’

‘No!’ he said. ‘I will lie at rest in Presbyterian soil.’

‘Then you shall sleep alone through eternity,’ Mary told him.

And so it was, and is. Their graves are 100 metres apart, separated in death – as in life – by their religious prejudices. And now by tons of dark, rich cemetery soil.

So Herbert was their grandson, and Annibale’s and Caterina’s son. He was born and raised and lived his whole life in Coburg and died there in 1989. In this photo, taken on September 11, 1943, he is smiling; but nervously, and looks ill at ease. Perhaps it is the suit, but I sense it is something more. He is holding his three month old son, but there is something not quite right; he looks uncomfortable, unpractised, as though he is unused to this business of holding a baby.

Nonetheless there is no doubting the simple joy, the happiness of this moment, for Herbert Garrie. He’s happy – no question. But look closely at the baby. Its eyes are wide, its mouth is open, and its look is one of … of what? Fear? Bewilderment? Or perhaps I am reading all of this into the photograph, spinning a story – as we are prone to do, we humans – from the flimsiest of information. Taking that trite old saying, that a ‘picture is worth a thousand words’, and romancing – getting carried away with the story. Extemporising. Seeing discomfort in the demeanour of the father, bewilderment – perhaps fear – in the eyes and facial expressions of the child.

How much can we glean from a single photograph, a snapshot. It is a long gone moment, this moment captured on light-sensitive celluloid sixty – almost seventy - year ago. Cameras don’t lie, they say; but they are not necessarily right. In this moment – it may have lasted for one-fiftieth of a second - the child seems to look confused, the father uncomfortable; but it may all be a trick of the eye, no more than a random moment in a day otherwise full of easy joy and happy smiles …

The photo ‘tells’ us little. It is the story teller who spins the yarn, who builds the narrative, who interprets the scene and makes of it what he will. It is the story teller who blends his knowledge of the back stories of these two ‘dramatis personae’ with the features of the photograph, to begin to tell the story of Barry, at three months, and the father, Herbert Garibaldi Carozzi – known variously as Garrie, Herbie, Uncle Garrie, Dad.

I’ve had that photograph since the late 1980s or early 1990s. Garrie died in 1989; his wife, Linda, in 1991. I found it in Linda’s glory box when I was cleaning out their house at 82 Reynard Street, Coburg, where they had lived since their marriage in 1936. I placed the photo in an album, to keep it as a relic. A sacred enough object. Yet I did not notice the inscription – ‘Barry, 3 months’ until sometime in mid-late September, 2009 – 66 years after the photo was originally taken.

Linda and Garrie were my mother and father. I lived with them all through my childhood, from 1943 until 1969, when I married. Linda Robina May Kipping was born on October 26, 1907, in Casterton in the Western District of Victoria. She lived in Hamilton for most of her childhood with Pop and Gran: William Charles Kipping, my grandfather, and Edith Kipping (nee Davis), my grandmother. Linda left Hamilton some time in the mid-late 1920s, and came to live in Melbourne, where she worked for ‘French, the dentist’ as a housekeeper and cook, and helped raise their two boys: Vincent and Ronnie, both of whom carried on the family business and themselves became dentists.

Linda was 29 and Garrie 31 when they married in 1936. I was born 7 years later. In the intervening years Linda had had several miscarriages and had given birth to a still born boy child, in 1941. The photo inscribed ‘Barry, 3 months’ is – to my knowledge – the earliest photograph of me, and the only one taken in my first year of life.

When I first noted the inscription, it was September 2009, 66 years after the photo was taken – almost to the day. At a time when those three words had suddenly become burdened with an almost unbearable weight of meaning. For in mid September 2009 the incredible significance of that simple inscription became explosively apparent.

It arrived like a message in a bottle, a scrap of information placed inside a bottle and thrown into the sea years before, and now amazingly washed ashore. What was it Eliot wrote?

