Holidays

I haven’t blogged for a couple of weeks as last week (as many of my usual handful of readers are already aware) we were on holiday in Venice for the week. I took about 400 pictures which will take a while to get sorted and online (not all of them!), ate too much, walked all over the place (Venice being that kind of a place), read more than usual, relaxed, enjoyed spending an entire week with HD (that was the best bit!), chilled, usual holiday stuff really. Now I’m back I’m trying not to think about going to w*rk tomorrow morning, and that I have to mark OU essays in the next couple of days and submit another chapter revision as well (the chapter should be OK, it’s the methodology chapter which was my favourite to write – it was very therapeutic as a lot of it was All About Me ). I have just spent the last hour and a half sorting out a problem with my OU students who are doing some online group-work (which I have to say is on the whole infinitely preferable to the real-life equivalent!) – nothing serious serious but awkward and couldn’t be left. So now my (admittedly red wine-related) headache is showing no signs of disappearing, so I think I might be off to bed in a minute. Photos and holiday musings (of which there are a fair few) will have to wait a few days, I think.

Don’t vote for Cameron redux

The news over the last couple of days that Tory leader David Cameron wants to make teaching an elite profession available only to the (allegedly) brightest and the best has already attracted comment on the wibsite thanks to an (as usual) astute post from Tractor Girl. The idea of a panel of “good universities” in the “low dozens” (see this press release from university think-tank million+) suggests to me a return to elitism and snobbery based on where you study rather than the million and one other things that should define a good teacher and the value of the time spent at university, explained much better in Tractor Girl’s post than I could here (do read it if you haven’t already clicked on the link).

I have to say that I also felt rather peeved, not to mention confused and angry, because last week the article about nurse education which wound me up so much (see last post) seems to be saying the opposite thing – ie that being elite and highly academic is a bad thing. Now, a disclaimer here: I realise that I am on the more academic side of things, and I responded well to much of the academic side of nurse training, whereas many absolutely brilliant nurses aren’t so into the academic side of things but are still fantastic at what they do and shouldn’t be discriminated against by a lack of academic aptitude (having said that I do think that a GCSE/O’level C grade in maths is essential for pretty obvious reasons – I don’t want any doses of drugs being calculated by people who can’t multiply or divide – but I digress).

My concerns are severalfold. Cameron’s statement that there was “too much over-academicised training and not enough hands on training, not relevant to what they were doing on the ward” is far too simplistic. The issue of academic versus hands-on has been going on for ages, certainly while I was training in the mid-1990s it was a huge issue with “old hands” moaning that newly-qualified nurses didn’t have the practical skills to do the job whilst many nurses really appreciated the chance to expand their knowledge and – and this is the important bit – apply it to how they practised nursing. What really bothers me about this statement though is in many ways much more basic. Hello Mr Cameron – I haven’t worked on a ward for years. What is relevant to ward nurses is much less relevant to community and general practice nurses, who work in different ways and often are looking at health, illness and wellbeing in a totally different light (complementary I might add to the hospital system, not in opposition to it).

My biggest concern is that, when I look back at my nurse training, the biggest discovery for me and the thing that really sparked my interest in working in communities, looking at health inequalities and trying to work towards improving health at a community as well as individual level was sociology – in particular looking at the Black Report of 1980 which showed how social class affected health outcomes (the report was commissioned by the Labour government of the 1970s but published in August 1980, just after That Bloody Woman took power. It was published on a Bank Holiday with only a few hundred copies, and was basically hushed up, as the findings were so compelling that inequalities in health were inextricably linked to social class inequalities). And this is, I think, precisely the sort of “academic training” that Cameron has in mind when he talks about over-academic training. He’s not going to slash lecturing posts in anatomy and physiology, it’s the more political stuff he wants to get rid of. It’s all very well having nurses with amazing practical hands-on skills – indeed it is vital, of course it is. But if we have a generation of nurses who are only trained to do practical things with individual patients, what is lost is the focus on inequality and injustice. I just think it would be awfully convenient for the Tories to have a nursing profession that is so focussed on being professionally and practically brilliant at what they do that they have so much less time or knowledge or understanding to challenge the real issues of inequality and exclusion on a wider level.

New Year not-resolutions

Rather than do either a. a scary list of things I aim to do this year which then make me feel inadequate because I will fail to live up to them or b. a long rambling screed of streams of consciousness over why I want to achieve the unachievable anyway, I’m just going to put up here, for my reference as much as anything else (so it won’t be the great writing you’ve come to expect from this blog ), a kind of combination of the two which hopefully will be neither scary nor rambling, but more a kind of wish-list or stuff I’d like to see happen but not stuff I’ll get too obsessive about. We’ll see.

To get the elephant (or in my case perhaps more accurately hippo) in the room out of the way first, I’ll at least mention weight loss. I’m aiming for about 1lb a week, which will hopefully see me lose about a stone by Easter. There are a few reasons why I want to lose weight, none of which I particularly want to go into here, but I want to end the year feeling better physically, and feeling better about myself physically, than I have started it.

