Long time, no words and stuff and things

I have to wonder sometimes why people give me strange looks when I talk about things I want to do in my life career wise. This year I finally made the decision and took the step to do my teaching degree. I like it, the theory is interesting and being able to engage with kids and influence them in a hopefully positive way is just brilliant. Am I still just as odd and slightly immature with a large dash of nonsensical musings? Of course, I doubt this will ever change. Do I have to watch what I say around teenagers more....Hell Yes!!! I mean seriously, it's one thing to show something or talk about something that could be slightly too mature to your own cousin or other teenage family member, another to do it with another persons child that has entrusted you to educate them. I am still new to this, so, I will reserve my judgment on my abilities to communicate ideas to teenagers til I have much, much more experience. However, this is not what this is about and I have digressed a little there (see? being in a classroom has helped me with staying on topic). I want to really discuss the confusion that people have when you want to do cross discipline studies.

I expressed to someone today that I would love to maybe do a Master's in Anthropology, perhaps with a focus on education. I feel that Anthropological techniques and observations allow us to examine society. Home Anthropology, or the anthropological study of areas within your own "society", allow us to look at our own society as a different culture to our own. Doing observations as a student teacher, I am thinking all about me, about the actions I need to take, actions from students I need to be aware of, and importantly how to know when a teaching technique I am going to use is working and with which kind of students it will work with. Anthropological observation is different to that. We all talk about how the classroom is a small society in and of itself, we all think of the classroom as a microcosm of the culture, region and society in which that classroom is based. I don't see it that way. I see it as its own specific culture and society. It has a particular kind of environment, a very specific set of social rules you rarely see outside of it, its own style of language (both lingual and physical) and most of all it has its own form of interactions that are classroom specific. Yes, all these things are going to be influenced by the wider community with all the socio-cultural specifics of that community.

However, why is it that despite all these things that classrooms are largely all the same? We teach teachers all the same techniques, strategies and research. How can these things that we are learning and teaching be applicable if there isn't some kind of classroom specific culture? If there is, hooray, by all means keep teaching teachers in the same way. If there isn't, why on earth do we not try and actually research what these differences are? We throw around the word "variable" a lot. Almost as though the word magically means that we can't possibly research it. I feel like it is the academic way of saying that the academics have put it into the too hard basket. However, having had experience, at least as a university undergrad student, of anthropology, this use of the word variable just baffles me. I feel like I hear far too much about statistics and numbers, and yeah, in those sorts of studies it is hard to examine too many variables at once. So why not seek out a different way of doing research? A different form of observation? Why not use anthropology, the discipline devoted to examining culture and society with its myriad of variables?

I don't doubt that there is already anthropological research on education, so why we don't get given any of it in our education course is beyond me. I know there is anthropological research on childhood and early learning, and I have seen research on adolescents across many cultures. I do intend on looking up some of this research when I have my mid-year break. It frustrates me that there is all this research that our education lecturers could be discussing with us, but the only cross-discipline stuff we seem to see is with psychology. I understand that a post-graduate course in education is only one year, we have a lot to get through in very little time. With this limited time why do they provide us with references to research we will never use, telling us that we will never use it, when there is practical and useful research out there, that just happens to be in the wrong discipline for them to notice it.

I don't want to become a teacher and abandon my anthropological influence. I am certainly not going to abandon my archaeology, though I admit what I have done in archaeology is much easier to insert into my teaching as it is already part of what we know as school taught History. Anthropology I feel has strongly influenced the way I view the world. If I hadn't done so much of it in my undergrad degree would I be asking these questions? I honestly don't know. All I do know is that I want to mix my anthroplogy into my education studies. If this means doing a Masters in Anthropology at some point, in the hope to do a PhD that could possibly focus on classroom culture, I am prepared to do it. Whether I will ever do it is a different matter. I also would like to do something that crosses my archaeology background with education. Even if it is simply going through all the sources and textbooks I use in class and try and fix any misconceptions about archaeology that comes across in them.

I feel like I have made some sort of argument here, but I am hungry and need to finish cooking dinner now. If you have any thoughts on the matter, feel free, as always, to comment.

love you all (in a platonic way)
Milly

Job Thingies

I was watching a documentary on Phone Sex Workers in Britain the other night and it got me wondering, what jobs could I do if I was that little less sqeamish, a little less prudish, a little less everything that inhibits basically. Now I duly hope that the few of you people that read this would be kind enough to comment on this, as I wish to have a, mainly immature, conversation.

There are many jobs in the world that we forget about. Sure, we remember that there are strippers and prostitutes, garbage men and lab workers, but we forget about the others, the phone sex workers, the taxidermists, the blood splatter specialists and the morgue attendants. Most of these jobs are really only seen in tv shows, either as a joke, or weird people that have these strange jobs that we forget exist and don't take from fantasy inside the tv show into reality and job applications.

I am a little curious as to how people apply for some of these sorts of jobs. How do you figure out your life calling is to take care of dead bodies or make a dead animal into a statue? How do you discover that you can make money by stroking peoples libido over the phone? How do you then get the experience, certifications or courage to then go for that job, that career path?

I know what I want to eventually do. I know it isn't everyone's cup of tea. I would love to be what is known as a Forensic Archaeologist, look at Palaeopathology (yes, it's a real word), explore childhood in what could be considered one of the more creepy ways to do so. Probably more creepy considering I'm about to apply to a teaching course, but hey, we all have our odd career sidetracks.

So I obviously lack some of the squeamishness that others have in bucketloads, but only for certain things. Get me to pick up dog poop or clean out rotten food from a fridge and I am outta there. I have a much more apparent prudishness, though the level of it can only be gauged once you know me well. I have to give it to those that spend their lives talking openly and frank and occasionally inventively about sex. I applaud them, as long as I don't have to be involved in the conversation. Let's stick to the other kinds of sticky and gross human functions thank you very much, and not in a fetishy kind of way.

So, what I want you to do (and I really hope you do) is write down an ooky, open or odd job that you would enjoy as a career, and why.....and then something that you would be completely against doing, and why (not the obvious "I won't be a prostitute/yoga instructor/midwife" kind of things).

So in the end, I am not bothered by dead bodies but would fail completely as a sex therapist.