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

The message, written in code, could now be decoded, and the world could never be quite the same – not for this little pebble on the beach, not for this little 3 month old babe, who 66 years on stares at this image of himself, and sees a stranger – a bewildered, fearful infant, held in the uncertain arms of a simple and loving man who felt, at that moment, out of his depth, not knowing quite how you do hold a child so young. Happy beyond measure, but overcome by the responsibility. And on that day in September, the bewilderment in my three month old eyes mirrored the sudden bewilderment in which I found myself at 66.

64. A Teacher's Reflective Journal 4: a week is in long time in teaching

Love letters

It's Saturday afternoon. I've just woken from a short nap. It's been a tiring week. So far today I have read and commented on around six Year 12 SACs. Each SAC takes around 30 - 45 minutes to 'process'. I remember how impatient I used to be with correction, how I would put it off for as long as I could. Teaching writing in the TAFE Professional Writing course cured me of that.

I think that I'm clearer now about what to do, how to respond, the kinds of things to comment on. Many English teachers resent the hours and hours spent in reading and responding to what the students write. It is THE perennial topic for the English teacher's complaint. We compare the assessment load in English with - say - Maths and can see - well, there's no real comparison. Correcting a page of sums is not unlike correcting a spelling test.

We need to do what they do with diving - designate a difficulty level [DL] for the various types of correction - on a 5 point scale.

Jump into the pool from the edge and make a splash DL 0.1 [That's marking a 50 word Spelling test]

Do a swallow dive, with a twisting triple somersualt, plus pike DL 4.95. [That's the Year 12 SAC: an 800 - 1500 word essay, with six marking criteria]

Yes, it's not fair that we spend so many of our weekends reading our students' work and writing our notes to them. Yes, there ought to be some recognition of the DL - and the size -of the English teacher's assesssment load. But the other side of it is this: what an opportunity! My year 12 have done pretty well on their Reading their SACs. The shortest is around 700 words; some are as many as 1500.

We've been studying David Malouf's novel Ransom. It's hard work - a retelling of a single scene from Homer's The Iliad: Priam's ransom of Hector's body. We started the year looking at the opening 20 minute from Dead Poets' Society: the start of the new school year, the pomp and ceremony, the arrival of John Keating, the charismatic teacher pl;ayed by charismatic actor Robin Williams. The scene in which Keating takes his boys to the glass cabinets in the school foyer, where the honour boards and old photos are housed. Pitt reads:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may

For summer is aflying

And that sweet rose that blooms today

Tomorrow ill be dying

Keating points to the photos: "A hundred years ago they were like you are today ... but they are now food for worms... It's hard to believe it, but one day we too will stop breathing, become cold and die... Carpe Deim - Seize the day, boys - make your lives extraordinary."

Ransom took us into similar territory ... death and meaning in life... being yourself ... or constantly wearing a mask ... becoming human ... being a father, a son ... being a mother ... being a grandfather ... what matters in this life ... Ransom is hard work. But I can see, in their responses to the SAC, that many of my students have been thinking about Priam and Achilles and Hecuba and Somax - the central characters of the novel. And they have been thinking about themselves. Literature touches on the personal in ways that Quadradic equations and theorems in geometry and scientific experiments and Legal Studies generally do not.

My friend Misha, in a comment on one of my earlier reflections on teaching reminded me of how carefully we need to move, as teachers, when in this minefield of the personal: Personalised writing was something I remember from your writing class and even I found it to be quite confronting.... Sometimes the class felt more like a group therapy session than a writing class - no offence. It is difficult, especially for teenagers to reveal their innermost thoughts and feelings to their peers or to anyone for that matter - especially teenage boys. I did grow to love the personal element of your class, but only as I grew older and became more confident and self assured. Her comment - 'No Offence' - is unnecessary. I'm not offended; but it raises the moral dilemma of where the line is drawn. Literature provides the safe ground, I think. [Though, of course, no ground is really safe...] All of which is something that might be worth pursuing in a later blog. I don't have time for it right now; I still have five SACs to complete.

63. A Teacher's Reflective Journal

El Blog de Steve is a blog by an American teacher that I came across on a blogspot forum. I've included the link in case you want to read Steve's blog in full. Steve writes of two instances of teachers finding themselves in hot water. One teacher was stood down because she refused to remove a sticker from her bumper bar. The blog reads:

“Have you drugged your kid today”–a reference to Ritalin and similar drugs used to calm kids down due to ADD and ADHD. This particular bumper sticker upset some parents, and the school administration (it is a public school) asked her either remove that sticker or not park in the school parking lot. She refused to do either, and she got fired.

