Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Apple Basket!
I hope you have had a good week; mine has been
somewhat active, so on top of all the activities of last weekend, this one is being
rather quiet. The snow is gently falling outside, and we are all settled in
with our quiet pursuits.
I am going to bake for today’s afternoon coffee:
homemade Fastelavnsboller, which are
cream-filled sweet rolls or Danish pastry, traditional for Shrovetide. Mine
will be rolls rather than Danish, with a marzipan filling. And, by the way: in
Danish, ‘Danish’ is not called ‘Danish’, but ‘Vienna bread’. Such are the ways
of the world.
This week, I rant about conditions for teachers, and
as always give you an update on my knitting.
The
Apple of the Week:
Recently, our lovely politicians seem to have it out
for teachers on all levels of school, both the folkeskole (something like primary and lower secondary), years 0-9,
and the gymnasium (upper secondary /
high school), years 10-12.
The common consent is claimed to be that teachers do
not work enough, what with only 16 or 18 or 20 hours of ‘real’ work a week (and
not even proper hours: most schools still have lessons of only 45 minutes) and
ridiculously long holidays.
Someone has even calculated that teachers at a
gymnasium work 9 hours a week. Yes, nine.
How do you come up with that number?
There are several phases: first, you count all of the academic staff, including the
headmaster, the administrators, the counsellors, the guy (or gal) who manages
the library, all of whom are traditionally trained as teachers, but who
obviously do not all teach full time, and add up their number of teaching
hours.
Next, you divide that number by (1) the number of
above mentioned people and by (2) 46: the number of weeks in the year minus the
6 weeks of vacation that everybody in the workforce is entitled to. Note that
the break weeks, in which no students are at school, are included in the number
of supposed teaching weeks, as is the exam period.
Finally, you set teaching
hours to equal work hours, ignoring
planning, preparation, evaluation, meetings, marking of papers and
performances, &c.
And voila: you have proved that teachers work much
less than everybody else.
Anyone who has ever tried teaching will instantly
know, of course, how preposterous this is. I am continually amazed – and angry –
that it can be put forth again and again, that reporters and politicians can
get away with so blatant a lie. Who would demand that actors are only paid for
the time they are on stage or in front of a camera? Or musicians? They are not,
as it is sometimes claimed, paid a vast amount of money for a couple of hours’
concert; they are paid a pittance for the vast number of hours of practice they
put in before the concert.
Or the politicians themselves? Would they want to be
paid only for the time they actually speak in the House?
I am reminded of a tale I heard recently, about the
Emperor of China:
The
Emperor was a great collector of art, particularly images of horses. He had
jade horses, gold horses, wooden horses, and horses made of porcelain. One day,
he heard of an artist, the most talented maker of charcoal drawings in the
known world. ‘He must draw me a horse!’ the Emperor said to himself; and he
sent an envoy to speak to the artist.
The
envoy rode out to find the artist, who lived far away from the city, up in the
mountains, in a little cabin. And back he came, with the answer that the Emperor
could have his drawing in six months, and it would cost him 10,000 gold pieces.
‘No problem,’ said the Emperor; he had plenty of gold.
Time
went by, and when the six months were almost gone, the Emperor became impatient
for his drawing. So he ordered up his retinue and set off, out of the city, far
out into the mountains, to seek out the artist in his little cabin.
The
Emperor entered into the cabin, looking about him, but seeing no drawing. ‘I
have come for the drawing you promised me,’ he said to the artist.
‘All
right,’ said the artist; and he took a piece of charcoal from the fireplace and
with a few quick strokes drew a horse. It was a magnificent beast, with a
flying mane, a spark in the eyes, ready to leap right off the paper and gallop
away. ‘You can leave the 10,000 gold pieces over there,’ said the artist and
turned to carry on what he had been doing when the Emperor walked in.
The
Emperor admired the drawing of the horse; but still, he was puzzled and
somewhat annoyed. Why had he had to wait for six months? And pay 10,000 gold
pieces for a drawing that took less than a minute to do?
‘Oh,’
said the artist casually. ‘You can have those too, if you want.’ He pointed to
a huge pile of paper lying on top of the wood stack. ‘Those are the 9,999 less than perfect
attempts to draw a horse.’
The negotiations for work and wages in the gymnasiums have
been finalised now, resulting in more pay, it seems, and more teaching. For
those who are not fired, that is: with the same number of students and lessons,
and each teacher having to take on more, many schools will have to either fire
or not hire teachers.
The secretary for finance, Bjarne Corydon, is pleased
and calls this a ‘solid’ and ‘responsible’ result; read: he has managed to save
some money and at the same time bully the teachers. And he is supposed to be a
Social Democrat.
The real results will be seen when either even more
teachers snap under the strain of a job that already has a high frequency of
stress, or the quality of the education that the students get sinks to a new
low, if everybody insists on working the hours instead of the task.
I can only be glad that my teaching days are over, and
that I haven’t exerted myself to try to get back into it after a stress-related depression
that has left me with lingering remains of social phobia. It would have been a
slap in the face to start up again in these circumstances.
