Sitting in the dark

Drat.

After a 4:20 am start yesterday, I practically fell into bed last night, after having already spent an hour in the dark all by myself – well, with just the bewildered Jack Russell terrier for company, who was racing around the house trying to work out why I’d switched off everything electrical and all was now in the blackness. The battery in the emergency Dolphin torch lasted all of four minutes into Earth Hour, and it was impossible to read by the light of flickering candles. How did they do it in the old days?

But, of course, I’d forgotten to change the “Auto” setting on the alarm clock – and it dutifully woke me up, bright and early this morning. On a Sunday, when I didn’t have to be anywhere.

Now that I’ve slept on the events of the last two information-overload days of the ASLA conference (see my last two entries), I realise exactly which bits of my material I should have used on Friday (my ten-minute segment of a 70-minute panel), when the captive audience was huge. It’s all so clear now; I should have started off the panel talk on the Saturday with a public reading of my favourite student-written fable. I’d been so focused on using it to kick off my tutorial yesterday (a one-hour session), which was in a comparatively tiny room, and a much smaller group. Sigh…

In the clearing haze of my ruined slumber at 6:00 am this morning, I asked myself: Why is everything always so obvious the day after the event?

This photograph is from my last imposed (but extended) blackout – my desperate attempts to finish a novel when the power went out across the entire suburb during a violent storm last January. I was very tempted to go and fetch the solar-powered “rock” lights again (the yard looked very eerie last night, which my garden statues being the only things lit up during Earth Hour), but I figured by this time I only had about 55 minutes to wait it out.

Rockin’ reading

2 thoughts on “Sitting in the dark

  1. Great to see you supporting Earth Hour, Ian! The students at our school walked down to Nobby’s Beach in Newcastle and, along with a couple of other schools, made a huge 60 in the sand. A helicopter took footage, though the poor kids were stuck sitting in the beating sun for a good hour while waiting for it.

    On another note, I came across your blog while searching for blogs by Australian primary school educators. I’m setting up a website for what will hopefully be a useful online community for Australian primary school educators to collaborate and share resources.

    Part of the website is a feed aggregation of blogs by Australian primary educators. I think your blog is great and would be chuffed if you’d allow me to have your latest blog postings appear on it. You can see it in action at
    http://planet.thinked.net/output/index.html
    Your blog is on there at the moment so that I can see how it looks with a few blogs up but I’ll remove it in the next few does unless you’d like for it to stay. If you like, I can remove it instantly.

    Your blog seems to keep popping to the top. You just keep writing!

    Happy blogging!,
    Rob

  2. Hi Rob,

    Thanks for letting me know about your site. I guess there’s no problem in my posts appearing on your site, so long as there are always the links back to my own blog. (Especially since I tend to tinker with the grammar and layout, etc., and I presume those changes don’t go out in an RSS feed.)

    You might be interested in checking out the NSW DET’s “Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge” rap blog, which is starting to wrap up now, but still might not have been appearing on your radar because most of its entries are in the form of class groups’ and (in “Teachers”) educators’ comments. There is some great teaching and learning being demonstrated there, and it’s worth adding to your blog roll, if nothing else.

    See you in the blogosphere, and good luck with your course!

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