VT2012

Hello again. Remember me? Thought so.

I’m back at work which means I’m back at messed up body clock. I think the last time I went to bed at 8pm was when I was about five years old. Even then, it probably wasn’t without a fight. Commuting to work is quite fun. Especially as there are a lot of familiar faces on the 06:52 to Simrishamn.

It’s so strange, I recognise these people, I know their routines (on the train), but I know nothing about them, not even their names. In a way it’s quite amusing. In another way it’s quite annoying – you sort of feel obliged to say “good morning” but then remember that doing so would defy a million and one social conventions – especially as we all sit in the silent carriage.

I know I shouldn’t really blog too much about my job, but it is, quite frankly, a rather nice job. Like all forms of employment it has its up days and its down days, but I’m plodding through nicely. I have finally got to know a lot of my students (ok, so there are still a lot of names I need to learn…) which is making things easier for me when it comes to planning.

I’ve also been given a huge dollop of responsibility for my plate – an extra German class and even worse, my “own” little mentor class. I do love my little mentor class, but I don’t love the workload that comes with it. I’m still trying to get myself organised. As well as all the lessons, I have to, keep track of my mentor group’s attendence, private lives, academic progress, I have to get in touch with parents, I have parents getting in touch with me… and soon I’ll be having performance review type things with my students and their parents.

The worst thing about it all? I don’t get any more money for my troubles!

Anyway, the time is now 06:59 and I have a laundry time booked for 7. Isn’t my life just a barrel of laughs?

Twelve for 2012

I’m not quite sure whether last night was a celebration of the year just gone, or the year about to arrive. Either way it was one of the most phenomenal NYE celebrations thus far. 2011 was a great year, so 2012 has a lot to live up to.

I’m not big on New Year’s Resolutions, but I am a big fan of to-do lists. So this year, I will set a to-do list of 12 things to accomplish/do/own before midnight 01.01.2013.

1. The Macbook Pro. I shall own one.

2. A grown-up stock market investment savings thing. 2012 is the year I turn 25 so probably the year I should start doing “adult” things with my money. Not that there’s anything un-adult about buying stuff.

3. Go back to Uni. Get onto some form of pedagogy course so I can become a certified teacher here in Sweden.

4. Travel to some place I have never been before.

5. Make more of an effort to stay in touch with all of my friends from university/school. I say this all the time, but I really am so lazy. They’re too good to let slip away. There is more to friendship than Facebook.

6. Be a better vegetarian. I am quite conscientious, but some things slip through the net. Last night, for example, I ate fish. As a result of which, I feel terrible. It tasted so good, but the guilt is so strong.

7. Take more risks. I need to step outside my comfort zones. When I took risks in 2011, they led to great things. Though admittedly they were calculated risks…

8. Spend more time being a good Big Sister to E. Every time we meet I realise just how similar we both are. I want to make sure he makes the right choices and doesn’t make the same mistakes I made. I want him to aspire to great things, a great education and great adolescence.

9. Read more. Do you know the amount of fiction books I read for pleasure – and completed – in 2011? Zero. Not one single sausage. This is shameful. I will try to read at least one new book each month. Perhaps I should jump on the Kindle bandwagon?

10. Be kind to stupid people. Rather than get worked up and become angry when people say uneducated things, I shall instead feel sorry for them. I shall be kind to them, rather than try to explain the other side of the argument. There is no point.

11. Grow my hair until it drives me bonkers. Then cut it all off and donate it to charity.

12. Try a new beer each week.

Gott nytt år, happy new year, gutes neues Jahr and a gelukkig nieuwjaar to all.

Christmas Buns

This weekend, P. invested in an incredibly fancy DSLR that he has been saving up for since the dawn of time. In the end, it was the Nikon D7000 he went for. I’d been fairly non-committal to any camera purchase. He’s been going on about getting a fancy camera for months, most of which I spent unemployed so the concept of spending so much on something so small was a bit, ugh, when we were basically living off knäckebröd and cheese.

Now I’m employed and can contribute to the running of the household, I’m happy he can finally spend his hard earned, hard saved up money on something he really wanted. For I shall be saving up my hard earned money for a beautiful MacBook Pro… Living on a teacher’s wage means it’ll probably be a good while before I can afford a MacBook so I’ll stick to more teacher-suitable hobbies. Baking. Then using P.’s camera to take photos of my handy work. In HD.

So ladies and gentlemen, I give you my very own recipe for Christmas Buns:

Ingredients:

125g butter

3 dl sugar

4 eggs

zest of 1/2 orange

4dl plain flour

1 dl Graham flour

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 dl raisins*

1 dl yellow sultanas*

1/2 dl mixed peel*

(*can substitute these out for just raisins)

1 tsp ground ginger

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 mixed spice

1/4 tsp ground cloves

small block of white chocolate, chopped.

Directions:

- mix flour, baking powder, spices, zest, chocolate and dried fruits in a bowl.

