Some responses to 'Only Connect'

from an ETANSW member to Eva Gold:

"I would also like to add my thanks and appreciation for the ETA conference and also for the excellent text Only Connect I am up to Chapter 11 and I am overwhelmed at the brilliant collection of the contemporary voices, engagement with current issues, and motivational and inspiring discussion. Thanks to Brenton Doeke, Mark Howie. and Wayne Sawyer. I think it should be on every English teacher's bookshelf along side Reviewing English and English Studies.


Dear Brenton, Wayne and Mark

..my sincere thanks for Only connect…, it is a timely and wonderful addition to the Interface series..Only Connect presents lucid, compelling ideas that I look forward to using in the coming months. For once, I feel as though AATE are on the front foot, with Only Connect a compelling driving force and call to arms for English education. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Karren Philp
Professional Development Officer
English Teachers Association WA

Also article by Kevin Childs: If it ain't broke, why fix it?

Only Connect

I have a chapter (11) in Only Connect: English teaching, schooling, and community, edited by Brenton Doecke, Mark Howie and Wayne Sawyer, Wakefield Press/AATE Interface Series.

"At a time when popular media are promoting a view of schooling as ‘drilling and skilling’, this book argues the role schools should play in producing a literate, imaginative, and critically engaged citizenry. Writing out of diverse locations and settings, the authors emphasise the importance of schooling as a common enterprise where teachers and students, schools and communities can participate in a socially productive dialogue."

One of our editors and VATE Advocacy Committee members (of which I am also a member) Brenton recently emailed: "I have just received my copy of English in Australia which contains a rather diffuse but positive review of 'only connect' by Rob Pope. Several advoc people (most notably Pippa Kirwan and Natalie Bellis) get special mention.

http://www.aate.org.au/media/releases06/smartening.html

“The Red Shoes.”

All those girls
who wore the red shoes,
each boarded a train that would not stop.
Stations flew by like suitors and would not stop.
They all danced like trout on the hook.
They were played with.

Anne Sexton

red shoes

I stand in the ring
In the dead city
And tie on the red shoes..
They are not mine
They are my mother’s.
Her mother’s before.
Handed down like an heirloom
But hidden like shameful letters.
The house and the street where they belong
Are hidden and all the women, too,
Are hidden….

by Anne Sexton

gumboots and slippers

I wrote this so long ago about Amelia

it's a first draft:

she dances eloquently
in silk slippers
in gumboots
i stomp stupidly
but there are all these thoughts
prompted by silk slippers
that i don't mind being uncomfortable
and it's not that kind of quick breath
sucked in air but rather a long
long inhaling understanding
rising sense of fog
but not fog more like seaspray
maybe we could go to the beach sometime
somewhere rocky and wind
speak to the sea goddess
be slapped by her wild cold
salt in eyes

Impression of newage house party

On Sunday I went to some kind of house party musical act - amazaing, beautiful, hypnotic.. held in an old shoe factory become run down warehouse appartment put on by Chay-Ya and the crew from Guns for St Sebastian

with stripy socks jumpers warn as leg warmers talk of conservation sustainability playing the saw with violin strings VICA student with a crystal ball rapping harps double base poetry under a sleeping bag lying beside Amelia performance poet drinking beer with a headache and a hangover watching Rochelle sketch with her eyes taking in short brown hair mullet like tails slipped my hands under the sleeping bag head on a cushion at one with the carpet everyone doing something and when the ball boy responded to the music with his little self caught in the crystal into which he gazed as though mesmerised looking into at himself also looked like an eye to me which was also looking out at him at the rest of us watching i was transfixed tears welling because it was a night where i felt like i belonged. and that i could slip into the carpet or get up and read but either way it didn't matter my way of being was part of their way of being

your eyes

you're horizontal

ticking out tumbling

crowding my space

your blue eye implants

looking at everything

rapping around the folds

of my delineated lifestyle

your tongue tilting backwards

over this untidy space

you are more in my room than i am

what's this dance we're doing

your burial of me

deep in the earth surrounded

by your little clues

that betray

the fact that you live here

and i have dropped into the wallpaper

glued over by blue eyes tying

up pieces

of me

slipped into oblivion under

your better seeing self

(a tribute to The Banger Sisters - a great script)

honeycomb commander

get on your knees and massage me little dog little thing pet of mine because i have long golden locks you could eat like honeycomb

Bibliography of Self

biology must be a composition
bibliography a mysterious chronology
of dates
evaluated evolution
discussed and lineated
separated and constructed
made and remade
for order and sense
this is me i announce
i announce i announce
at any one moment as though
it were true

to dos

horizontidy
things to do within the next three weeks:

spring clean massive throw out of undesirables

- clean my room
- finish this term's teaching
- retreat to my parent's farm
- write the bulk of my MA
- start applying for jobs
- find new volunteering gig
- write and rehearse for fringe fest
- sort out finances
- send card and book to Christos
- visit Joan
- expand understanding of indigenous issues
- draft next uni assignment

negotiations

leaves burnt
doors slammed
no time for coffee

fake smile
lips curled
tight jeans surly

Critical Consciousness

choice is illusory to the degree it represents the expectations of others

p6 Freire Education for Critical Consciousness Continuum: London, 1974.

Anxiety: red heels clicking on chequered marble

I associate this one with red high heels clicking on chequered marble. It's not so much a voice but a clicking thumping fear. Heart beat suffocation. Clang clang clang of the prison warden coming to smash my face in. As a kid I’d lie awake with my ears pressed into the pillow listening to my heartbeat. I didn't know it was my heart. It sounded to me like an impressive woman walking stalking determinedly down an endless corridor. I got to thinking they were red high heels she was wearing. Something about danger, power, sex and blood. I got to thinking it was the prison warden wearing those red high heels. She had signed out at the end of her shift, everyone thought she'd gone. She could do anything she wanted. I got to thinking as I lay there listening to the quickening click to the thump thump thump of her red high heels, that when she reached the end of the long corridor she was going to take off her shoes and... but I could never get beyond that point because I was always too focused on breathing, trying to suck in air, dizzily swallowing oxygen, remembering how to breathe. Eyes blurring while my head shrieked in pain probably because she'd reached me with her red high heels.