Rant

What are you curious about?

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What are you curious about?
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What are you curious about?

I am curious about how you generate prompts for people to write about. Do you put words in a hat and pull them out? Or do you examine a multitude of Christmas crackers to see what words of wisdom are contained within them? As for me, I am curious about Olde Curiosity Shoppes and the curious things that one finds in them.

I am also curious about aliens. There are so many of them. At night, they often invade my brain and stamp around causing enormous damage up there. I think they think the own the place, throwing parties at two in the morning and chanting things that shouldn’t be chanted. They embarrass me. Even worse they sometimes shame me. You should hear the things they say and sing. Snippets of old rugby songs and limericks that never even saw the shores of the Emerald Isle. Sometimes, next day, they are still partying, and those little snippets go earwigging their way on and on.

What’s worse, they speak several languages and I hear them chanting in Latin, French, English, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Galician, and even in Welsh. As for the Welsh, it rolls on and on – ar hyd a nos – in fact they sing until Harry is hoarse. I looked in the mirror one morning, and I saw a whole crowd of them waving their tentacles like multiple octopi and chanting yma o hyd. And yes, indeed, they were still there. They weren’t going anywhere. They followed me around all day.

Another thing about which I am curious – how do I de-alienate the aliens who have alienated me from my old peaceful world of curiosity shops? “Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho, tell me if you know, who the, why the, where the, what the, where do aliens go?”

And if you happen to be curious about what makes me tick, well, I have a long arm and a short one, just like a grandfather clock, and a key in the middle of my back with which you can wind me up and set me off on any topic, however curious it may be. Just light the blue paper and retire.

What makes a teacher great?

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What makes a teacher great?
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What makes a teacher great?

When Moo descended from Mount Academia, he brought down with him the ten tenets to which great teachers, knowingly or unknowingly, commit. He asked me to transcribe them here, since they were in danger of being neglected and / or forgotten.

  1. Mastery of the subject – great teachers know their subjects inside out. They do not read their graduate school notes to their students, heads bowed, chins on chest, droning on in a low, boring mumble. They encourage questions and are open to debate with their students about the subject that they know so well and openly love.

    Master thy subject.

  2. Humility – great teachers are humble. They know that they are not omniscient. They also know that knowledge changes across time and that they too must change and follow new ideas. They also know, perhaps instinctively, that some of their students are as intelligent as they are. They never dismiss their young charges as idiots, fools, or lunatics to be beaten and forced into the required shape.

    Be humble.

  3. Flexibility – great teachers are flexible, not rigid. They can bend the rules, reshape the syllabus, change pace and tone to match the needs of their students. In addition, they ask their students about their needs and try to address those needs in a personal way, sometimes on a one on one basis.

    Be flexible.

  4. Reaching out – great teachers reach out to their students as a group and as individuals. They never paint themselves into the know-all corner where they alone know best, and they know, with absolute certainty, what’s best for their students. Great teachers know, above all, that one size, in great teaching, neither fits nor benefits all.

    Reach out.

  5. Equal treatment – great teachers treat their students equally. They do not fawn on the best and scorn the worst, nor do they teach by the WWII convoy system, teaching only at the speed of the slowest. By extension, great teachers try to create an atmosphere of love in learning and joy in the subject.

    Practice equality.

  6. Honesty – great teachers are honest, fiercely honest. They know their own strengths and weaknesses, their own limitations. They work on their weaknesses, striving to turn them into strengths. They also push the boundaries of their limitations, striving always to keep up with the ever-changing frontiers of knowledge.

    Be honest.

  7. Human beings – great teachers know that they are human beings and they recognize early on in their careers, that while they are teaching a subject, they are also preparing fellow humans for a life beyond the ivy-covered walls of academia. By extension, they emphasize the humanity of their students and try always to develop and sustain that humanity.

    Be human.

  8. The meaning of meaning – great teachers reach out beyond their subjects to teach the meaning of meaning. Why is the subject important? What can each individual use this hard-earned knowledge for, in their own lives? How can they reshape their own lives and create better ways of learning and living? This teams up with reaching out and enters the realm of learning for learning’s sake and love of learning and love of knowledge.