I want my PhD to be over and done with this year. And get back to writing for the fun of it (yes academic writing can be fun).

I’d love to have cleared my debts this year. I should have one card cleared in the next couple of months; the other one will take longer but I have just increased my payment so hopefully I’ll start making a dent in that soon and get onto the parental debts too. That would be good.

I don’t really want to end the year in health visiting if I can help it. Though at the moment that’s a bit out of my hands – while I’m paying off debts and HD is in temporary work I’m not going to give up permanent work. Whether or not I’m still in health visiting, by the time I finish the PhD (hopefully in the summer) I want to be starting a course which will get me qualified in the area of nursing I want to go into (more of which later if it actually happens). If I do manage to leave this current job, maybe I’ll try and do some more OU tutoring if I can.

I want to get back more into my faith, and what it means for my life. I was very challenged by conversations with HD’s sister and brother-in-law over the holidays, and although their vision is not mine particularly, their heart and commitment is something to which I aspire (and from which I’m still a long way away).

I want to be a better wife. HD says he’s happy with the one he’s got (he’s very lovely like that), and I don’t mean total personality transplant or anything, but I think I can aim to be less selfish and more loving without causing him too much consternation

Creatively, I’d like to get to know my shiny new camera better and maybe start another photo project as I think my Glasgow blog is running out of steam a bit and the Sibiu blog is running out of photos! And I’d like to draw a couple of pictures at some point as well, it’s been ages (over a year) since I last drew anything.

There’s other stuff as well, like wanting to know where we’ll be living and for HD to have a permanent job and for us to be together all the time and all that sort of thing, but at the moment that’s all a bit out of our hands. I can start to do some of the stuff above though.

I feel pretty good about 2010, all told

Vindication

So, as many of you know I am currently tutoring on a distance-learning university course. This involves, amongst other things, setting questions to be discussed by the students in an online discussion forum. Up till last week this was just with my own students, but as we’ve moved into the second block of the course each tutor group teams up with two other groups to fill the discussion out a bit with more people participating.

Last week was the first week of this larger group, led by one of the other tutors (we take it in turns so we only have to do one week in three as lead tutor). The discussion was pretty good, and the students seemed to be interacting really well.

This week it’s my turn. The activity is meant usually to relate to the topic which is being studied that week (each unit is meant to take just a week, and then the students move on to the next one), so last week I sat down with the course material so I could read about the topic and think up an activity. Imagine my joy when I discovered that all of this week the students will be learning about my favourite topic.

Group work.

How my heart sank leapt for joy. Regular readers will no doubt remember my utter antipathy to this topic, second only to the even more evil role play. Actually, in all honesty I laughed when I saw it. This, my friends, is irony at its finest.

The activity has been up a couple of days now, so I popped into the forum this evening to see how it was going.

Not a single student has posted anything at all. Not a word. Obviously they love it as much as their tutor.

Normally I would be getting all paranoid about being a terrible tutor and not motivating my students. But in this case, I feel strangely vindicated.

This week I shall mostly be …

* marking OU essays, and
* writing a thesis chapter, and
* working full time, while
* trying not to cough up any more of my lungs (a fine image for a professional health promoter, no?).

No wonder I’m knackered.

But, excitingly, today HD and I booked our first proper holiday since our honeymoon almost 2 years ago. We are off adventuring in February, I can’t wait!

same old same old

I have some essays to mark (still!).

I don’t want to.

Maybe I’m not cut out for academia.

I did my first OU tutorial today, I think it went well! I was expecting 8 students, 5 came, but they were nice and chatty, and I think this is the first time in my life ever that I have planned stuff for a tutorial and had too much material rather than not enough! Anyway it’s a relief it’s done, and I don’t have another till January – last night I was really antsy and feeling a bit ill, but more tense than ill really, and I remember that it was exactly the same before every tutorial day for the last 4 years, I always used to feel sick the night before until they were over! Maybe I need to rethink my idea of going into academia, it’s no good if I feel sick every time I have to teach! But seriously, I did actually rather enjoy it, and I don’t think they thought I was a numpty so that’s always good (I’ve not read the feedback form yet though, I’ll save that for another day!).

HD is home for the weekend – am happy about that

I have a provisional start date for my new job of 2nd November, which I agreed with HR yesterday (I need to confirm it with my line manager next week, assuming she’s back from holiday). Unfortunately, I got home from the tutorial this afternoon and found I have been called for jury service from 16th Nov! I hope I don’t get a reputation at work for taking time off as soon as I start! Not the best timing, and I can’t say I’m brimming with enthusiasm at the prospect, but I guess if I do it I can at least get it out of the way.

As for my thesis chapter, and my various doomed attempts to get it finished when I say I will: I think this Dilbert cartoon pretty much sums up where I’m at with it (guess which one’s me?!).

