On Milestones

The last time I posted, it was my “second” 21st birthday.

Nope, I’m not 42. I’m a good decade older than that. It’s 21 years since I was diagnosed with–and subsequently recovered from–cancer.

The Offspring never seemed too bothered by having two bald parents for a time

Having choriocarcinoma in my early 30s probably did change some of my paths in life, but marginally. It’s cancer of the placenta. The risk of it returning if you have no more placentas is nil. We did attempt, briefly, to expand our family further but those pregnancies didn’t take and the cost benefit analysis very quickly just didn’t stack up. The risk may have been worth it for more kids, but if we weren’t actually getting those, then it was time to focus on the two that we had, who actually turned out to be kind of wonderful.

Those kids walked beside me at multiple Relays for Life, joining with our community to raise awareness and funds that would mean fewer families would face what we did while they were still so very, very young (Child the Elder was in Kindy and Child the Younger in preschool when I was undergoing treatment). Ultimately, Child the Elder would serve on the organising committee with me.

A young child and her Mum, both wearing red caps, white shirts and smiling. The Mum is wearing sunglasses. — Team members at our first Relay (2005)

A middle aged white woman with grey hair and her 20-something daughter. Both are wearing glasses and yellow committee shirts, and are smiling. — Committee members at our last Relay (2023)

For his part, Child the Younger accidentally scored us a sponsor when I once materialised at his work on Relay day, frazzled, and asked was there any way they could blow up some purple and yellow balloons, stat, because our planned supplier had dropped the ball. While they were working on this, his boss asked whether there was a personal reason our family was so involved, and my boy matter-of-factly responded, “Oh yeah. Mum.” The balloons were donated that year, and for quite some years afterwards.

A young boy in purple leading Dougal the bear, the mascot for the Cancer Council, onto an oval. Behind them, a young man in a purple shirt and wearing a black cap backwards is leading Sid the Seagull, the mascot for the Slip. Slop. Slap. campaign. — Child the Younger handling his Mum and Child the Elder being handled by our Josh.

Those “kids” are now grown and have been kicking some serious life goals lately.

In late June, Child the Elder and her Sweetie got engaged. Unlike me, she was the kind of child who dressed up as princesses, brides, and princess brides. As a teen, she created her first Pinterest wedding board.

Round cut engagement ring on left hand. Winter leaves in background.

I am happy to report that she must have got all of that out of her system, because she’s being very sensible now that wedding planning is an actual reality.

My main task is to grow the flowers for the bouquet and table arrangements. (No pressure!). Luckily, I have a Garden Design assessment coming up in my Diploma course, an enabling spouse, and a tradie on speed dial who’s used to my insane ideas and yet is still willing to assist when I inevitably bite off more than I can chew in the landscaping projects arena.

Just a couple of weeks later, Child the Younger graduated. As someone who was a long-term employee of his university, I have been to a great many graduation ceremonies, so I was surprised that I got a bit emotional at this one.

Blue banner with white writing that reads: UOW Graduation Ceremony. Congratulations! — Beaming parents with the Graduate!

The Deputy Chancellor in black and gold robes and bonnet congratulates a young man in black shirt, gold tie, tan pants with cobalt blue robes and trencher, holding a certificate. — Beaming parents with the Graduate!

In between, I had a professional milestone of my own. Two, I guess. First, I went to my first academic conference since COVID.

Secondly and more importantly, while I was there, I was awarded a HERDSA Fellowhip. Basically this means that I put together a reflective portfolio of work focused on how and why I teach the way I do. Anonymous assessors judged it and came to the conclusion that I actually care about teaching quite a lot and do a pretty good job of it, which was very nice validation to receive.

The conference and awards were in Perth, meaning I got to catch up with a couple of long time friends.

I took advantage of the only working 4 days a week thing to add in a quick trip to Rottnest Island. (Aside: Angel and Dick Strawbridge from Escape to the Chateau had the same idea. I nearly fell off my perch when I saw them). There, I made some new friends:

Kimberley, in a black jacket, grey jumper and jeans, kneeling in front of a quokka. — My first quokka!

Sign: Don't let the quokka inside no matter what he tells you — My first quokka!

I loved everything about Rottnest Island–except the ferry ride over. The less said about that, the better.

Sun breaking through a grey sky. The ferry is coming in from the right. A bird flies above it. — So picturesque. This was taken from our verandah.

Starting Over … Again!

It’s been so long since I’ve added to this blog, that I wasn’t able to log-in for a hot minute there. Mind you, that has pretty much been the theme of the week!