    Love thy learning.

  9. Creativity – great teachers are creative. They open their students’ minds to new ideas, fresh knowledge, better ways of doing things. They never use phrases like ‘thinking outside the box’ and they do not build better boxes, one or two sizes larger than current boxes, inside which their students must now sit, work, and think. Creative teachers tear down the walls of medieval academia and open their students’ minds to the winds of change and fresh knowledge.

    Be creative.

  10. Life long learning – great teachers teach students how to think for themselves, how to teach themselves, how to self-assess, how to check and double-check the knowledge (all too often nowadays, fake news and / or false knowledge) handed down to them from a multitude of sources, far too many of them unreliable. Great teachers teach their students to know themselves. They also teach them how to work out whether a source is a reliable fount of information, or not. In short, they teach life long learning and neither they, nor their students, ever give up hope.


    Teach Life Long Learning.

Are there things you try to practice daily to live a more sustainable lifestyle?

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Are there things you try to practice daily to live a more sustainable lifestyle?
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Are there things you try to practice daily to live a more sustainable lifestyle?

Let me begin by asking a straightforward question – what on earth does this question mean? Permit me to begin with the word lifestyle. I googled it and got the following – 1. a set of attitudes, habits, or possessions associated with a particular person or group. 2. such attitudes, etc, regarded as fashionable or desirable. Let me now google sustainable. Here’s what I found – 1. able to be maintained at a certain rate or level – “sustainable fusion reactions”. 2. able to be upheld or defended – “sustainable definitions of good educational practice”. 3. Sustainability is ability to maintain or support a process over time. Sustainability is often broken into three core concepts: economic, environmental, and social.

This is all very interesting indeed. So, what can I practice daily that will allow me to maintain “sustainable fusion reactions”? Answers via snail mail, trained snails please, via the North Pole, to arrive by Christmas, if the snails can maintain the pace. What can I practice daily to “uphold or defend sustainable definitions of good educational practice”? Good question as a retired former teacher, I have to admit that there is very little I can do about an academic world, already moribund, that I left fifteen years ago. As for the three core concepts of economic sustainability, environmental sustainability, and social sustainability, well, I really don’t know what to say.

Economic sustainability – I look at the growing number of homeless and the multitude of retirees who are forced out of their homes or apartments and onto the streets by rising rents, and I feel fear and dismay. I watch prices rise and my savings fall – you tell me, pretty please, what can I do about it? Hope? Pray? Petition? Buy less? I already do that. Eat less? I already do that. I can control a certain amount around my own house and home, but there’s little I can do about homelessness and the stock exchange and the cost of living.

Social sustainability. Covid brought shutdown (2020) and shutdown meant a great many friendships and connections were broken. It is hard, at my advancing age, to establish new friends, begin new relationships, or renew connections with friends who are happy to remain disconnected. Besides which, a year or more of masking, not meeting, not leaving home, changes one’s lifestyle. It is hard, as I say, to gear up and start again.

Environmental sustainability. “Drill, baby, drill.” What can I do, on a daily basis, to stop drillers drilling, miners mining, polluters polluting, forest fires burning? I certainly try to pollute as little as possible on a daily basis – but – I do not own an open cast mine, an oil refinery, nor do I have an oil field to exploit, nor a space ship to launch like a modern day Noah’s Ark, to escape the deliberate destruction I am doing to the earth. Clearly, I try not to play with matches, especially on a hot dry day. But that’s mainly a cross between courtesy and common sense. To phrase it another way, I certainly didn’t guzzle up all the cod on the Grand Banks, or allow the sewage from a major sewage works to overflow into rivers, lakes, and seas in order to save money and make larger profits for my friends and shareholders.

Given my limitations, yes there are things I do on a daily basis to live a more sustainable lifestyle. I eat less. Go out less. Exercise and stretch more. Try to recycle as much as possible. Try not to over indulge and to make my daily bread stretch as far as possible, sometimes into a second or third day. I would, if I could, buy seven loaves and five fishes, go out into a central square, and feed a multitude. But, alas, something like that is really way beyond both me and my pension level.