The other item concerned a teacher whose blog comments concerned how poorly behaved her students were. She too was discipline.

Here's the link:

http://www.theblogfarm.com/syndicated-blog/teacher-fired-over-bumper-sticker/

The situations got me thinking, so I wrote back to Steve:

Like you I’m a teacher and blogger – though I’m not as prolific as you. I try to manage a blog a week – but I don’t always manage it. I’m a full time at English teacher at an Asutralian secondary school, and 2011 has been a terrific year for me.

The bumper sticker story reminds me of my youthful days as a teacher. In 1970 the rear window of my Ford Anglia displayed a small sticker: Stop the Vietnam War Now. I was attending a meeting at an inner city school in Melbourne (capital of Victoria in the south of Australia) and was ordered by the school’s principal to “remove that car with the offensive sticker” from the car park.The politics of teaching are invariably complex. In Australia government school teachers are employed by a central authority. There are school councils, but they do not have the power to “hire and fire”.

The expression of opinion – especially if it is on a controversial topic – can be tricky. I recall the case of a young feminist teacher, working in the government system, who rang a shock jock from a school phone to express the opinion – on air – that the age of sexual consent should be lowered to 12. The radio commentator heard the school bell ring, realised that he had a great potential “story” and tracked the teacher down. She was suspended from teaching, and spent years hidden away in a clerical job in the Education Department.

She was fortunate not to be sacked; you can imagine the kind of campaign that was waged by the radio station, and the kind of red-neck opinions that emerged.“Do we want people like this teaching our children?”

In such ways do bureaucracies silence dissident voices. Or the voices of those who are brave or stupid or idealistic or naive enough to think that ‘freedom of speech’ extends to teachers. I love teaching; this is my 47th year in the game. I love writing about teaching on my blog, and enjoy the conversations that some of my blogs contribute to. But I am very wary when writing about colleagues, or my school, or my students.

During the Second World war, the British had a slogan that illustrated their extreme caution: “Loose lips sink ships”. Current affairs radio is NOT the place to air controversial opinions about sex if you are identifiable as a teacher. Unless, of course, you are willing to accept the tsunami of conservative wrath that your comments will almost certainly unleash.

There’s a great line that occurs in Peter Weir’s film WITNESS (starring Harrison Ford, who plays the part of police officer John Book. Book is a good guy, in hiding from the bad guys – cops who have gone off the rails). The line is spoken by the old patriarch in the Amish village where Book has been cared for. The old man says: “Book – you be careful out there, among them English.”

It’s advice from which we could all benefit: Be careful what you say; be careful among ‘them English’.

62. Dreams and unexpected meetings: March 26, 2011

In December of 2010, I attended the VATE conference where I met one of my heroes: Catherine Deveny. I attended her Master Class on writing. After the session, we chatted - and it was great fun. She grabbed someone and asked them to take a photo of us together; she sent me a copy the next day. For anyone having trouble working out who is who, I'm the taller of the two, and I'm NOT in the white and red floral dress. Catherine, on the other hand, is the one NOT wearing a lanyard and name tag.

I hunted out this photo because I ran into Catherine Deveny at the Teachers' Union building in Collingwood yesterday. [I'd been meaning to add the picture to my blog for ages, but of course hadn't got around to it.] Catherine was at the AEU to run a workshop at a pre-school and primary teachers' conference. I was too; it was in fact the "launch" of The Music Cubby - my latest musical/publishing venture. I'm really pleased with the way the book - and the CD - have turned out.

Nicked out - as is my wont - at 7:15 this morning, and went down to Alta Vita in Eltham for a croissant and coffee and to spend a half hour or so on my Saturday morning obsession: the sudoku. I also contemplated this morning's dream.

