I know, it’s lazy 😉
Had a nice day today, rushed around like crazy to arrive at Julie’s a mere five minutes later than arranged and left Ady and the children there. Not at all sure what they were up to and actually it’s quite refreshing not to be able to account for every moment of my childrens’ day so I’ll enjoy that ignorance I think!
The course was good – done by the same woman as the one last Autumn but a different style of basket – I will flickr it tomorrow when I’ve taken some pictures and it’s fully dried out and the colours are true. I did attempt a fairly large basket though and have had to finish it off at home and all of my fingers are very sore. It was pretty physical work actually using your shoulders and arms and hugging the basket into your tummy aswell as using muscles in your hand that simply don’t get that amount of exercise from typing or moving a mouse ;-). Really pleased with my creation though. I’ve yet to decide on a use for it, infact I’ve yet to decide on a use for the one I made before. When they asked me on the course what I was going to use it for I said ‘skipping merrily through woodland’ because it does have that sort of Little Red Riding Hood feel to it, so you never know I may take up geocaching just to give me an excuse to be in woodlands and copses! 😉
There were only two other women on the course – both retirement age so it was nice and intimate with lots of group chatter during the day which was lovely. We also had an inspector with us for part of the day viewing the teacher so we were chatting to him a fair bit too. Very relaxing and indeed slightly more rewarding to be battling with reluctant willow than reluctant children when attempting to get something or someone to do what you want it to do!
The course was held in a school – it’s a big secondary school thjat is also used for adult education and I think may even do the more non-academic types of post 16 qualifications too. It was odd to be back in that sort of environment after many years since leaving school myself and I was slightly saddened by looking round the art block room that we were sitting in at how exciting some of the students work on display was. I think I have blogged before that I used to really enjoy art and creative stuff but was encouraged far more towards academic stuff and eventually lost the urge to explore artistic pursuits further, but sitting in that room with all these wild and fantastical products of pupils imagination was very inspiring. I then took a walk down some of the corridors to the staff room for tea and looked at the further displays of work on the walls and then noticed various boards full of stuff about ‘community’ ‘citizenship’ and ‘pride’ – all of which sounded rather a lot like Management Seminar buzz words but were insistent that ‘beacuse we have pride and passion for our learning we will commit to : getting to class before the second bell, doing our home work’ and so on….And do you know for a short while I was suckered in by that. I found myself thinking it was inspirational, fretting that my children will be deprived by not getting to make 6ft square papier mache creations to be admired by the whole school, will not get to see posters saying that ‘we are a community and we take pride and comfort from knowing our place within it and feeling our importance to the community’. Suffice to say I quickly realised it was similar to those management seminars because they are filled with spin doctors propaganda too and that actually my children are better off learning their place in the community by being out there in it living and learning that by seeing it on a poster 12 times a day as they shuffle by in a sea of children all going to the next hour long session of life broken down into what you can learn within the confines of this classroom, the teachers knowledge and the co-operation of the rest of the class. And then the basket weaver lady started talking to us about some excellent ideas for creative stuff with the children using willow and collecting our own materials from hedgerows (which I would need some sort of recepticle for collecting them in while out walking in woodland, where could I get such a thing?) so I started to feel better again and wrote it off as the after effects of some residual institutionalising spray from the school week there! 😉
Anyway, we came home via McDs for the children who have both gone to bed very early, I sat and watched trashy Saturday night TV while finishing off my basket and Ady cooked me dinner – which was lovely after doing all the cooking all week while he sat in corporate entertainment style posh restaurants! Tomorrow we plan a very quiet, very relaxing day with no more possible exertion than a walk if the weather is nice and we might not even be bothered to do that.