How do you waste the most time every day?

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How do you waste the most time every day?
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How do you waste the most time every day?

Answering stupid questions like these – now that would be a great response. But there are other ways to waste time – like mousing around on the computer – some call it surfing, which sounds like fun – but acting like a mouse that’s chasing its own tail / tale, well, that is most surely a waste of time. Playing verbal cat and mouse games is a good way to go too.

Most devilish of all, sitting in a car, beside a lollipop person, who has just stepped out and stopped you from joining the car, ten yards ahead of you, that is now the last car in the latest convoy to be held up, while you are now the first car waiting to go next time. You sit, and sit, and wait.

Then – INSPIRATION – I turn my disc player on and lo and behold – Pete Seeger sings The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, from the Spanish Civil War. What’s special about that, you ask? Well, how about the chorus? – “No pasara’n! No pasara’n!” / “They shall not pass! They shall not pass!” sang the Abe Lincoln Brigade as the battle for Madrid thundered on. I open the car window, turn up the volume, bellowing it out loud while waiting to count the cars coming from the opposite direction.

It was a very long wait. And then the first of 109 cars, trucks, and various other vehicles appeared. Bored now with The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, I changed quickly to Viva la Quinta Brigada, kept the volume up high and “No Pasara’n! The pledge that made them fight” rang out as the official truck with its magic sign “Follow me!” crept up in front of me, turned, and started to crawl, snail mail style, down almost two kilometres of highway at 10 KPH.

When we got to the end of the road works, he turned into someone’s driveway, and I, and the next two cars behind me, followed him. I learned a few choice words to add to my vocabulary – “Like WTF do you think you are doing?” “It says follow me! on your truck.” I replied. ” I just did.” And off he went again on a long, four letter rant. Then, on foot, he stood in front of the convoy that had stalled anyway, now having nobody to follow, and guided his three black sheep out onto the road that led to freedom.

Well, that was an adventure and an absolutely total waste of time. As the court case will be, when I appear before the magistrate next week. Believe you me, if you believe all this, you would believe anything. And, congratulations, you have just successfully wasted another five minutes of your precious time and I have wasted ten of mine writing this piece.

If humans had taglines, what would yours be?

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If humans had taglines, what would yours be?
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If humans had taglines, what would yours be?

I really only want a one word tag – poet, and that’s the name of my blog – rogermoorepoet.com.

An award-winning teacher, researcher, poet, and short-story writer, I was born in Swansea, the same town as Dylan Thomas, the famous Welsh poet, whom I emulated in my youth. I wrote poetry throughout my childhood, but I never took lessons, nor was I known as a poet.

Early in 1962, I sent a sonnet to the poetry competition of the Stroud Festival of Religion and the Arts. I left school and was studying in Paris, when the results came out and I discovered that I had won first place in that competition. In my absence, a deserving boy from my school was sent to pick up the award, a book of poetry, signed by Ursula Vaughan Williams. The poem was published in Trydan and I have a copy of it somewhere.

Throughout my undergraduate career (1963-1966), I wrote poetry. Much of my early work appeared in my university’s student arts review, The Nonesuch Magazine – the Flower of Bristol that giveth great light. Alas, I was not studying English, and only the English students seemed capable of being called poets, so I was always called something else. I wrote a lot about nature, back then. One day, when I hand delivered my poetry submission, the editor of Nonesuch, an English student, asked me if I was a pantheist. “Good heavens, no,” I told him. “I’ve got a girl friend.” This answer did nothing in university circles to affirm my wanna be status as a poet.

Some of these poems survived and a couple appeared in Stars at Elbow and Foot. Here is one from Last Year in Paradise.

St. Mary Redcliffe

Time and Temple Meads
have begrimed your wand-thin spire,
the tallest in England.

You waved goodbye
to the Cabot boys,
Nova Scotia bound,
as they set sail.

Starlings lime your belfry,
gift and inspiration
of Merchant Adventurers,
that gentlemen’s company.

