Strong Verbs Are Just Better

Let us talk about the training I am supposed to deliver, as one of many deliver-ers.

Context: we have one (1) new person started today. He has a full caseload as of 1 May; while I was on leave, Boss G re-allocated some April work from Various Of Us to New Person. I think he has avout 2 weeks before his "deadline 2: file scanned for decision-makers" points start hitting (and deadline 1: notices of listing has already been done).

1-2 weeks before I went on leave, Boss G sourced from the team a) volunteers to cover a list of induction topics she had come up with, to match her developing Procedural Guides and b) any further suggestions.

I volunteered for "adjournments". I was aiming to avoid the "core essentials", since I had not exelled with those myself, but adjournments? I have made several "find out the hard way" errors.

Colleague L then raised "hmm, this list doesn't include evidence gathering".
Me: Agreed, although it could fit in with one of the existing topics. I also note there isn't a slot for "late papers / file management after scanning", I can cover that".

I MEANT: I think this topic would mesh well with "adjournments".

I GOT: slotted for "file managemnt and late papers", tomorrow, and "adjournments" on Thursday. I agreed, although I was a bit "hrmm": "file management" is slotted after "allocations / The Spreadhseet" and before "notices of listing", which sort of makes sense but "late papers' does NOT make sense before Notices of Listing", and frankly I would have assigned "evidence gathering" to one or other of those not grouped with late papers.

I considered: how can I make this chain? I will find out what M is doing for "allocations / the Spreadsheet" and try to orient my session around "so, let's build on that".

THEN TODAY: I realised that I am booked in to WFH on Thursday, the day I am supposed to explain Adjournments. But while I was away, a file turned up on my desk, re-allocated, in pristine "weird, a new adjourned matter" state, notices due out Thursday. I sent a TEAMS mtg invite with short agenda and note that I would leave an Example File on New Person's desk on Wednesday evening and he could look at the hard copy while walking through What one Does with it.
THEN NEXT: I explained this to Boss, who was like... "or you could move it to Friday morning? There's time".
ME: Uh... hrmm... I'll ask him what he'd rather.

ALSO TODAY: I found out that Boss had reallocated two of my files to New Person (good, that makes space for the unexpected adjourned-reallocated file). One of those has actually been administratively relisted, and I could quickly send "notice to vacate and relist" BUT it was one where I hadn't been able to contact the care facility and send them a direct notice. I am INSTRUCTED to tell/show him what to do about this file.

HOORAY, CLEAR GOALS:
First: Colleague M will show New Person what the macro-level planning looks like for "here are all your files".
Next: I will
- familiarise New Person with The Files (PREFERABLY NOT BY LECTURING HIM)
- give New Person an explicit task, ie, "send a notice of listing to this care facility"
THEN: R, who was my induction buddy, will walk him through how to send notices of listing (from scratch)

That leaves, of the things I was supposed to cover tomorrow:
- essential evidence seeking (which either M or R might cover anyway)
- Standard Late Papers (ie, what happens when your essential evidence comes in less than 7 days from hearing)
- Exciting/Alarming Late Papers (easily covered under Adjournments)

ERGO:

1. I talk to Boss G tomorrow morning and suggest that instead of asking New Person if he would prefer "TEAMS on Thursday or in person on Friday" I ask him if he would prefer "this week, or deferred to around about when your first file-due-out-for-scanning deadline is" for our second meeting.
1.a. I try to raise this in a way which exhibits my Pedagogical Wisdom but also defers to Boss G's known "good at induction and training" reputation. If I do have to, or choose to, go back to ESL teaching, I'll probably want Boss G as a referee.

