The lyf so short

Three more days until Christmas break. Can't wait. The students can't wait either. They've been restless and overexcited for weeks now, and it was hard to get them to focus on anything. The older students are no longer all that excited by Christmas itself, but they certainly can't wait for the holidays, either. So it's been a challenge.

In the middle of that challenge, I had my first observation lesson. Like any trainee teacher, I spent three days agonising over the lesson and preparing an elaborate plan, only half of which I managed to realise in the end. But the kids managed to work along well (both their class teacher and I had informed them about the importance of the observation lesson) and, more to the point, keep from chatting or running around (which they usually do). They lost all self-control as soon as the auditors were out of the door, of course! And then in the debriefing the principal observed that "Obviously, the kids were doing you a favour". Crap! He saw straight through it! But fortunately he felt that this was also a good sign. "If you can get the kids to help you during observation, that means you're a teacher they care about." Well, as long as he sees it like that!
So it would appear that I'll continue teaching there for the time being. Stability! Or something vaguely like it, at least!

Not really, of course, because (duh) organising my work life, Jörg's work life, and the kids' life is not at all stable. Teaching gives me a more predictable schedule than working at the magazine did, but there are regular conferences. And unfortunately I let myself be elected into the directorate of Julian's kindergarten, so on top of normal work, there are regular meetings in the evening to sort out kindergarten stuff, which is... a lot. Especially recently. Crab mentality is strong among the teachers, so whenever one of them rises above the others (to, incidentally, the good of the whole team), the rest will drag her down and make her life hell for good measure. Then there's the aging manager who has to do both the work of a teacher and the work of a manager because it's a small kindergarten, resulting in burn-out but a sense of duty too strong to get the rest (or help) she needed. It's a hot mess and I wish I hadn't gotten into it. The other two directors have already resigned so we need to elect two new ones first thing next year, and now I feel duty-bound to stay on board so at least one person on board knows what went on this year. Graaaah.

Speaking of burnout, Jörg has now returned to work. I think I only ever alluded to that and I can't be bothered to write it all up now. Suffice it to say that in March - on the day of my grandfather's funeral, just to lighten the mood - he was hospitalised with what looked like a heart attack. Fortunately, his heart turned out to be absolutely fine, but the symptoms had to come from somewhere, and the doctors eventually decided that they must be physical symptoms caused by severe psychological distress. So they put Jörg on extended sick leave. Those who know him know that he has been suffering in his workplace for years (make that a decade, actually), so that definitely did him well. Then in October he got a place in rehab, and now that that's over, it was back to work. It went as (un)well as was to be expected. Let's see what the future brings. No renewed heart attack symptoms, psychosomatic or otherwise, one hopes.

Felix managed to catch laryngitis in school and has passed it on to me. He, being a student, got a week off school out of it (we managed to organise that). Me, being a teacher, has to continue going. Very few of my students take pity on a teacher with an extremely sore throat; they continue chatting in class like they always do. The 5th graders definitely need to be handled like 1st graders. Some of them either never learned school rules like not running around during lessons ("But I was only going to borrow a ruler!") or talking to their bffs during class ("But it was really important!") or, heaven help us, having all their material on their desk at the beginning of class ("I can't write it down! I don't have any paper left!") or forgot all about it. The time you waste on making sure that everyone has paper (and borrows a ruler from their neighbour, rather than someone at the other end of the room)! It's funny now that I write it down, but it's just frustrating while it's going on. At some point you start asking yourself whether they're genuinely unable to get it, or whether they're winding you up.

But! Only three days left until the vacations! And then I'll try to get into a seasonal mood so the kids get a festive Christmas. I just want to rest and recuperate, dammit! (I expect Julian will fall ill once the rest of us have recovered. There's always something. :P)

... man, I go on vacation for a week and the world goes completely mad. I expected some of it (but not this much!) and thus stayed away from the news in my happy little Alpine valley, but coming back and catching up isn't fun either when there's such a clusterfuck to catch up with. Boo.

But the holiday, on the whole, was nice! As nice as travelling by bus (= twice the time) and with a group of senior citizens (I know, I know, one day I will be like them and then I'll so regret my youthful arrogance) can be. Fortunately, aside from the journey and meals, it was more a family vacation with my parents, the mother-in-law and the kids (poor Jörg couldn't get off work and had to stay at home). To be honest, I hadn't particularly cared to go, but my parents so wanted to treat their grandchildren, and since Felix starts school this summer and then won't be able to take part in such a trip outside the school holidays, we went. And it was nice. I didn't get to do any skiing due to the kids, but I got to take some nice walks (and photos). I reanimated the old camera I'd bought in Japan for the purpose. I know my cell phone would have taken higher quality pictures, but getting pics from the cell phone to the computer is a bloody pain and I'm not gonna face it for 30+ pics, no way. So we'll all have to deal with the flaws of ten year old technology, oh woe.