Worms wriggle and gnaw
at your ship’s figure-head,
harbored now, bare-breasted,
sturdy in your oak-beam nave.

Rust rustles and creaks
at the Edney Gates,
wrought to last centuries
by Bristol ironmasters,
themselves apprenticed
to learn time’s laws.

I call myself a poet. I think of myself as a poet. In Santander, Spain, I was known as the mad Welsh poet! What an honour it would be to have Roger Moore Poet as my tagline. I’d rather leave the ‘mad Welsh’ out.

But why stop at one tagline? I am also an award winning teacher and researcher. And a long-term rugby coach. How would they be as tags? Roger Moore Coach? Roger Moore Teacher? Roger Moore Researcher? Not quite the same thing. No resonance and I can produce no links to attach to those names. They are much more run of the mill. Anyone can be a coach, a teacher, a researcher. Not everyone can be a poet, let alone a famous poet, like Dylan Thomas. Besides which, I live in Idlewood, not Milkwood.

There is one other alternative, however. Roger Moore 007. Alas, that one belongs to someone much more famous than me, even though we share the same name. But I might go one step further. How about 3M-007? That would do at a pinch – pretty unique – there aren’t many of them about! I love it. So there we go – a choice of two taglines, either of which fit – Roger Moore Poet and Roger Moore 3M-007.

Which one would you choose for me? “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” But remember, I ain’t no rose. So please don’t tread on the tails of my all-disguising, multi-colored 3M-007 poetry coat.

We’ll Rant and We’ll Rage …

We’ll Rant and We’ll Rage …

Spring is here. An election is near. Road repair season has started.

1. Spring potholes – they are terrible and they are everywhere.

It was so bad in one area of town that people filled them with water and put out little plastic yellow ducks to float on them.

That way they could be seen, which saved the loud clunk of them being heard and felt.

In one place, some street artist used the potholes as the centerpiece for porno pictures.

Success –  early next morning, the potholes had been filled in.

2. Spring road repairs – horrific – and all too abundant.

We have a sign at the bottom of road saying “Caution – Construction  – drive carefully for the next 6 kms.”

At the 1 km mark, a lollipop person with a STOP sign. 

Ahead of us, 24 cars – behind us, the traffic line up is building. 

We wait 15 minutes.

A white half ton appears, followed by a line of cars. 

The half ton pulls into a drive ahead of us.

We count the cars as they drive past.

99 of them. Then a pause.

The white half ton reverses out of the drive and pulls up in front of us.

On his tail gate a sign that says “FOLLOW ME”.

He pulls away, and the first car follows him, as do we all.

He drives at 10-15 kph.

After 1.4 kms, we see the road works – the actual working space is less than 200 meters long.

We keep driving. 

At the 3 km mark, the white half ton turns off, into someone’s drive.

Alas, the driver of the first car has no sense of humor and doesn’t follow the leader into the drive but sets off at speed down the road.

I count the cars that are waiting to return – 59 of them and more arriving.

It has taken us close to 25 minutes to negotiate 200 meters of road repair.

3. Bridge closures – there are three bridge crossings from the south side to the north side of the river.

One is at Mactaquac, over the dam, about 15 kms up stream from the Westmoreland Bridge, the central crossing point. 

The Mactaquac crossing has been reduced to ‘one way at a time’ traffic for the last two or three years, and will stay like that for most of the summer. 

Don’t ask, they won’t tell and I can’t tell, because I don’t understand.

The third bridge is the Princess Margaret. 

It is closed to all traffic for the next five weeks and this is the third year that someone has been working on it.

So, for the next five weeks, we are all reduced to crossing the river by one bridge, the Westmoreland, unless we drive 15 kms to a ‘one way at a time’ crossing or 20 kms down river to the Burton Bridge at the Town of Oromocto.

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light!
My thanks to my good friend, Dana Webster who inspired me to write this by sending me a rant of her own. NB Click here to link Dana’s Creative World.

What public figure do you disagree with the most?

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What public figure do you disagree with the most?
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What public figure do you disagree with the most?