- whisk the sugar and butter until fluffy.

- slowly add the eggs (I always pre-beat them in a bid to minimise curdling)

- fold in the flour and fruit mix

- blob the mixture into a baking tray

- bake on 180 C for around 20 – 30 minutes/until skewer comes out clean.

ta da! The muffin tops just totally exploded over the cases but who cares? It’s like you get a free cookie on top of the cake!

The Yule Countdown has Begun.

Excuse my hiatus. I’ve been a busy bumblebee setting grades and all the usual boring administrative crap that brings teaching down to the same mundane level of, well, customer service. I’m going to develop my own pedagogical method. I’ll call it the “Rhian’s No Nonsense Teaching”. I’ll do away with paperwork and administrative chores and instead reward initiative, enthusiasm and improvement with things that teenagers actually give a crap about. Like, Battlefield 3, Burger King meals and so forth. School grades mean about as much to teenagers as, well, does anything mean anything to teenagers?

Year 8F: Your Homework!

Well, before your “epic” teacher takes herself out for Saturday night cocktails, she will tell you your Literature Project homework. Since that was the reason she “let you in on” (idiom: look it up) her blog.

Your work is to:

Choose a film, poem, book or even song lyrics that you want to discuss in a short essay.

For the next lesson, I want you to come a little bit prepared (don’t “wing it” (another idiom there))with your text/whatever and a short description about it.

We’ll then do a little bit about “essay writing techniques” so you can do your BEST EVER PIECE OF WRITTEN WORK IN ENGLISH! I want to give out As and Bs like sweets. I’m a pusher.

Abe, I’ll read over yours on your Studiedag, but trust me, I’m going to make you work harder. I may be “epic” but I am also evil.

 

Oops

I may have done something rather silly, my year 8s may or may not have the link to my blog. Is this professional suicide? Probably. They’ll find out that teachers are humans too… Still. They know they have to comment in English – and it’s excellent language practice for them…

School is Cool

I know I probably shouldn’t blog on work’s time, but I need to take a break. I’m currently having to do something very difficult and sort out information for tonight’s staff meeting. Monday is a “day off” where we have to submit grades and such for our pupils. Today we’re sort of discussing that. Having been here for just short of three weeks, it’s tough. The only thing I can really say is “well, if I know their name they are either very good or very bad”.

Work is hectic. I honestly no longer have time for myself any more. P. and I are like ships that pass in the night! I’m up and out of the house by 06:20 every day, usually home between 16-17:00, and P’s working in Uni most nights until about 18-19:00. So by the time he gets home, I’m pretty much ready for bed. Then by Friday, when I finish at half one, I end up fast asleep by 20:00.

I try to get most of my prep etc done in my “free” periods or on the train. Though this isn’t always the case. At the moment I’m currently busting my backside to make German grammar accessible to the year 9s. I finally, finally understand everything about German grammar now I have to teach it. I wish there were a way to turn back the clock and re-submit all my degree related Grammar work.

I had fun with the sentence: Der Tisch gab dem Tisch den Tisch des Tisches today. (The table gave the table the table’s table). I’m not sure the Year 9s were quite so taken with it.

I’m ready for the Christmas Holiday.

Vem vet mest?

When I was little, I used to hang out with my grandad quite a lot. We had a special agreement, he’d let me watch Sesame Street if he could watch Channel Four News. Fair enough deal, when you think about it. Well somewhere between the Channel Four News and Countdown fell Fifteen to One. I loved Fifteen to One.

Sadly Fifteen to One died a death in the early 2000s, being replaced by utter trite as that what’s in the box thing with Noel Edmonds. Deal or No Deal I think it’s called. It was a sad time for television quiz shows. A few years ago, P. and his sister became moderately obsessed with this quiz show, Vem vet mest? (Who knows the most?) My Swedish wasn’t too brilliant at that time, so I didn’t really pay attention. Until one day, I saw they had lamps and there were fifteen contestants. “Oh it’s just like Fifteen to One!” I said one day. Well I’ll be, the show is based on the programme I grew up with!

When I became unemployed and suffered from the subsequent brain rot associated with doing nothing, I became a full-time Vem vet mest? devotee. One day I wouldn’t mind taking part. The trouble is, whilst I can answer the majority of the questions, I sadly answer them in the wrong language. Then where we used to have very specific UK based questions, VVM? has incredibly Swedish ones. I’d no doubt not even make it past the first round, unless the producers of the show would let me answer in English…

Having devoted every week night at 7pm to Rickard Olsson, I’ve grown to learn a lot about the intricate workings of the show. You can pretty much set your watch by the frequency of quips, disappointed sounds from the Quiz Master, the popping of light bulbs and the amount of people giving stupid answers.

So then I thought, hey, there’s a drinking game in this somewhere. Terry Wogan and the Eastern Bloc inspired one for Eurovision, surely Rickard Olsson and the various overweight pensioners from Skåne will be the perfect grounding for a Vem vet mest? fredagsfinalen piss up. I was right. I was spot on.