In a major life update and against all odds given the current state of Higher Education, my half-year of substantive unemployment has come to a close. I have a half-year contract doing what I did before, at the same level, which feels nothing short of miraculous. It is a Catholic university, so perhaps that is appropriate.

If you’re playing along at home: yes, that does make four universities in under two years!

In the interim, I cobbled together what work I could, which I hasten to add was nothing like a living wage. I did manage to slog my way through to get my teaching number/s reactivated … but didn’t get any work. By the time I was offered something, this 6-month gig was on offer. Since March, I have also been doing some casual delivery of literacy programs and marking at another university. Both contract jobs are based in Sydney, but are very sensibly allowing me to work remotely where that is appropriate, which is the bulk of the time.

I did NAPLAN marking — which was a disaster, and I quit after a week of not getting within a bull’s roar of minimum wage on any given day because of their ineffectual systems and poor communication causing unnecessary delays. I did GAMSAT marking, which started around the same time and is, mercifully, professional, organised, and generates appropriate remuneration. I continued my Board work, and I extended my studies from an Undergrad Certificate, enrolling in the Diploma course.

I am now wondering how to juggle all of this along with a “real” job 4 days/week, but I guess I’ll figure it out, because I always do.

Higher Ed, however, is still a mess. Every day I hear of further job cuts at one institution or another. There is no respite in sight.

Yesterday, both universities were impacted by IT issues and I was struggling to log in to anything. The new place is like working in two half-universities. The team and discussions about work are fabulous and get me very excited about what we can achieve, but then whenever I try to find my way through any system (you know: email, pay, super, induction …), I wonder what in the 1978 is going on. They are evidently still recovering from a past cyber incident, but in my case, issues could also be because someone has not yet triggered my access. It is only Day 3. It would be reasonable to think that further clarity may yet arrive.

Research is going OK. One chapter is with editors, one is off to the publishers, and I was approached to submit a journal article for a special edition on Teen Wolf, which looks like it is going ahead.

Father in Law has had a long hospital stay this year, but is doing well now. One of his other kids is coming for a visit this weekend, which will be nice for him.

Spousal Unit has been doing casual teaching days, because he’s very bad at being retired.

Child the Elder has settled in to her new place and we spent some time with her on the weekend to distract her because the Son Out Law was working away.

Child the Younger has a one year teaching contract and has suddenly become too diligent to spend time with us!

Callie is now on anxiety medication, which has helped my anxiety because she has stopped peeing on everything that doesn’t move (and once, famously, on something that does: me. Lying in bed). Clover is my devoted shadow who tries to race past me and hop into bed with me each night. Unfortunately, her delighted purring if she succeeds is far too much for this insomniac to handle.

The chooks are fine, but in unproductive Winter mode.

The fish are back in the television fish tank, thanks to our amazing builder, Jeff, who can turn his hand to anything.

So: yeah. We’re still here. And I’m still very regional, despite working for metro employers.

Update

Well, we all survived the mid-October mess. Except the 19 year old cat. And I have zero interest in revisiting how that all played out. It was not a fun time.

With regard to the Father-in-Law, we had five hours of debate around consent and who could give it (he has two POAs –both in Queensland; one is MIA and the other was in communicado). One nurse helpfully explained to him that they were just trying to protect his best interests. I pointed out that it was in his best interest to have the festering tumour removed from his head. His surgeon agreed with me.

Luckily, the Nursing Unit Manager is someone I’ve known for years, who has a great deal of common sense and knows it would be out of character for me to be somehow trying to leverage personal gain from an octogenarian pensioner with cancer. He put the case to the Director of Medical Services, who also agreed that maybe removing the tumour was the better option than just letting him walk around with it or trying radiotherapy which would knock him around more (and presumably also require some form of consent!).

He’s healing well, and the skin graft has taken beautifully. He has his follow-up next week so we have digits crossed for clear margins.

Work continues to be difficult. I have been marking, on an impossibly tight deadline that kept becoming worse because of systems that didn’t work as promised, and students who were upset about things that had bugger all to do with me (like 73 being less than 75; or that I had marked the assignment that they uploaded, as opposed to the one that they meant to upload but didn’t).

It is equally excruciating to sit in meetings planning for next year, knowing I will not be part of it. I keep reminding myself not to offer opinions since I have no horse in the race.

Meanwhile, well-meaning people both internal and outside the sector offer platitudes: with your skills, you’ll get another job.

Facts not in evidence, Your Honour.