Some definitions please. What is a public figure? There are several statues in my local park. Are these public figures? If they are, how do you, or I, disagree with them when they can’t reply to our questions? Their mere presence, is that enough? Their historical past? Their figures now cast in bronze or stone? The crimes they committed (in our current opinion) from a time in which they did good (their society’s position)? “Judge not lest ye be judged!” We are all walking on thin ice and I do not wish to be the one who casts the first stone.

What is a public figure? A politician – provincial, regional, national, international? A TV personality? A film star? A rapper? A musician? A teacher? A preacher? A newscaster? A hockey player? A baseball star?

And how do you define disagreement? How do you disagree, and in what ways, with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the Song of Joy, even if you are a Beatle and can sing “Roll over Beethoven” or mimic it on a Tuesday night in the local bar at a Karaoke show?

How do you define the most without defining the category and nature of disagreement? Mozart vs Bach vs Beethoven vs Vaughan Williams? Wordsworth vs Byron vs Donne vs Dylan Thomas? So let us go back to the beginning, and ask again “What is a public figure?” “How do you define disagreement? And how do you categorize “the most”?

Goya vs Velasquez vs Turner vs Dali vs Picasso?

“What’s the definition of Baroque?” “When you’re out of Monet.” Come on, you’re joking, aren’t you. “You’re having me on, aren’t you? You’re having me on.” “Pull the other leg. It’s got bells on.”

And I offer a nod of gratitude to The Two Ronnies and my good friend, Moo, who painted the painting that leads into this blog. He called it “In search of enlightenment.”

And no, I don’t disagree with him. But is he a public figure? Or just a figment of my imagination? And if he is a figment of my imagination, what, dear reader, are you?

What is your career plan?

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What is your career plan?
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What is your career plan?

“Pull the other one, it’s got bells on,” as the comedian said on our old black and white TV back in the late fifties when the television shows first started. My grandfather bought that TV in 1953 in order for us to watch the Coronation of Elizabeth II. I was nine years old at the time. Now I am – hold on – “How old am I? Let me count the days” – as Shakespeare might have written, if he had actually written his own plays and poems. Or were all those glorious words written by a conspiracy of authors who then had their work claimed by some else aka Willy the Shake? Snake oil, all of it, or as they say in some parts of Wales – blydi hel.

I wonder how many of my readers know how to play Tute, a Spanish card game, slightly akin to whist? Well, in it you score by singing – Canto las veinte – o canto las cuarenta – well, I am well on my way to winning my game of Tute because Canto las ochenta!

So, at eighty years of age, after fifteen years in retirement, what sort of career plan can anyone have? Plan – is it a detailed proposal for doing or achieving something? Or might it be – an intention or decision about what one is going to do? As for career – is it an occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person’s life and with opportunities for progress?

So, in my retirement, what opportunities are there for progress when I seem to be regressing most of the time? And what plans can I make when the unplanned knocks on my door at irregular, uncomfortable intervals?

And that’s the problem with prompts and life in general – one size designed to fit all and I do not fit in. Never have. I no longer have a career. I no longer have any plans. I drift with the winds and the waves “as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.”

I guess my only plan is to stay afloat for as long as possible and to avoid, if I can, that deadly dive down, down, down, into Admiral Brown, and down to Davey’s Locker.

What makes you laugh?

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What makes you laugh?
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What makes you laugh?

The current state that the world is in. Seems like a strange answer, doesn’t it? Wars, famine, plagues, diseases, fire, flood, earthquakes, drought, what is there to laugh at? All of it, of course. Because if I didn’t laugh at it, I would cry. And crying – well, there just aren’t enough tears, are there? Anyway, as the Reader’s Digest used to say “Laughter is the best medicine.” So, if we want to heal the world, we must first learn to laugh at it.

In fact, there are many things we should be laughing at – politics and politicians, for one. Or is that two? Chuckling away – it’s hard to tell them apart nowadays. In fact, if we laughed right out loud at the folies bergeres who masquerade as wise men, can-can dancers who actually can’t-can’t, and decision makers who really can’t decide, then that laughter would be the last straw that would break the camel’s back and dump them all on their backsides in the desert where they belong. There, they would be voices ‘crying in the wilderness’, crying indeed, for deprived of their privileges, none of them would be laughing. But we would. And we’d probably be a great deal better off.