The setting was a holiday resort - somewhere like a cross between Apollo Bay and the Gold Coast. Karin and I were eating breakfast and watching the astonishing surf on the nearby beach. The waves were mountainous, and the surfers were out in force. [This is maybe an echo of the novel my year 8 class are reading: Lockie Leonard Scumbuster. It includes a scene in which Lockie, who is a real grommet, is dumped by gigantic waves at Angelus Beach. It may also be an echo of the recent tsunami in Japan.]

My coffee wasn't quite sweet enough - in my dream, that is - not at Alta Vita - so I had to go down to the counter for more sugar. I knew that Floss Mildenhall - an old friend who I've barely seen in the past 3 years - had gone out to surf. As I reached the counter, the comedy/musical duo - the Scared Little Weird Guys - were arriving. In the dream I looked down at these two fellows who were only about three feet tall. One of them - Rusty - had a bald head, a pale shiny complexion and was very thin; he smiled up at me and said 'Hello'.

As I turned to return to my table, up on the mezzanine floor of the coffee bar - a freak wave broke, and the waters surged across the street and into the coffee bar. It wasn't dangerous - just wet around our feet and knees.

And that was the dream. Weird, eh?

I'd listened to the Scared Little Weird Guys on the 774 radio as I drove home from the workshop yesterday.

61. MY READING LIFE 8 On Smartarses

How many wives DID Henry VIII have?
How certain can we be about what we know?

Few could equal the quiz king Barry Jones in terms of general knowledge. When Bob and Dolly Dyer were radio royalty, back in the 1950s, with their hugely popular quiz program Pick- a-Box, Barry Jones was the unchallenged champion. His appetite for detailed information seemed unquenchable; no matter what the topic Barry not only had all the answers, he could explain - sometimes at astonishing length - the background, the details, the nuances.

Dickens’ famous teacher, Thomas Gradgrind [has there ever been a better name than that for a pedantic pedagogue?] saw his students a row upon row of little pitchers into which he would pour knowledge. ‘Facts, facts, facts’ was his catch-cry. And Barry Jones had them, in abundance.
It seemed that Barry Jones knew almost everything. But he was never a ”know –all”. Know-alls pretend that they know it all – they lack humility; they force their “knowledge” on you; indeed, they rub your nose in your ignorance. What impressed you about Barry Jones was the absence of hubris.

I detect a similar quality in the American writer Bill Bryson. What impressed me about his Short History of Almost Everything was not just the breadth of his research and the clarity of his account; it was the sense that here was mind that was simply enthralled by what it was discovering about the world. It was the sense of curiosity about and deep interest in whatever topic or idea or scientist of finding that he was currently exploring. Like a little awe-struck kid saying, ‘Hey – look at THIS!’

Bryson is also terrific at finding the fascinating detail, the telling fact, the clarifying analogy.

Know-alls, smart arses, clever dicks – as I’ve suggested – are not like this at all. It is Bryson’s style is to say, ‘Look at THIS’; the smartarse’s script is , ‘Look at ME. Look at what I know.’
There’s a comedy sketch embedded in my memory that featured English comedian Kenneth Williams as a man full of facts. He sits on a park bench and tries engages the Straight man in conversation.

‘Did you know there are more than 80 mkiles of tubing in your body?’
‘No, I didn’t know that,’ says the Straight Man.
‘Oh yes – 80 miles .. It’s hard to credit, isn’t it. But it’s true. If you laid out all the tubing in your body in a line, it would be 80 miles long.’
And so he goes on, telling the increasingly uncomfortable Straight man more and more “fascinating” facts. The Straight Man tries to leave, but the Williams character is insistent.
‘Did you know …’
Eventually, in his efforts to keep the Straight man’s attention, Williams tells the story of how, during the war, he was to be England’s secret weapon. They were going to parachute him in, behind enemy lines, where he would bore the Germans to death….
The story is ‘the end’ for the Straight Man, and he walks off, Saying, ‘Well – I’m not surprised! You are the most boring person I’ve ever met!’ and leaving Williams by himself, calling after him …
‘It was a joke … It’s not true … it’s only a joke …’
I always recall the deep sadness in William’s voice as The Straight Man walked away, and the plaintiveness of this lonely human being, desperate for somebody’s attention, anybody’s…
“It’s not true … it’s only a joke … only a joke.’