The Higher Education sector is in chaos. There are hiring freezes seemingly everywhere … which seems very mild, when you are securely in employment, but is quite scarily relevant, when you are actively seeking to be hired. Worse, some universities are shedding jobs–regional universities, in particular. 600+ at ANU, 200 at Canberra. Closer to home, more than 300 at UOW (where some former colleagues I rate highly, and indeed whole schools, have been told they’re on the hit list …. but they can still make an argument to be saved. Bring a support person).

I was asked if I was really trying to find a job.

I am not yet 52, and while I was hoping to transition to retirement in the not-too-distant future (my husband is already past retirement age, so we will need to have some adventures together before I hit one of the magical Super or pension ages!), I did not have complete unemployment in my early 50s on my life plan. So of course I am trying to find a job. I am, however, also a realist who is currently processing that I will more than likely never work again in the field of Higher Ed to which I have devoted myself for the past couple of decades.

Nor am I prepared to sell up and move to another city or state after we both worked so hard to set ourselves up for retirement here. Because, yes, we have thought this through; we continue to do so.

I could, for example, go back to school teaching. All I have to do is find all my qualifications, get them certified, pay a fee I don’t owe but was arguing with NESA about plus a new one, and then wait to see if my qualifications are deemed ok. I may also have to prove I’m literate and numerate, I think. I will be considered a provisional graduate, meaning my thirty years of experience will not count, and I will be on a starting salary that is a fraction of what I am on now (although, admittedly much better than the $0 pa I am currently staring down). And if I don’t get enough days to produce enough evidence to jump through the required hoops within two years, my teaching number will be revoked again. (So don’t believe the stories of a “teacher shortage.” There’s a shortage of teachers in schools. There is, however, a surplus out here of teachers who are no longer employed in schools–for more than thirty years, half of all beginning teachers have left in the first five years!–doing Cost Benefit Analyses because the system is screaming at us that what we have to offer is not valued. Like, at all).

I probably will end up doing the necessary admin to get my number back, because as much as casual teaching remains, in my opinion, the worst bits of teaching, I’ve been assured that there might be some Inclusive Ed days, which would bring me more than just a paycheque. And for better or for worse, I am someone who has always needed more than just a paycheque.

And so it is that every Wednesday, we check the school education jobs email. Occasionally, up comes a shorter-term contract in a hard-to-staff school with sign-on bonuses, and potentially jobs for both of us. But when we start to work through the logistics, it just doesn’t seem feasible. What would we do with the house? The cats? The chooks? The Father-in-Law? (“Hard to staff” is code for miles and miles from our current home, lives, and responsibilities). Or does one of us stay here, and we lead a separated life (we tried that once before, and lasted five weeks, if memory serves). In that scenario, the sign-on bonus won’t touch the sides of what it costs to run two households, anyway.

The remainder of the local jobs on offer are things like waitressing and motel cleaning, which I’ve done before. I’m not sure how my now-much-older-body would hold up to doing them again. Nor is my Physio. This week, she asked me why my body is so tight. I told her I think my body has been flooded with cortisol since we came back from America … eighteen months ago. She told me she thought that was probably right.

Today’s flooding cause was, ironically enough, the fish tank.

Now, I love our fish tank. It’s purpose built into my grandparents’ former TV cabinet (the person who made it has since gone out of business. I checked). Today, I discovered that it’s been leaking long enough to damage both said cabinet, and the flooring underneath it.

I am devastated. I have temporarily moved the fish, and now I am trying to figure out how to isolate and fix a leaking fish tank. (I guess the leak is on the side with the water damage?). And when to find the time to do it. And what happens if I don’t quite do it right – having to move the fish a second time would not be great, for anyone. (I’ve listed the repair on AirTasker, but no bites just yet).

The idea was to preserve this, not destroy it.

And so it goes. If I can fix the tank myself, maybe that can become my new post-Higher Ed career.

HSC Time … or is it?

All my Facebook memories at this time of year seem to have been me giving last minute advice and messages of good luck to my former tutoring students (including my own offspring … yes, when they were in Year 12 they dutifully turned up each week to the tutoring centre I’d worked in pretty much their whole lives, much to the amusement of their peers in our small group sessions).

This year, of course, the start of the HSC has been delayed. Consequentially, so has HSC Marking. We now won’t start marking until close to the time we usually finish, and it will continue into December. As a result, and because of the compressed timeline to get the results processed and through UAC in time for University offers, NESA is doing an unprecedented (there’s that word again!) second call for applicants. So if you have recent HSC teaching experience, jump on board, jump online and join us for an educational experience that is quite literally like no other. In my experience, you won’t find a better bunch of people with whom to work.