( Picspam & rambling under the cut, as always )

Well, wasn't that fun! And now, to paraphrase JD from Srubs, I'm back to a world full of bad presidents, oaths and gonorrhea. URGH.

So, something positive. (Mostly.)

Felix is, well, mostly thriving at the new kindergarten (the Montessori place in the next town over), which he has been attending since July. Astonishingly enough, now that he's with teachers who a) bother listening to him, b) bother explaining the rules and the reasons behind them, c) bother actually doing things with the kids (rather than leaving that to the intern and the part-time aide and limiting themselves to surveillance and documentation), his meltdowns have become a lot rarer. That doesn't mean they don't happen anymore, but when they happen, that is no desaster, either, because these kindergarten people actually realise that young children sometimes react badly to overstimulation, understimulation, frustration and whatever else life with other people throws at them. And don't treat it like an illness. Will wonders never cease. They basically do the same thing I do at home when it happens: remove him from the upsetting situation, judge whether he needs distraction or time to vent his anger in a non-harmful manner, offer whichever they think is needed, and only try to discuss the situation once it is no longer acutely frustrating him.
It doesn't hurt, of course, that they don't force kids who can already read, do basic maths, play chess or build complex LEGO robots to engage in "Name things that are blue/yellow/red/green" projects for four weeks straight. It doesn't hurt that they don't try to discourage kids from whatever they're currently interested in. If someone wants to learn letters, they provide materials. If someone is curious about numbers, they have different games that involve numbers (up to 100, but hey, we only learned up to 20 in first class, so that's progress already). If someone wants to build robots, they provide LEGO. If someone is madly interested in something, they help them to find books on the subject or colouring pages or whatever applies.
And lo, the anti-social boy who supposedly couldn't make friends (although he actually had two friends, or two kids whom he considered his friends, anyway) has a BFF (and two almost-BFFs) and likes to play with some select others, too. He seems to be generally accepted by the group (although to be honest, I never had the impression that the other kids at the old kindergarten didn't accept him; the problem was wholly with his two main teachers) and actually *gasp* liked by the teachers.
He does attend ergotherapy because he grips pencils in his whole fist rather than "properly", which puzzles everyone, because apparently the cliché is that kids who do that do not like to draw (or write) and don't do it often. This is very much not true in this case - he loves drawing (he tends to go totally wild about a particular subject for months on end, producing nothing else: it started with letters and numbers, moved on to streetlamps, then to houses, and currently it's road constructions. With, incidentally, first attempts at perspective - I am ever so proud!), he can colour pictures reasonably neatly, and he can write legibly (and, I should mention, mostly orthographically correct. In two languages). He just holds the pen "the wrong way" - a result of having taught himself to write at such a young age without the corresponding fine-motor skills, I suppose. This wouldn't particularly bother me, but his teachers (and the teachers at the school he's going to attend in summer) worry that it may later slow him down, which will lead to frustration, which will lead to the Dark Side of the Force. Or something. So he goes to ergotherapy. Whatever. (He initially called it "Ärgertherapie", which is sort of hilarious because Ärger is German for annoyance/irritation/anger/frustration, and one thing it does is test his frustration tolerance.)