New words also make me laugh. Homicide, femicide, domicide, ecocide, countrycide – tell me, who makes up these names? Who keeps popping them into the dictionary? And if they mean what I think they mean, we should all be on our knees, praying and weeping. It’s like fake suicide. That happens when push comes to shove, and the subsequent defenestration is deemed a suicide.

Look at Moo’s painting, Burning Birbi. Now that is something to really make you cry. Moo tells me he was going to call it Burning Bush, but then he remembered all the poor birbis who were burned to death in the Australian Bush Fires. They ascended the eucalyptus trees for safety, and there, of course, they met their sad and tragic fate, while trying to escape the conflagration. I can laugh many things off. But not the fate of those cuddly little Koalas, brought to the edge of destruction by our treatment of their natural habitat.

Welsh proverb – “Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry, and you cry alone.” So, I am laughing at it all. I have to – or else I will suffer a break down. So, laugh with me, and let the real losers cry in the wilderness, hermits all, abandoned to their lonesome own-somes.

How has technology changed your job?

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How has technology changed your job?
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How has technology changed your job?

I suppose I must begin by saying that, having retired fifteen years ago, I no longer have a job. So, Technology has not changed my job at all. However, when I was actually working full time, technology made an enormous impact on my work.

Keeping up with the Jones’s! I travelled to Oaxaca, Mexico, on a faculty exchange program in 1995 and was astonished to find that the Escuela de Idiomas of UABJO, had better computer and technology features than I did in my home university. I was way behind the Oaxacans in what I taught and how to deliver it. How to catch up, that was the question!

In 1996, I started a Multi-Media Certificate at the University of New Brunswick, completing it in 1999. As a result of this certificate, my beloved and I built our first web pages and produced our first Quevedo Online Bibliography. This also enabled me to start teaching a course entitled Mexico Online. This course took place in the university’s computer laboratory and, instead of requiring written papers, it asked the students to create their own web pages and to do their own online research.

This was the first step into the brave new world of WebCT, Blackboard, and the many other web platforms that rapidly became available, often at great cost to the student. Student costs – well, they skyrocketed. So, I did my best to cut them down. Texts, especially literary texts, in online format, for free. A formal course outline, online, discussed with the students each term, and changed in accordance with each class’s particular needs. This guaranteed that teaching and learning were both flexible, and did not become bogged down by the trap of the one course, set “in electronic stone” for all eternity. This is a trap into which far too many teachers fall. The everlasting course, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, taught without further changes and with no end, amen. No thought, no development, and knowledge a static state.

But technology also changed the teaching environment. We began with the static classroom with rows and rows of desks looking down on the stage where the professors, at the podium, performed their annual circus acts of passing knowledge from their notes to the students’ notes, without it passing through anybody’s head, as my first prof in my first university once told the class.

Then we moved to the chairs and tables classroom, where the professors could, if they chose, wander among the students, get to know them by their names, and create a dynamic small group teaching environment in which each individual received increased professorial attention if and when needed.

Enter Technology. The Computer screen replaced the black, green, white board (I have scrawled with chalk and marker pens on all of them). Classrooms became fixed spaces again. And the computer program doubled with, or replaced, the formal lecture. Static knowledge delivered to stationary students sitting and passively watching.

They were called smart classrooms. My favorite moment of the day? When I stood up and asked the class if this was indeed a smart classroom. Yes sir, they always replied. I would tap on the wall and ask the wall – “What’s two plus two?” The class would wait and wait. No answer. I would ask again. No answer. “Not such a smart classroom, then,” I would tell them.

Technology is great, as a tool for genuine teaching and learning. But it brings problems with it, as we are beginning to find out. Brainwashing, false information, erroneous material that misleads, quite often deliberately … Quis custodiet ipsos custodies? Who shall police the police? Who shall program the programmers? Perhaps the Romans, all that time ago, had it right. Caveat emptor – buyer beware.