In keeping with my HSC-styled musings, this morning The Chicks’ “Wide Open Spaces”–all about letting your daughter go and waving her goodbye as she begins adulthood–started playing in my Spotify list. This also seemed kind of prescient since Child the Elder is graduating this evening. It’s a postponed and online event and for a few brief hours last weekend we thought we were going to be allowed to sit on a couch in the same location to view it, before state pollies “clarified” that no, metro and regional areas wouldn’t be allowed to cross the streams for day trips just yet, after all.

So instead we’ll be sitting on our separate couches 92 kilometres apart. Hopefully it won’t be too much longer before we can get together and have a properly celebratory meal and take some frame-able photos for what is actually a pretty significant moment in her life.

Congratulations, Jamie. We love you, we miss you, and we’re very proud.

If you need help with getting organised for the HSC, you can contact me on https://www.kimberleymcmahoncoleman.com or send me an email via kmcmahon_coleman@hotmail.com

Over It: the HSC, Higher Ed reforms, and Home Renovations

This made me laugh when I checked social media this morning:

… and then I got out of bed and painted a ceiling before I showered, had breakfast, and started my workday!

Here it is: the LAST room in progress. And it needs to progress fast, because my husband is currently sleeping in my daughter’s bed, my clothes are all around me, one child has announced he’s coming home today and the other one says she’s home tomorrow. So if this doesn’t get done in the next day and a half, we are looking at a long weekend (yay!) with more people than beds (boo!).

I don’t think that would make me very popular, somehow.

My Facebook memories tell me that I have been using these September school holidays to work on stuff around the home for a very long time. More than one home, in fact. This is the third one. Nine years ago, I was mid-meltdown over the delayed kitchen. This is what it looked like one day after it was meant to be finished:

Bizarrely, if your look where the fridge is meant to be, they’d capped off the taps and outlet from the old sink, but left the washing machine taps where they were. So Jody and I somehow managed to lift the washing machine back inside and hook it up for a little while.

Because every kitchen needs a washing machine.

It looks a lot better now. I’ve been meaning to get an “After” photo, but the kitchen is not currently tidy enough for that and I’m, you know, painting ceilings and walls before and after work, so most things around here are only getting untidier!

Focusing on renovations has been a helpful distraction because the higher education sector has been having a tough time of it. At our institution, we are all now on reduced pay, and waiting to hear which of our colleagues have been granted an early retirement package. As if that didn’t bring enough uncertainty into attempts at future planning, we’re waiting to hear the fate of the higher education reforms package, which seems likely to go back to the Senate in early November. All of this sees me dragging my feet and prioritising things like painting and blogging over finalising the agenda for our planning day, which is next week.

Overnight we learned that one of the two cross bench Senators who will ultimately decide the fate of the package has pointed out the inequity baked into it and decided not to support it. I felt an overwhelming sense of relief and peace when I read the news–most un-2020 of me. Of course, there is still one undecided vote, and so the legislation may still be passed. I’ve listened to all the arguments for and against, but at the end of the day, I keep thinking of the current Year 12. Not the ones in the news for off-colour scavenger hunts (they are over-privileged drongos, pure and simple, and I refuse to give them cyber-column inches) but the bulk of the 70 000 or so of them who started their Senior year in a smoke-hazed apocalyptic landscape, who’ve spent much of their final year largely out of the classroom because of a pandemic, and who now have to sit their exams and try to get into Uni as though it were any other year. Mind you, they are also potentially facing tougher competition for entry: with high youth unemployment, the first recession in a generation, and a practical inability to take a gap year when travel is off the table and casual employment is hard to come by, we are seeing in early admissions and application data what we always see in recessions: that our young people are turning to the relative safe haven of higher education to up-skill and ride out the worst of the unemployment rises.

Year 12 who, at this point, don’t know whether their degrees are going to cost them what they thought they would when they applied, or some new amount decided by legislation between the times of application and enrollment. Their exams start in a fortnight. By the time the Senate decides what their degrees will cost next year, I’ll be marking the papers that generate their ability to matriculate.

And no matter how you cut it, that seems to me to be profoundly unfair.

Image from: https://ethics.org.au/hsc-exams-matter-but-not-for-the-reasons-you-think/

Another week, another funeral .. and some free advice for new teachers

As we sat in the chapel, my friend and former colleague leaned over and asked, “How’s your health? Are you feeling OK?”

