Roads to Safe Places

I'm going to teach my fidgety students in a room without chairs tomorrow, since they find it so hard to sit still and learn better standing up. I'm curious about how that'll work out - all of them said that when they study at home, they don't do so at their desk but while walking about. I'm curious as to whether this will be applicable to larger groups, too - I know for a fact that part of the reason why some of these kids stop being able to concentrate at some point is because they simply can't sit any longer, and I don't see a disadvantage to having them walk about the room while teaching or have them stand while writing as long as they pay attention. My reading backs this up, too. Should be interesting.

Also, I'm having a lot of fun in the Groups on DA right now, and my day was made when I discovered the picture below, drawn by ~nattherat, the best Worst Witch artist on that site.

One of the good things about Partick is that we have a lot of charity shops close by, and it's great fun to occasionally skim through them and see what treasures we can discover. They really ought to be more common in Germany! It is so much fun browsing through them.

I found something which made me happy on Friday:
The Worst Witch All At Sea.
Ah, the memories of childhood. Well. Teenager-hood. Boy, I must have been the most boring 16-year-old in my entire year.

Does anyone else know and remember the series?
Since I saw the series on TV the first time, I have had a crush on Miss Hardbroom. She is just soooo cool. 
If not, meet: Constance Hardbroom.  Oh dear, I hope Jill Murphy won't sue me for showing this around on the net. 

Sadly, the author is not as good as drawing this wonderful character as she is at drawing the kids.

But this is the coolest female character ev- nah. One of the coolest female characters ever.
She kicks student butt. She can materialise out of thin air. She thinks body-length school dresses with grey and black checks are "too frivolous" for the girls and changes them to plain black. She teaches Potions. She always appears directly behind the students when they are least expecting it, or dematerialises, waits until the students do not suspect her of being there, eavesdropping, and then makes comments on what they're saying in a disembodied voice, catching them off-guard. She favours the meanest girl in the entire form (who does not only get everything always right, but is also the daughter of very rich parents and has won prizes for practically everything). She has a cat named Morgana. She is always neat.
And she wears a bun!!

Kinda scary, the many things which are strangely reminiscent of other schools here. But then, she is allowed to be like that because she is a few years older than Severus Snape or Minerva McGonagall.

Isn't she cool??

Oh, yeah, right.
I am supposed to be a literature student. But against the magic of H.B., other authors battle in vain. No match in the stuff I'm reading at the moment, anyway (not counting the poetry, of course). Apart from this very profound novel for a slightly younger audience, I'm forced to read Jane Eyre. Once more. That is two times too many already. I thought I was through the worst when I got a dose of Emma. Once more. But nooo... Well, it's not all that bad. 

Something funny: our seminar teacher tried to interest us in poetry yesterday. At least that's what she said. Kinda strange, blue-eyed as I am I always assumed that everybody studying literature simply MUST love poetry to bits, but that turned out to be wrong.
In the seminar, about three people told me that they absolutely did not know what to do with a poem. At all. And that they did not like poetry, and that they found it terribly difficult to make sense of them at all, and that they were terrified of writing the essays about them this year.

Our tutor said we were going to do a "poetry workshop" because apparently most of the guys in the class run screaming at the sight of verse, they simply don't know what to do with poems because they never get taught how to go about it, and then get assessed on it. All around very fair, the whole matter - and with important exams looming ahead, everyone thought it best to revise.
She said she wanted to "seduce" us with verse, to get us to see poetry a new way, etc., etc. I wonder if I will say similar things to my wee students when I am forced to confront them with poetry... And I wonder if I will make her kind of choice.
Her weapons for seduction turned out to be the epitaph to Ginsberg's Howl (Diane: "Didn't your head just explode when you first read it?!"), the first part of Whitman's Song of Myself and the lyrics to some song by the Beatles which begins with I dig a pony.

Somehow, the white faces and the apparent terror of the guys in the class suggested that her plan of seduction and reducing their fears through a new confrontation with a new kind of poetry … did not work. Well, and no one new the poems, at all. I missed out on the Beatles lyrics as well, but the others are fairly well-known?

I ask you - you want someone to realise that poetry is wonderful, want to seduce them with verse, want to show them the beauty of language… Ginsberg??? But then, she was into the energy and this feeling of breaking out she wanted us to see. Didn't work on most of them.

So, off to Russian, once again. Sorry for cluttering everybody's Friends page. I hope everyone's alright!

Major hugs!