There’s a sizable lexicon for that unpopular condition of being a smartarse – that is, a conceited person, somebody who makes an annoying show of knowing something or of being cleverer than others.

The lexicon: Know-it-all, smartarse, clever Dick, smarty, big head, know all, smarty pants, clever clogs, smart Alec, clever drawers, wise-acre, wise guy, big noter, smarty boots, clever shins.

The Danes word for it is bezzerwizzer; they’ve even invented a variation of the game Trivial Pursuit especially for bezzerwizzers (or smartarses).

So, as you can see, it doesn’t pay to be too sure of your own cleverness; it’s not cool to be a person who is regarded as being arrogant or ostentatiously clever. As the old saying goes: ‘Nobody likes a smartarse’; so make sure you don’t get ‘too big for your boots’. I felt more than a tinge of national pride when I discovered that the word smartarse had its origins in Australia, in the late 19th or early 20th century. Proud but not surprised. We’ve never had much time for bulldust – or for bullshit artists!

[Aside:

Q. What do you call a man with no arms and no legs who can swim 100 metres?
A. Clever Dick.]

All of this arose out of a purchase I made just this week, of a book entitled The Book of General Ignorance, by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson, published by Faber & Faber, and selling for a just under $20. The blurb suggests that this is a book designed for the smartarse market. It reads, in part: ‘Carry it everywhere to impress your friends, frustrate your enemies and win every argument.’

Its subtitle is perhaps a little grandiose: ‘Everything you think you know is wrong’. And the book sets out to prove this contention. It is (again quoting the blurb) a ‘ comprehensive catalogue of all the misconceptions, mistakes and misunderstandings in “common knowledge”. But grandiose or not, it's a great read!

Test yourself on the following. What is the first answer that comes into your head?

1. Henry VIII had SIX wives
2. What is the tallest mountain in the world?
3. What is the biggest thing a blue whale can swallow: a large mushroom, a small car, a grapefruit, a sailor?
4. For how long can a chicken live without its head?
5. How many galaxies are visible to the naked eye?
6. What man-made artifact can be seen from the moon?
7. Who introduced tobacco and potatoes to England?
8. Who invented champagne?
9. Where and when was the guillotine invented?
10. Which of the following are Chinese inventions: glass, rickshaws, chop suey, fortune cookies?

If you are like me, and responded with what common sense dictates, or according to what we usually call common knowledge, your answers would have been as follows:

1. Henry VIII had how many wives? Six
2. What is the tallest mountain in the world? Mt Everest
3. What is the biggest thing a blue whale can swallow: a large mushroom, a small car, a grapefruit, a sailor? A sailor
4. For how long can a chicken live without its head? A few seconds, or a few minutes
5. How many galaxies are visible to the naked eye?

Uncountable there are so many
6. What man-made artifact can be seen from the moon? The Great Wall of China
7. Who introduced tobacco and potatoes to England? Sir Walter Raleigh
8. Who invented champagne? The French
9. Where and when was the guillotine invented? The French at the time of the Revolution – i.e. the 1790s.
10. Which of the following are Chinese inventions: glass, rickshaws, chop suey, fortune cookies?
All of them

If you agreed with my ‘off top of the head’ answers, you – like me – would have scored ZERO – nil – nought – not a sausage!

How come?

Well, for starters: If a marriage is annulled, the slate is wiped clean – the marriage is regarded as never having happened. Two of Henry’s marriages were annulled, so we’re down to four. The Pope refused to recognize his marriage to Ann Boleyn … The score at this stage is: Smartarses 1, the Rest of the World (that’s you and me) zero.

Mt Everest is the tallest mountain measure from sea level; but Mt Mauna Kea is 10.2 kilometres from seabed to summit, and is around 1.3 kilometres taller than Everest. Whales can swallow a grapefruit, but not a human. All you Fundamentalists out there – don’t be dismayed. I know it looks like a whale COULDN’T have swallowed Jonah. But you guys are so good at ignore the findings of Science, you’re sure to come up with some explanation that will prove that it COULD happen. What about: God can perform any miracle he chooses. Yeah, that should do the trick!
When I was a kid I saw – with my own eyes – the spectacle of a beheaded chicken running around the back yard, splashing blood everywhere, before collapsing to the ground. But two years? Can it be true? According to Lloyd and Mitchinson, it IS true! If you don’t believe me, go read pages 9-10!

