Entering the homestretch

Yes we are approaching the endgame here, as I try to figure out how to spend the last little bit of Activity Fund money (the agency alleges that it is use-or-lose, which I find hard to believe), and as with all endings this one is tinged with relief but also regret and pre-nostalgia (I think that was a Tom Lehrer coinage): there are aspects of this place and even this group that I am going to miss. 

Of course there are the obvious things, like the many many different ways in which the Opera House is on my list of the World's Coolest Buildings (this photo was taken on a warm evening when Amelie and I spontaneously decided to take in a Symphony concert in the big hall, and as I waited for her on the esplanade from the ferry terminal I was again struck by how casually wonderful this place is.  The sound was great by the way, even from where we were, up in a side area back of the orchestra where we could spy on the percussion section as they busied themselves with the Rachmaninoff 4th Piano Concerto and Tchaikowsky's Manfred.  Very cool.

   

But to the left here is another of the things I may find myself missing: Sydneysiders take their coffee pretty seriously, and even the little shop on the corner at the top of our street, which treated me to this casual masterpiece, seems to take pride in serving damned good stuff that looks great too.  Sure this "large flat white" (which is the size of a regular cap) costs 4 bucks easy, but hey, I'll support this barista artist in a heartbeat.  On the other hand, the patisserie a little further up the street has pretty good-looking croissants for sale, but I haven't had any yet--not for $5.50 to eat in, $4.80 to take away!

My ducklings are supposedly hard at work on their end of term projects--Friday is the last day of class, and they have to be out of their apartments and homestays on Saturday, and this picture here shows a recent class session where I had the groups of three reading and commenting on each others' draft reports using a web form I developed for my Business and Tech Writing classes back home.  I was able to wangle a computer classroom at Australian Catholic Uni, and was able to adapt my patented routine to the unfamiliar surroundings (a PC lab instead of Macs, a class that had been meeting in conventional classrooms all term, etc).  They did great after a slightly slow start, and I was able to give each group the other groups' comments anonymously within a couple of hours of the finish of the class, thanks to this cool method.

Here's a shot that shows what Alex has been up to, besides driving us slightly crazy.  Mostly on his own accord he volunteered for the Jazz Band at Mosman High--this required him taking the initiative since we had only asked that he attend regular band, and he had to ask the jazz band guy to join late.  His trombone section mates are both female as you see, and he actually learned a lot of music in a hurry.   This gig he was playing at deserves a full post of its own, but you can google the Schools Spectacular and find out about the biggest variety show in the universe.

Mosman's jazz band didn't make the main show, but they were selected to provide entertainment in the foyer both before the show and during intermission.  In this area of the hall they probably had an audience of several hundred, maybe more, and they were a LOT better than most of what we have heard back in Berkeley.

They fill this giant auditorium for two shows--in the area of 10,000 spectators--and the quality of the numbers is stunning.  Some of these kids go on to win "Australia's Got Talent" and then come back to help guest-host, and from the look of it the dancers and drum corps spent half a year rehearsing.  Then the full show is broadcast on New Years Eve, which makes for some odd moments where the emcee asked us to count down and yell "Happy New Year" as if we mean it!  Am and I were able to sneak into the matinee by tagging along ("we're with the band"), watching from the side but surrounded by literally hundreds of chorus kids and so on.  The level of professionalism was ridiculously high, and though one wondered whether the thing had to go on for three hours, Amelie and I had a whole lot of those dropped-jaw moments as the best high schoolers from all over New South Wales did their thing.

That night late he volunteered that he wished that kids at home didn't talk back to teachers so much, because, in his unprompted words, "we get so much more done in band here, because Mr Hardy doesn't let anyone waste any time."  Wow. 

Cool things about Sydney: Maritime Museum

Replica of Cook's Endeavour

 Among the many things-to-do around here, I counted the Maritime Museum high on my list, and I was right to do so.  Last Sunday we enjoyed a sweet day down there, the day after Amelie and Alex had gone there (while I sat at home and worked) and been frustrated by a power outage in the main galleries.  This being Australia and not France, they were given chits to come back next day when everything would be open.  How cool is that?
     So down we went on a bus, then over on foot. This juxtaposition of old and new just struck me hard as I visited the destroyer and submarine--making me appreciate how gutsy these early mariners must have been, to set out for months and years with the kind of tools they had, far more vulnerable than just about anything we do today.  I guess for someone my size the other thing that gets you is just how cramped everything would have been--no headroom, and no privacy anywhere.  And of course, imagining the stench os such a space is hard to imagine as well.

Alex was fascinated by the armaments of course, but has no clue how scary it might have been to have been shot at, no matter how much armor plate there was around him.  I keep thinking back to my own reading back then, the breathless accounts of sub warfare and heroism on aircraft carriers, until it slowly dawned on me that those fighter pilots were literally shitting their pants in fear as they went up against better-trained and better-equipped enemies and saw their friends blown out of the sky...

It's interesting to see how risk-averse he is (something we are thankful for in some respects, except when he doesn't want to leave the bunny slope), given the lack of impulse control in so many other areas.