2. Were I drawing up a CELTA-standard lesson plan for tomorrow it would go like this:

- Hello, my name is Edmund, and I talk too much

- The Learning Goals this lesson are: "I know what is in a file" and "I have at least one clear task for the file(s) I have inherited from Ed"

3. After providing a somewhat more normal human version of the above, I reckon I will
a) note that he has worked for NCAT before: so he knows SOMETHING about case management and files. I not only talk too much but wish to KNOW many things. Ergo: have a look at these files, tell me what you understand from them / how they seem different / what questions you have.
b) actively get up and walk away to make tea - offering him a choice from my selection of Office Tea / Coffee Bags

My thought is that item a) re-directs my Explaining Instinct toward what New Person actually knows; and item b) prevents me looming, while providing slightly more scaffolding than just leaving him alone at his desk to read his assigned files might.

4. I return and
- we discuss comparative file structure
- one file I printed and loosely tucked in several "generic correspondance" emails not sent to the members: see if he knows where they belong; if not, explain; thence foreshadow conversations he may have with the stakeholders based on those emails
- I verrry lightly run over the "types of evidence and what if they're late" questions
- Zero in on "this case: I sent the vacate-and-relist notices, but I haven't called the care facility" - his one specific task is, subsequent to colleague R's "notices of listing" training (or in it!), to call the care facility and get contact info and then send them the notice

5. When shall we two meet again: would he prefer this week? Or would he prefer to postpone "adjournments" and "more details on late papers" to just before or just after his first "file out to scan" deadline?
5a. Noting that if he would like me to shadow/hover/etc while he does the Call The Care Facility step, I can do that!

WAIT: None of Boss G's advance plans involve the telephone splitter. The telephone splitter was actually an excellent part of the induction I recieved. Raise this also with Boss G.

I appear to have drafted this but not posted it. This was drafted evening of 31 March, NSW time. SOME THOUGHTS and SEVERAL OUTCOMES have happened since. Please stand by.

( I fucked up on several axes )

I do not have the werewithal to analyse this properly right now.

I can report that today I:

- sorted my budget
- talked to Shiny
- napped
- made tray-bake chicken AND endive and peach and spinach salad
- put some plants in the plant stand friend G and I assembled last weekend.

I taught the Old English Apollonius of Tyre followed by Gower's Apollonius, over a two week block earlier this month. It was really striking how much the students found the OE Apollonius inaccessible - unemotional, lacking in character development (true, i'll grant, for most characters), and Gower's more accessible on account of it's greater degree of emotionality.

What I found really odd was that *I* saw emotions in the OE - especially in the part of the narrative where Apollonius is overcome with homesickness in the great hall, and his hosts observe his grief and send the princess to talk to him. He's reluctant to talk, but he does give some of his story, and then he finds solace in music.

My boss-colleague had taught the Old English elegies (two of - The Wanderer and the Seafarer) in a two week block before that, and we'd spent ages talking about the passage in the Wanderer where the speaker remarks that it is an 'indryhten Þeaw' to 'bind fast' one's 'ferðloca' and keep his thoughts to himself. Now, MF and I had a bit of a wrangle in class over indryhten Þeaw, which the Longman edition translates as 'courtly virtue'. Virtue, I'll grant, but I want to translate that as... 'with-lorded', I think. I see why the translation 'courtly' works, but still, it's so lexically anchored to the concept of having a dryhten. ANYWAY. One who is worthy to belong to a lord will exhibit the virtue of binding fast his soul-locker.

I never did care for the elegies much; I hadn't re-read them since literally undergrad (and I couldn't swear I'd actually read them all; certainly not translated them) before this. But even without that, I guess I'd picked up, partly from the ethos of OE prose and partly from secondary lit, how this works - that it's exposing and shameful to have to exteriorise your emotions. The elegies are a particular exception, in that while they have a LOT of emotion going on, they're specifically designed to lament - to give shape to the emotions otherwise bound in the soul-locker.

The end result was I had a WILDLY different experience of the two Apolloniuses to my students. I've taught these two together before, and I don't recall being so struck by this part. (A current student has really interesting ideas about a throughline between the Seafarer and Gower's Apollonius, which I would never have thought of!) And I just... really struggled, I think, to get across what I saw.