So in my next blog entry, I shall share the rules of the VVM-FF Drinking Game. So next Friday, when you settle down in front of SVT2 with your end of week brewski, you’ll be able to play along.

Midweek from the Teacher’s Lounge.

Well here I am, three days into my job and my oh my it is good. I love it.

I’ve got my own wee desk in an enclave of a workroom, my colleagues are just wonderful people, the students are just, well, puberty riddled potential human beings. I’m sure somewhere underneath all the body odour, make up and sebaceous glands there are hearts of gold. With English, I’m so happily in the zone, even in the lessons that start at 08.20. If only my school were in Lund and not Middle Earth…

The feedback I’ve had from various members of staff has been brilliant. The 8th Grade want me to be their form tutor and think I’m cool because I said I like Norwegian Black Metal. The 6th Grade seem to think that I am just some female shaped Tony Irving as I have a habit of hamming things up and speaking Swedish with a Blackpool accent. Little did I know that Mr. Irving hails from Bury. I need to find more speakers of Swedish from Lancashire, clearly we should have a support network.

I’m having trouble connecting with German for the teenage group as, just as imagined, German has the same reception at this school in Sweden as it did in my school in England. People have chosen German because a) they had to choose a Modern Language and they didn’t like Spanish or b) they picked it because they thought it would be “just like Swedish”. I think they are slowly realising that no, the two are rather different.

I forget that not everyone is a language person. I have spent so much of my academic life surrounded by losers who look up dialectical variants for past tense conjugation of verbs, who sit at home and alter the stems/suffixes to see how split second brain reaction time changes to incorrect word accents, who sit in their room reading hand-written Goethe notes (you all know who you are) that I have forgotten that 99% people just do not give a cobblers that Swedish is SVO or that there is actually a huge difference between  I am going shopping and I go shopping.

I am also struggling a bit because I’m having to explain complex grammar rules in Swedish. Sadly, having learnt Swedish as a second language, I’m much more familiar with the nuances and terminology than they are, so when I say that something is a bisats I am asked vad e en bisats för fan?

All is not lost. I have now prepared an action plan for the next three weeks that I will present to the German class. Perhaps then, if they have that for reference, they’ll be more inclined to pay attention and I’ll be more inclined to teach them.

I’ve found my career. I didn’t want to admit it for so long, but I really have found where I belong.

Parkin Mk. II – The Recipe

So here it is, Katie’s Mother’s Parkin Recipe.

Before I begin, those of you outside the United Kingdom must be aware that there is no real substitute for treacle. Perhaps you could try Black Strap Molasses, but you really shouldn’t. Get yourself down to your nearest English Shop and buy a tin of the real stuff. For those of you located in Sweden, luckily for you Malmö, Stockholm and Göteborg all have English Shops. For those of you within spitting distance of my house, I have Parkin and I may let you have a slice.

The original and best treacle.

Ingredients for Parkin

look! We have the biggest kitchen in the world. This is it. All of it.

175g black treacle weigh this out directly into a saucepan. Don’t do what I did and put it on a plate. I am an idiot.

175g butter or margarine

100g soft brown sugar

225g plain flour

2 teaspoons ground ginger

1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

225g fine oatmeal if oatmeal is hard to find, which it seems to be outside of Parkin country, you can simply use the same amount of rolled oats and then blitz them in a food processor until they resemble something like Graham Flour.

150ml milk

1 egg

1 good quality wooden spoon.

Directions

Step One: Place the treacle, butter, and sugar in a saucepan and melt over a low heat. Allow to cool slightly

Once all melted, it should look nice and smooth, like this:

Do not let it boil! Unless you’re making Bonfire Toffee – which is a wise thing to do if you don’t enjoy eating treacle straight out of the tin.

Step Two: Sift the flour with the spices and bicarbonate of soda. Stir in the oatmeal

Step Three: Pour in the melted mixture with the egg and milk and mix well until smooth

Step Four: Pour into a greased and lined 23-cm square cake tin and bake for 1.25-1.5 hours. (Swedes take note: don’t use bloody breadcrumbs to line your tin. Use butter and flour. Or parchment.)

Step Five: Leave to cool in the tin for a few minutes before turning out to cool on a wire rack

Now comes the hardest part of all…

Step Six: Wrap your Parkin up in unbleached baking paper. As you can see, I had to cut ours in half.

Step Seven: Placed wrapped Parkin in a cake tin, with an apple. Leave in the tin for as long as you can manage. The apple will shrivel and look all disgusting, but this is good.

The longer you can leave your Parkin in the tin with the apple, the better it will taste. Good Parkin should be sticky and dense. For the first few days it’ll be crumbly and cake like. It’s fine to eat it like this, in fact it is very, very tasty, but old Parkin is just to die for.

5th November marks Official Parkin Season, in my opinion.