Now – about galaxies. I’ve always thought that a lot of those blurry lights were either stars or galaxies. Turns out folk in the Southern Hemisphere can see only TWO. But with telescopes … we can see back to almost the beginning of time …

By this stage the Smartarses have established an almost unassailable lead: Five to NIL. I’m beginning to recognize that I have taken a lot of what passes for common knowledge on trust. I must admit, I AM gullible. A friend sent me an email recently, telling me to watch the night sky on Aug. 28. On that date, the planet Mars would be the closest its orbit ever brings it to the earth. Why, at 11.40 pm that night, I would see two objects – the moon and Mars – side by side. Mars would be only slightly the smaller of the two, and would have a pinkish tinge. I told my Year 9 class to watch. Many of them did. The next day, they were not happy campers. Turns out it was a hoax. Not only that, it was a hoax on its second or third cycle through the Internet.

What man-made artifact can be seen from the moon? I know that one: it’s the Great Wall of China – I was almost certain. But no, I was wrong again. From the moon, no man made ‘artifacts’ can be observed. The Great wall CAN be seem from 100 kilometres up – outside our atmosphere, and IN space. But NOT, definitely NOT from the moon!

Tobacco was smoked by English sailors four years before Raleigh was born. Potatoes were introduced from Spain long before Raleigh planted some in his garden. The English, not the French, invented champagne; in addition they beat the French to the invention of the guillotine by about 400 or so years. [As an interesting aside: when was the guillotine last used for an execution in France?

Please choose one of the following: 1799 1826 1854 1911 1977.

The trick is: choose the LEAST likely answer, the one that you think can’t possibly be true. I’ll let that one slosh around in that warm-wet-grey computer/cluster of cells called your brain for a little.]

As to rickshaws, chop suey, fortune cookies and glass … I knew the answer to this, I was sure. China. What could more Chinese than the rickshaw – or the fortune cookie. I’ve eaten Yum Chas – they always have fortune cookies at a Yum Cha! Had to be China. So – all of them were invented in China. That’s my answer.

Once again the Smartarses came out on top. I was right about Chop Suey – it IS a Chinese invention. But the Egyptians beat the Chinese by about a thousand years to the invention of glass. An American missionary named Jonathan Scobie invented the rickshaw; he used it to wheel his invalid wife around the streets of Yokahama in Japan in 1869. And a Japanese- American created the fortune cookie.

It seems that so much that we regard as common knowledge isn’t quite as solidly based as we thought. And at one level, does it matter? Does it matter that our trust in THE FACTS may not be as firmly based as we imagine it to be? Probably not. But there’s no harm in being reminded that we can be wrong. It may cure us of our tendency toward dogmatism. It may make us a little more critical, a little more questioning of what is put before us as ‘truth’ or as ‘facts’.
We are surrounded by ‘misconceptions, mistakes and misunderstandings’. And when I think about it, it DOES matter. I’m grateful to Lloyd and Mitchinson for straightening me out and correcting me. It’s good for my soul to be proven wrong. Or worse – proven to be too uncritical, too ready to accept whatever I am told, whatever passes as ‘common knowledge’. If I’m going to know stuff, we’re all better off if what I know is true – and not just someone’s misconception.
And just to round things off: the answer is 1977. Yes, the last execution in France using Madame la Guillotine took place in 1977. The death penalty was abolished in France in 1981.
Makes you think, doesn’t it.

60. A Teacher’s Reflective Journal 2

February 13 2011


I am a teacher at heart, and there are moments in the classroom when I can hardly hold the joy.

Today is Sunday, and I’ve been at the computer since 9 am preparing handouts and lessons for next week, writing letters in response to the letters students have written to me. I’m on a roll; I’m in flow – that state of mind, that state of being, when this flow – when you are ‘in the zone’, when ‘everything flows’.