And that will have to do as an ending on a happy note;
it is somewhat difficult to be optimistic about the future of education the way
things are going.
Knitting is much more pleasant: you can always make
the knitting do what you want and get decent results out of that; nobody
ambushes your efforts or tries to denigrate them (apart, maybe, from USOC last
summer, but never mind about them).
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And then there’s the cat to cheer me up – he just decided
to take a walk on the wild side:
So,
The
Knitting:
Last Sunday, I discovered that the lovely Martine of
iMake podcast fame has put up a free cowl pattern, the Splendid Striped Cowl. This
is an easy, striped cowl in stocking stitch, knitted on the bias and grafted
into a big loop.
And as I was going to a school function Wednesday
evening, I needed something simple yet not boring to bring along.
The function was the presentation of 8th
grade projects, which Victor has been working on for several weeks together
with a partner, who unfortunately fell ill last week, when all the writing had
to be done. So Victor wrote it by himself – and presented it by himself, all
alone on stage with his PowerPoint presentation. He would have preferred his
guitar. But he did well; the umbrella subject was ‘On the Way ...’, and these
two had chosen bio ethics: On the way to
the perfect human, looking both at gene modification and mechanical
prostethics. Other groups tackled youth culture, education, recycling,
multiculturalism, global economics, &c.
Anyway, this entailed 1½ hours of watching &
listening, so I did the provisional cast-on at home to have the fiddly bit done
and then simply knitted stripes with in- and decreases on the RS rows. A fun
knit; not at all demanding, but the stripes and the shaping add knitting
interest – and I look forward to the warmth it will give to my neck.
An added bonus was that I finally got round to
frogging a couple of items that I knitted nearly 2½ years ago and practically
never wore: my Wayfarer wrap, from Rowan Magazine 48, and a little shoulder warmer of my own invention. The Wayfarer is big and chunky and romantic – but ultimately
unpractical in a climate that is mostly wet and / or windy or too cold to not
wear a proper coat. Besides, even the small size was too large and kept
slipping down over one shoulder. So, much as I liked this thing and enjoyed
knitting it, it has been languishing by the frog pond for a while. The shoulder
warmer suffered from comparable, though different failures: too chunky and
impractical.
And now they are frogged and ready to be reborn as
this lovely cowl and ... something else. I know what I want to knit, but I don’t
want to mention it before I actually get to it, so watch this space :o)
The anklet bed socks are done, and now that they have
dried out after their soak to get the extra dye out, I can try them on and take
pictures. The dye surplus is all my own doing; the yarn is dyed with a healthy amount
of logwood to get the deep colour, and it does tend to crock. So my fingers
were purple for a while there; I still have a faint trace of it across my left
index finger, where the yarn runs over.
My driftwood jumper, named Juniper on Ravelry, because
the colour of the yarn reminds me of juniper bushes on the heath, is coming
along nicely. I have done all the increases around the shoulder part, and right
now I am just working back & forth in stocking stitch below the armholes,
waiting to join to work in the round below the opening. So far, so good.
And the Blues Riffs socks for Victor, the first of
them anyway, is moving towards the heel; the gusset is rather elongated, with
increases on every 3rd round instead of the usual every 2nd
round. I say ‘usual’: that could only reveal how little experience I have with
sock knitting. I may have to report back on that issue in about 20 sock
patterns’ time.
Anyway, now the riff pattern is showing itself on the
instep and looking very neat.
And the KnitPro cubic dpns ... I promise, they are not
paying me for this (although maybe they should, lol): they are lovely. Pointy
and not bendy like 2 mm bamboo
needles. They are not all that long, mind you, so I have to watch the stitches
a bit now that I have a lot of them going all at once; but that is just a phase,
when I get to the heel, it will sort itself out.
Let’s see, is there any other knitting news?
Oh, I found the yarn for my nephew’s birthday sweater;
in my stash – which doesn’t mean, of course, that I don’t want to spend on him,
only that I have already done it. And I am contemplating a pattern. His
birthday is 28th March, so there’s no rush, but it does help to have
a starting point. Now I have to ask my sister for his measurements; he will only
be 2, but as his dad is two metres tall, this little guy is tall, too – as is his
sister. So usually, one can go with the age-appropriate measurements in width
and add a bit lengthwise.
This project I will get back to in a while: no pics
before the big day to not spoil anything, but it will be mentioned here.
And I am almost ready to release a pattern in my
Ravelry shop, The Apple Basket. I have some patterns there already, some free,
some for sale, and I am working my way through the design notes I have sitting
around to eventually get everything put out there in both English and Danish.
The one I am writing up now is Pomona, a lacy summer cardigan that I made a
couple of years ago; my task is to go through the pattern and clarify all the
notes-to-self instructions, so that they are accessible to others. And, of
course, make sure that everything makes sense and that there are not any
errors.
That’s it for this week – I will be back next week
with a report on how we survived the winter break that is just beginning :o)
Stay happy, stay healthy, and keep crafting!
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