Of course it wasn't all war stuff, and I was fascinated by this display of rowing-related artifacts.  Here were two fours, one old and one new, arrestingly arranged vertically.  What an amazing effect, to look up forty or fifty feet like this and have this installation.  Then from a mezzanine you got a good look at the guts of the boats without being close enough to touch.

I ended up talking quite a bit with one of the docents at a rebuilt freight-carrying sailing vessel also moored at the docks, appreciating as always just how much care and love these restorers take in their work.  They are "foamers" in the same way that train foamers foam-at-the-mouth about all things related to rail, but somehow it was endearing to have a yarn with these people and catch a glimpse into their world.

Bloggus Interruptus R Us

I have no idea who if any would notice, but it hasn't been a fantastic two weeks for the Peregrinator, at least not in terms of the blog itself.  I suppose that is to be expected: when there are papers to grade, then if I am not doing that task, I feel I should be doing that task--the task of judging, coaching, chastising, coercing, criticizing, cajoling, all with the knowledge that too many of the recipients of these comments and judgments will be unable or unwilling to process them productively.  Moreover, much of the time when I am not teaching or commuting or dealing with logistics of teaching or field trips, I am trying to keep a lid on the domestic pressure cooker.

That last one is a biggie I am afraid.  We are having a tough time with Alex, and when I am feeling bleak (which is too often) I get the impression that I am either preparing for an argument, or arguing, or recovering from an argument.  No matter how Zen I or we try to be, there is conflict--from getting out of bed on school mornings and getting out the door (how much money does he get for lunch? should we check on his homework? does he walk or take the bus?), to waking up super early on weekends to watch cartoons and stupid TV, to screaming fits about not liking whatever food is in front of him, to perverse and inexplicable jags about wanting to sleep outside on the terrace, or absolutely needing to use the USB modem "for homework," to whining about when he can get his iPod Touch back from quarantine (when he puts two no-argument mornings together).

Much of the conflict revolves around screen time, a phenomenon noted by many another parent.  Yet the problems and solutions are never simple.  Remove the TV (or in our case, hide or take the power cable) and you implicitly frame TV as a reward and everything else as drudgery that has to be done to get that reward.  IUn-restrict TV and you have a couch potato whose capacity for mindless cartoons and junk is seemingly endless--and whose surliness increases with each hour of watching.  I recall my mom's adamant refusal to have TV dictate family schedules (at least when we were growing up--in their retirement I recall my parents choreographing all manner of meals according to when particular programs were on, picked up amid horrendously bad reception through an antenna rotor mounted on a hundred-foot pine tree on their property)(what would they have said about hundreds of channels, on demand movies, instantly programmable screen-within-screen DVR?).

For an addictive personality, the screen is a drug with infinite possibilities.  High functioning as I am, I have experienced touches of this syndrome when I have zoned out in front of the big-screen here before A & A arrived, even without having discovered the channels beyond the broadcast ones.  But for Alex and his ilk, there seems to be no resistance.  Where is the drug that makes TV nauseating? Where is the operant conditioning modality that increases the electric shock with each passing quarter-hour? Almost everyone I know has gone through some phase of screen addiction, whether it was infantile Tetris binges that finally ended with the rain of shapes cascading your pre-sleep self-castigation, or solitaire on the sly, or borderline obsessive-compulsive Words With Friends--but there's usually an endpoint, a recovery, perhaps a realization that (just as my dad used to say about never having started smoking) "I don't want to try to prove I'm stronger than that."

I hear the same litany from so many other parents--at whatever stage of screen and game immersion thay happen to have landed.  We have so far held the line against xBoxes and Playstations and Nintendos, with only the infinitely-seductive Apple garden of iPod Touch to contend with at home.  And we are lucky to share basic values between both parents.  Pity those in post-nuclear families, where for example a feckless mom gives her eight-year-old an unlocked iPhone, just to spite the dad--it truly makes me wonder where we are headed.

Will there be a pendulum swing?  Or at least an equilibrium?  I truly don't know.  There's a toxicity of connectivity I see in other phases of Modern Life--witness the paucity of un-connected bus riders I see on my commute--but leave that aside and consider just the impact on youth like Alex.  Leave aside whether cartoons or reality TV are intrinsically degrading or merely insipid entertainment--I ask myself what are the opportunity costs of spending so much time that way.  Time in front of the screen is time not spent doing something else.  Time not reading.  Time not walking or exercising, time not building stuff, time not interacting meaningfully with others, time not getting practice dealing with anything except what a broadcaster wants to use to keep your face in front of commercials for a little while longer (until the remote is pushed with all the languid determination of the opium smoker).

Yet even here, a reversal suggests itself: we make his behaviors the pathology, yet we ourselves are increasingly in the minority, believing the way we do.  We are the abnormal, in the sense that we are resisting the dominant paradigm that every increase in screen connectivity is to be embraced.  I suppose that for parents like us the only response is to hold our own within a particular jurisdiction, to control what we can control, and not bemoan the rest.  Otherwise one goes mad.

So perhaps I can return to blogging about excursions and the vagaries of this three-ring circus they call study abroad.  But for a half hour I allowed myself to type without much editing, to reflect on a deep and distressing undercurrent in my life, and perhaps to help myself let go to focus on something else.