Gallows humour, but it seemed apt. We’ve been to a lot of funerals this year.

We had headed back to Goulburn, which is always a bit like revisiting the scene of the crime: the site of my first official teaching post, and the place where I met, dated, and became engaged to my husband. The gentleman whose life we were honouring, Bob, had been my husband’s mentor when he was a beginning teacher. Bob had done the reading at our wedding. His widow had painted our anniversary candle, which had been made by the guy with the black humour sitting beside me. In the pew in front was my former boss, and in the one ahead of that was a couple who’d attended our wedding (keep in mind we had fewer than thirty people there – to have five of us in the same room is statistically significant), and in the row in front of that my friend and bonus-Mum who’d come with me to select my wedding dress.

The story my husband tells over and over about Bob is that when regaled with stories about Tony’s early teaching exploits, Bob would ask, “But who was learning? Them, or you?”

Goulburn Railway Station in Sloane St. My Pop, a railway man, was born in Sloane St. I lived in a railway worker’s cottage, also on Sloane St.

After the service we hung out with our former colleagues, and it was easy. I miss these people. As a staff, we had been united, and those bonds remain.

Goulburn

At the club afterwards, one of my colleagues was updating me on his three sons. The eldest I had met earlier that afternoon; the youngest wasn’t there; and I was asking him where his middle child was. Many years ago, as a first year out teacher, I had taught that young man. When I say “taught,” I don’t know that I actually did. I clearly remember someone asking a question about teaching for the HSC of our Methods teacher during the Dip Ed, and she laughed and told us not to worry about it: no school would give an HSC class to a first year out.

Mine did.

Worse, they gave me Contemporary English. We had really only studied 2U and General.

Contemporary English was basically two topics. Total. So we spent six months on a topic about sport (those who know me will understand the irony), featuring David Williamson’s The Club, which is not a bad play, but it’s pretty hard to milk it for content for six months. The other text was Peter Skyzrynecki’s anthology, Joseph’s Coat, which I had studied at Uni. For a week. I think we covered almost everything in that anthology by the end of six months.

Add to that the fact that on Day 1 at that school, I had been called out of an all-staff meeting to answer an urgent call, telling me that my dearest friend from senior school had taken this own life. This Year 12 class was literally my first timetabled class in my new career. I walked in and the boys were seated on one side of the room, talking about hockey, and the girls were on the other, discussing their upcoming debutante ball. These patterns of behaviour were familiar to me, and I immediately started flashing back to my own senior years in Lithgow.

So there we were: I was consumed with grief, and my class were triggering it; I was teaching to the HSC when I was ridiculously inexperienced and arguably ill-qualified; and I was bored by the content. Add to that a class where many of the students resented being “made” to do English, and we were in for a fun time. Year 12 gave me the Amanda Woodward award that year, which was their way of calling me a prize bitch without having to utter that word on assembly. I reckon I deserved it.

I’m not sure what they learned, but I learned a lot. In subsequent years, I would no longer be afraid of teaching HSC kids, and carved a career out of it, at Nowra Tutoring Solutions, in uni transition programs, and in HSC Marking. As much as I declared that that entire class hated me, I do recall one student (aged over 18) with whom I was actually quite close out of school, because of our shared exchange student experiences; another girl stayed after school twice a week while we lifted her literacy via free tutoring; and of course, there was my colleague’s son, who was quiet and polite, and kept himself to himself.

But then, there was Jim.

Jim was a fully-grown man, already 18, who wanted to be out of school and on a worksite, and my recollection is that he gave me hell every lesson he was actually present. And one day after I had called him to stay back at yet another recess, I finally dropped my teacher guard and said something along the lines of, “this isn’t working – what’s your problem with me?”

So he told me.

Jim didn’t feel respected. He thought I was treating him like a child. So I thanked him for his honesty, told him I’d try to do better, and suggested a means by which he could let me know if he wasn’t happy–that didn’t involve interrupting the class. He acknowledged that he needed to show a bit more respect in the classroom, too. From then on, we treated each other quite differently, and class got easier.

(The texts didn’t get anymore interesting, though).

So that Middle Child of my colleague came in after he finished a work call, and he greeted me warmly. He updated me on his life and career. He’s polite and affable and clever, and doesn’t appear to hold any grudges against any former teachers for their cluelessness.

To any beginning teachers out there: take heart. It seems we don’t do lasting damage. And you will learn so much in those first few years, sometimes from unexpected quarters. Just do what you can to make sure the kids are learning, too.

MHS