Something I thought of, in the shower later, was that the OE prose narratives, and to a certain extent the *narrative* poetry, reminds me of modern Japanese fiction, in the way it handles emotion. Hard to say, I've read a lot more of the former than the latter, and I haven't read the big names (Murakami, etc) that people will immediately think of. But in my mind are things like Banana Yoshimoto and Sayaka Murata, Takaishi Hiraide, and even this short story by Aoka Matsuda I read this week. Apparently I didn't comment on this when I finished Convenience Store Woman but I remember thinking about it at the time: how Japanese first person narratives manage to be immediate, close first person, but still give the speaking protagonist a sort of... emotional privacy. You can tell there are emotions there, but you don't get the up close nitty-gritty of it. I forget the words for the distinction between emotional-bubble and emotional out-bubble people, but I don't think it's that the audience are emotional out-bubble. It's that the audience are expected to do some WORK, as emotional-in-bubble, and not demand complete cathartic emotional immersion.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, I've become close with someone who's a native German speaker (although not Swiss), and discovered that my emotional expression arsenal is wildly ill-suited to people who are neither Australians/Kiwis nor Brits nor steeped in Old English lit. I LOVE understatement, you see. 'You're not so bad yourself', for instance, is a well known example, meaning 'I am quite fond of you' (insert US-UK problems for quite - Australians use both meanings, although mostly the UK, and usually intuit which). I use all those 'praising with faint praise' idioms and then have just... wildly overcommited to litotes as a rhetorical device. 'Not the worst thing that happened to me' is probably Pretty Damn Good. And I think it's, in my case, actually partly influenced by OE lit, where pronouncements like 'he was not unworthy to ...' are high praise. (Right after having a communication fail on this axis I opened something to find bedlamsbard describing a moderately useful work event as 'not unuseful'. It's the medievalism, I tell you. But I would use that phrase for either something moderately useful or something AMAZINGLY useful, and I'm not sure Bedlam would for the latter. I wouldn't for something *fairly* useful, though. LITOTES!)

There's a whole complex here where I'm BOTH someone who is emotionally transparent, and someone who has trouble emoting on *purpose* (let alone co-emoting. I don't like people seeing me to the airport, oh no). And where I'm someone who has, let us say, not the most stellar track record with social nuance, AND a huge love of figurative language, especially for emotion. I am enormously on team 'straight up explicit communication' and also intensely into oblique communication, especially as expression of care.

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Currently Reading: Much the same as last time, honestly. I... read stuff. Every second day at least? But I never finish anything.
Fiction for fun: 'Three Daughters of Eve' is coming along. It's not what I really want to be reading right now (I feel like brain candy, but very little of that is ON my tbr, since I took an indefinite break from indie romance, so here we are). I'm enjoying the retrospective timeline and finding the grown-adult one tedious, but I assume that's intentional. I can also tell, loud as a clanging bell, the retrospective is going to end with a student/teacher affair, which is... not what I signed up for, but I suppose it's a strength of Shafak's craft that I'm still on board even though that's obviously how it's going to pan out?
Poetry: Still enjoying The World's Wife. Still not sure that ANYTHING in here beats Mrs Icarus. I am making headway again with Paradise Lost courtesy Anthony Oliveira; just got to the critical splitting point in Book 9.
Lit Mag: Hey I read THREE whole things from the autumn Meanjin. Never mind that it's nearly time for the summer issue and I haven't read winter or spring.
Non-fiction for fun: All on hiatus.
For work: still puttering through Jost's collection on Chaucerian humour, which remains stuffy (but sometimes in useful ways). Almost finished Heng's The Invention of Race but got stalled halfway through the Mongol chapter, a bit... o_0 about the way she writes about them. Certainly she doesn't execute the same careful disambiguation between what her Latin SOURCES say about barely-human Mongols and her own narrator voice as she does with the Arabs. (Also... clashes wildly with Lomuto's take in 'The Mongol Princess of Tars'???)

Recently Finished: Two whole things!

Trelawny of the 'Wells': A Comedietta In Four Acts by Arthur Wing Pinero

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I made it to the last of wildeabandon's playreadings and I'm really glad I did. This was a whacky play, SIMULTANEOUSLY a 19th c melodrama and a late 19th c drawing room comedy, and if I was a 19th century-ist I would be putting it on undergrad syllabi at once. A++ work, Arthur Wing Pinero, whoever you were.