Reasons to be thankful

Yesterday I celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving with a few people from church (one of the hosts is Canadian, unsurprisingly). Sometimes it is really good to have eyes bigger than your stomach – the food was so good, but I packed it in anyway and just had to suffer later (it’s a hard life).

Today I am thankful that at long long long long last my Disclosure Scotland form arrived. This is the form that confirms that I am not an axe-murderer or otherwise unsuitable for working in the NHS, and was the one thing holding me up actually starting my job. Actually it transpires it’s not the only thing holding me up, as I have just discovered that the line manager is on holiday so HR are having to wait for someone else to confirm I can start. If I have any say in the matter I think I want to start in just under a fortnight, rather than next week – that way I can have a mad thesis frenzy before I start, and to be honest one more week’s debt isn’t going to make all that much difference after all this time.

I’m also thankful that some of my OU students are starting to make some tentative steps on using the discussion forum, which means I am not Jackie-no-mates in there any more and am not feeling like I’m totally useless at it. So that’s good.

All work and no play

… is making Jack a very dull girl indeed. But, I have finally made a start on contacting my OU tutor group this evening (the course starts this weekend, so I need to practice what I’m preaching to them and get myself into some sort of routine to make the time for it) so that is quite a weight off my mind anyway. My next task is to figure out how to claim my expenses

In other news (and what I really wanted to write about) Chas’s post here from earlier today has got me really thinking. I used to be a voracious reader, but now can only manage small chunks of a chapter or two at a time, and I find I’m the same with films and TV too. Over the weekend we stayed with HD’s parents, and watched the TV with them (we never watch it here, there’s never anything much on so we don’t bother and play on the internet instead). They were watching a programme called “Doc Martin”, which is a gentle slow-paced drama set in a Cornish seaside village. It was all very pleasant and not at all demanding. But when I went to bed (I’m not sleeping brilliantly at the moment, and am having lots of vivid dreams which keep waking me up – not horrible dreams but just really very vivid indeed) I kept waking up, and when I did images from the “Doc Martin” episode we’d just seen were going through my head and were really quite relentless and not relaxing at all. No wonder I don’t watch TV or films much – I’ve noticed this happen quite a lot over the last few years. A couple of years ago when I was in Moldova the woman I was staying with was watching an American TV movie and I happened to be there too so started watching with her. I couldn’t get beyond the first 10 minutes before it stressed me out too much and I had to go to my room, but I still sometimes think about those 10 minutes and can see exactly what happened (it was quite traumatic, not like “Doc Martin”!) all this time later really vividly. I think as I’ve got older I’ve become much more sensitive (sensitised?) to sensory overload. And when I’m reading novels (to take us back to Chas’s post) I see the action in my mind so vividly too that I have to really psych myself up to start reading. No wonder I haven’t finished a book group book in months! Though the next one is one I really really want to read, by one of my favourite authors, so hopefully I will get over it. I’d like to read something some time other than academic books (which don’t have the same effect; they might bore me or even excite and grip me, but they never overload my imagination or senses!) and reclaim my enjoyment.

OU

The induction day today reminded me all over again why I like the Open University so much (and that’s before we even got to the amazing – free! – lunch, which to be fair they did tell us not to get used to!). Sitting in a room full of interesting, motivated people (who were in the same boat as me, and all seemed equally daunted by it, but equally up for it too), supportive staff, supportive staff, did I say the staff are really supportive? The OU consistently comes in the top 2 or 3 in the national student survey for student satisfaction, in Scotland and (I think) in the UK as a whole, and I think it’s going to be a joy to work for them. Hooray! Now I just have to find the time to get though the absolute mountain of teaching materials and get my head round the tutoring forums etc.

I was interested to hear lots of people worrying about interacting online, and how different that would be from face-to-face. I had done a bit of that as a student already, for my final MSc module (which feels like a lifetime ago, though it was actually just 5 years), and of course I’ve had the occasional practice at online interaction (can’t think where ), so for me that feels like the least of my worries. The most of my worries is in finding the time to get through the course materials and have enough of a handle on it that I can best help my students. I have had a brainwave, which if I were God would make life so much easier to handle, but as I’m not will have to muddle on regardless. Basically I think that if time could be captured on an external hard drive (or whatever the time/life/existence equivalent to a computer would be) then I could do my thesis and day job* as normal, and have the extra OU time running concurrently but not get overburdened or go over-capacity. I’m not sure I’ve explained that very well, but it makes perfect sense to me. I expect the techies will be along soon enough to point out the flaws.

And as for the food – mmmmmmmmm. A sit down delicious buffet, we all felt like we were at a wedding reception (and in fact the venue was quite posh and there was a wedding reception going on down the corridor). With proper cloth napkins and everything! Makes a change from the curled up sandwiches and custard cream you usually get at these things.

* whenever that happens – no news yet.