tulips don't need satellites

isn't it beautiful? it's the last tulip in miriam's garden.

i've had a productive few days so i actually have stuff to write about. today i made a guest appearance in ziggy's year 9 english classroom. talking to a bunch of fifteen year olds is challenging! they were a perfectly friendly bunch, though, and ziggy has a great repertoire with them, so it all went well. they're doing a novel study of Maus, so i was lecturing on reading images and the relationship between text and image. it was a reprisal of my picture book lecture in a lot of ways, though i didn't cover as much material. i talked through one page of the comic (panelling, frames, background, pov, shading, etc.) then got the students to do their own analysis of another page.

it was funny being in a big high school again. i felt not particularly grownup. but it was very nice to be back in front of a classroom. i do enjoy teaching. (did i mention how glad i am not to be a teenager anymore?)

am still working on getting some sort of paid work in front of a classroom. i've replied to a bunch of ads and have an interview with an ESL school on thursday. wish me luck!


and that's where the tomatoes are at. it's the may long weekend this weekend, which is traditionally when the weather is warm enough for tomato plants to go outside. you have to harden them first, which means bringing them outside each day for gradually longer periods so they adjust to cold and wind before you bung them in the ground and leave them to fend for themselves. lugging all nine in and out each day is quite a process!