Now, last Friday was St. Martin's Day. This is perhaps most easily described as Rhenanian Hallowe'en (with a different backstory, that of St. Martin of Tours, with paper lanterns instead of pumpkins, and with caroling instead of trick-or-treating - but I suspect that at the heart of it, it's the exact same tradition, only with its date set by the lunar calendar and its customs painted Catholic at a different time. Also, no dressing up. To make matters more confusing, however, St. Martin's is on the same day as the beginning of the Rhenanian carnival season, which you do dress up for.) - anyway, all you need to know that the tradition is to make paper lanterns, walk around singing St. Martin's songs in exchange for sweets, and have a bonfire.
In the olden days (TM) when I was a kid, St. Martin approaching meant eating a particularly disgusting kind of soft cheese, because it came in round cardboard packaging that could later form the frame of your lantern. These were then lit with tea lights or Christmas tree candles, and every year, someone's lantern would catch fire. It never happened to me, but it did happen to my brother, who was smart enough to throw it into the next puddle. These days, of course, lanterns are lit with LEDs, which allows for a lot more variation in shape and size without anything catching fire!
(Another St. Martin's tradition of my youth, which feels absurdly distant when thinking about it in those terms, was caroling at the owner's of the local beverage store, who in exchange for our lantern song would give each of us a can of Coca-Cola. This was a really special thing back then, not because Coke was rare in general but because parents just wouldn't buy it. We always kept our St. Martin's can of Coke in the fridge until New Year's Eve, when we absolutely needed it to stay awake until the fireworks! It worked because we believed it, I guess.)
Anyway, we fortunately didn't have to eat that disgusting soft cheese in order to provide the framework for Felix' lantern. These days, crafts stores provide ready-made frames in all shapes and sizes. The kindergarten had picked four basic models and the children all got to choose which one they wanted to make: A princess, a horse, a fox or a firefighter. Felix decided for... the pink, sparkly princess.
Now, one of the perks of having only boys, I thought, was not having to deal with pink, sparkly, frilly stuff. But I was wrong. And because I knew that if Felix had been a girl, I would have been delighted if he had chosen something that wasn't stereotypical for his gender, I felt I had to put my money where my mouth is and let him have his princess lantern.
(As it happens, the lanterns were put together by the kids' fathers. And the daddies who assembled their daughters' princess lanterns? Went TOTALLY mad on the glitter. Seriously, those lanterns were smothered in glitter. It was as if all the fathers were completely excited about being allowed to play with glitter at last!)
During the little kindergarten bonfire, when everyone was marching their lanterns around, I overheard two boys talking about Felix' lantern. They were right behind him, although Felix didn't seem to hear them.
So they went "Haha, did you see, Felix has a princess lantern." - "Yeah, Felix has a princess lantern! That's for girls!" - "Yes, it's a girl lantern! L.'s got one, too!" and I was pondering at which point I should break the Prime Directive when another little boy, H., spoke up. "Nonsense, boys can have princess lanterns, too." He turned to Felix: "Isn't that right, Felix?" And Felix, oblivious of why a boy wasn't expected to have a princess lantern, emphatically replied "Yes, naturally!"
And that was that. No further questions, no further snark. H. settled the matter just like that. He just pointed out the obvious - clearly, if a boy has a princess lanterns, boys can have princess lanterns - and that was enough. And H. isn't even in Felix circle of friends (who might maybe have felt obliged out of a sense of loyalty).

Jörg wasn't too impressed by the kindergarten celebrations (one father in particular rubbed him the wrong way) but that little exchange alone completely made my day. (Also, the fact that none of the teachers tried to discourage Felix or L. from having princess lanterns.) It had its disorganised moments, it was friggin' cold, and Julian was tired and testy throughout it all (he hadn't napped). But Felix participated with good success, and for the moment, that's my priority. So there.

Julian, meanwhile, is very much in his Terrible Twos. And beginning to identify letters and numbers correctly. Sigh. He does a lot better in social situations, though, but that's mostly due to the fact that he's such a pretty boy that all he needs to do is smile and everyone's completely smitten. And he knows that. So he gets by mostly by charming people. It's unfair, but there you go. He's also very deft and nimble (Felix actually learned how to properly ride his Bobby Car from Julian, not the other way round). He has a great interest in cars and engines, and quite an astute understanding of physics: Recently, when he was trying to shut a drawer and something had gotten stuck in it, he didn't repeatedly try to push it shut as most kids (and many adults ;)) would have, but immediately realised that something must be obstructing the mechanism: He went around, identified the obstruction, removed it, and shut the drawer. He has already mastered the first person (something that took Felix until he was a full year older). His mental lexicon and his grammatical skills are impressive, while his pronunciation is still adorably baby-ish. (Also, he constructs complex sentences, but leaves out all conjunctions.)
I'm in two minds about his kindergarten education, which will begin next summer. On the one hand, we've managed to secure a place at a local kindergarten - not Felix' old one, obviously. That kindergarten is right around the corner from Felix' future elementary school. So that would be really convenient. On the other hand, I'm a bit doubtful about regular kindergartens after certain past experiences. Then again, the teachers at the other place may be completely different - and, as I said, Julian finds it a lot easier to charm people! I JUST DON'T KNOW HOW TO DECIDE. There probably is no right decision, so I'm sort of putting it in the hands of Providence (TM). We don't even know for certain that Julian will get a spot at the Montessori kindergarten yet!
I do hope that the local elementary school is the right choice. Felix' kindergarten manager suggested the Montessori school in their town (of course), which incidentally happens to be my old school - though it wasn't a Montessori school back then. But we had very slim chances of getting a place there, being from a different town - and indeed, we got none. And Alqualondë Academy* does have a very good reputation. They also acknowledge that quick students need support just as much as weaker students do. So that's something.


- - -
*The three historical villages that form the core of our hick town were literally called Swans, Oak, and Church Village. The school is in what used to be Swans, and is therefore called Swans School. I cannot pass that one up, can I?