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. And at the moment, I am in love with teaching; I can “hardly hold the joy.” On Thursday, my double session with Year 12 was one of those positive moments. They are moments to savour.

I stayed up late last night and watched the English Premier League soccer – the Manchester Derby: Manchester United V Manchester City - and witnessed a moment of athletic genius. Wayne Rooney, most observers agree, has had an ordinary season; he hasn’t scored a lot of goals. He’s been workmanlike, but hasn’t produced the kind of play that marked him as one of the most skillful strikers in English soccer. But late in the game, with the score at 1:1, Rooney produced an astonishing goal. The Man U player Ryan Giggs sent a high pass into the penalty area. Rooney launched himself high in the air, his body horizontal to the ground, and from 15 or 20 metres out, put the ball in the back corner of the net with a scissor kick. In jubilation he ran to the corner, raised his arms, and arched his back, and looked into the sky. His whole body was a statement, and what his action communicated was: “THAT is what I am capable of”.

His action spoke louder and more clearly than any words. The Australian reported Rooney as saying, later:
"I think it's the best goal I've ever scored, I saw it coming over and I thought, 'why not hit it? …It's the first overhead kick I've scored since school."

Ferguson saluted Rooney's winner as the best he had ever seen at Old Trafford.
"It was stunning," he said. "We've had some fantastic goals here - Rooney hit a volley against Newcastle some years ago - but in terms of execution you'll never see that."

There are moments … when I can hardly hold the joy. They are moments to savour – for all of us.

On Thursday, I felt like that. But as Parker Palmer writes in The courage to Teach:
…at other moments, the classroom is so lifeless or painful or confused – and I am so powerless to do anything about it – that my claim to be a teacher seems a transparent sham.

Friday morning, February 11, 2011. The day was disrupted: 20 teachers involved in a Restorative Practices PD; the kids viewing a motivational program in groups of around 200 in the Theatre. Year 7 & 8 were in the Theatre 1 & 2. I normally teach 8.3 in period 2, so I went in to help supervise, But Glennis and Steve – principal and Assistant principal – had everything under control. I grabbed a coffee from the staff room and retreated to my office to clear some of the backlog of paperwork, and to do some writing about curriculum. I was on track, focused. Two free periods in a row, I thought; a great opportunity to get a pile of work done.

I barely heard the bell for period 3; I was on song, churning out the words. Ten or twelve minutes later, over the PA came the following message:

“Mr. Carozzi. Could you go to C56 please.”

8.3. I should be teaching them in C56. I have them period THREE, NOT period TWO!

I felt that sinking feeling in my bowels and in my spirit – not unlike the utter dread that overtakes you when you spot a police car right behind you and he starts signaling for you to pull over.

I had worked hard to make my first weeks of teaching the best they could be. I’d spent almost two weeks in the school over the break shifting offices, organizing my new room, preparing resources and lesson plans. I was redefining myself as a teacher, working hard to create the optimum teaching/learning environment.
And now this! I cursed myself, cursed my disorganization, cursed the shambolic state of my being … I flailed about, mentally, trying to find a scapegoat for this
… mistake.

I had no trouble finding them: the disruptions to the day; having an extra period one; having to introduce the PD speaker as well; if the school had organized a working phone for my new office, I could have been spared the oh so public humiliation and embarrassment; they’re expecting too much of me; I have too many things running through my head. And of course: it’s a seniors’ moment, I’m getting too old for this caper.

And of course: this is my lot in life, being so often up on the high tower, surrounded by some people who are willing to make allowances, and some who are just waiting for me to fall – indeed, hoping I would!

At such moments, as Palmer puts it, my claim to be a teacher seems a transparent sham.
I thank the universe for Sheldon Kopp’s Laundry List, his 43 epigrams about how to live your life. The 43rd admonition on his list is:

‘Be prepared to forgive yourself again,

and again and again.”

I apologized to the class, settled them down, apologized again, and we settled to writing. It turned out not a bad lesson – albeit 15 or 20 minutes shorter that it should have been.