Category Archives: between books

Teach your Children Well – – –

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Jack just makes it in time – –

I taught an on-line class yesterday morning and it brought back many memories.

To explain – –

I taught classes in a Scottish college for over twenty years starting with apprentice house painters and ending with management students. I had the opportunity to retire at either age 60 or 65 and might have gone on to 65 if only for the sheer pleasure of actually teaching. But the bureaucracy and paper work was so awful that I chose 60 and don’t regret it.

However, I never lost the pleasure of actually helping a group of people to navigate their learning experiences and I’ve been lucky to continue to be able do that.

Following retirement, I was contracted as a consultant and taught classes in lots of exotic places, then after moving to the US it was mostly more about Scottish culture, language and music.

Sometimes this was very informal just sitting down with friends and sometimes much more academic in lecture halls or classrooms.

In some ways performing as a singer for audiences gave me more confidence to do something similar in front of a group of students. Eventually, I think, it worked the other way too.

The two big role models in my teenage years were both teachers – George Simpson was the woodwork teacher at the high school I attended and Jim Yeats was the newly appointed young painting instructor when I moved on to the local college as part of my apprenticeship as a house painter. If I saw them walking in town and they said hello I felt like I was walking on air!

So if I managed to be a role model myself, then I’ll be well satisfied!

Tom, Tom, the Tiler’s Son

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Jack gets over the line again – –

We are having our main bathroom re-modeled and the guy in charge is called Tom – hence the title of this post.

Wendy had a recent disappointment and as a consolation prize we agreed to get her the nearest thing to the bathroom of her dreams as possible. We did some searching around for potential folk to undertake the work and settled on ‘Tom’.

The trouble is that we quickly discovered that he’s a ‘bletherskite’ – an excellent Scots word for someone who just won’t stop talking. But he mostly talks about anything except the job in hand.

On the odd occasion when he randomly inserts something into the conversation about the job it’s mostly incomprehensible to me. That’s because despite my background in construction, my technical language is from Scotland and it’s very different. For instance, I talked about the stoppers and he talked about the drain and we went about ten minutes waiting for each other to get to the point.

So – a fair bit of mess-communication ensued! Part of that was when he planned to start demolishing the existing stuff. He messaged me mentioning ‘demo’ – well, to a child of the 1960s a demo is when you sit in the road to protest something! When we discovered on Monday that he planned to start the next day we went into a panic because all the bathroom cupboards and closets were still stuffed full. Wendy had just held a yard sale and we had some empty boxes…..

So most of Monday we were desperately removing lots of stuff including things we didn’t know we had or hadn’t seen for years. Then finding where on earth to stash it for the next two weeks. At least we hope it is two weeks. Tom said “15 days” and we can’t translate if that is 15 working days, meaning three weeks????

But Tom and his helper are, right now as I write this, bashing away at the ‘demo’ and I’m hopeful that everything will turn out to be as we want in the end. More correctly, as Wendy wants it.

I’ll keep you posted of course over the next couple of weeks, and yes, we are taking offers of places to shower. Tom has just come in and I asked him about taps.

He cocked his head and said, “You play the trumpet? I came in here to talk to you about faucets.”

But where will we get a bath or a shower in the meantime – – –