Would LOVE to be involved in a production, but as it would lose ALL its attractions if it had anything less than full 1860s dress, I doubt I ever will be.



View all my reviews

I also finished Miroirs arthuriens entre images et mirages, with... mixed feelings. Next week will be devoted to figuring out how to give a mixed review that showcases its best aspects (as I think a bilingual french/english collection that's mostly French in... approach? I guess? is an important thing to exist) without overselling it. I think my basic takeaway is: if your institution TEACHES both medieval French and Medieval English, order it. If not, perhaps not.

Online Fiction:

Aoko Matsuda, trans. Polly Barton, introduced Carmen Maria Machado (Electric Lit), Peony Lanterns. A ghost story. A story of an unemployed salaryman.

Eris Young (The Selkie), The Archivist. Dark; several kinds of violence. But oh. It's... a thing. Oh yes. I think it will appeal to people who liked My Love, Our Lady of Slaughter in particular, although in some ways it has more in common with A voyage to Queensthroat.

Up Next: So many things I feel dizzy. I really want to finish either Three Daughters or Meanjin so I can move on to something else for fun. For work and work-adjacent I just have an Endless Pile. I'm trying to install a half hour reading segment each day, with... less than total success.

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Links of Note:

Barbara Caine (History Workshop), Reading and writing friendship: Ruth Slate and Eva Slawson. This is the GOOD SHIT, yes.

Lorrie Moore (The New Yorker), Face Time. On COVID, care, and death.

Michael Blair Mount (Longreads), My year on a shrinking island. For some reason I missed the author's name and (inferred) gender and for 2/3 of this thought it was by a woman. It's interesting, though not surprising, how my response changed when I realised not. Oh, right, you're (read as) a MAN, that explains how you can up and move to Martha's Vineyard with no context. Oh, right the women you're going home with make you STRAIGHT, that's why there's no ~extra guff~ about partner choice. Right. Regardless, as an essay, it has the thing I most value: sense of place.

Therese Mailhot (Guernica), I used to give men mercy. This is... notable. I'll be adding her memoir to my (unfeasible) TBR.

Rachel Sugar (Vice), What was fun. This is both interesting and unsatisfying. I hope to come back to it and write a post on Fun.

Lidia Thorpe (Crikey, 2019), Djab Warrung people have been failed at every turn. If you've been keeping tabs on the destruction of the Djab Warruing trees, and like me were wondering what was up with the Vic govt claiming they had consulted traditional owners while many Djab Warrung claim they hadn't: here's an explanation.

Roland Betancourt (Time), The Hidden Queer History of Medieval Christianity. Some of this is same old, same old, but really !! is Betancourt's account of a document *condemning* the Byzantine adoption-of-brotherhood rite as inviting immorality. It goes a long way to confirming Boswell's reading of that rite, and, like... I was so suspicious. So were many other people. It was the LEAST supported part of Boswell's second book. Anyway. Will be reading Betancourt's book as soon as I beat down the TBR a bit.

Mary C. Flannery (TLS), Does that star-spangled banner yet wave?. There are, I suspect, things missing from this, but I know writing it meant a lot to MF and going by Twitter it has spoken deeply to other Americans (and not all of them white). I'm still a bit ??? at the idea of having feelings about one's anthem other than an impulse to satire that ends up more moving than the original, so I am ill equipped to comment.

Carmen Maria Machado (Guernica, 2017), The trash heap has spoken. On fat women taking up space.

I had thought about writing summative posts every month, but my housing situation was too precarious and stressful at the end of September to even think about it. I might aim for bi-monthly instead? Those following me either on DW/LJ or Facebook have probably got a reasonable idea of what my life has been like since I got here, so feel free to skip or skim - part of the purpose of this post is that I can fling links at non-social-media-using relatives if it seems useful.

Dear friends, family, internauts, and terminally curious persons, ( It may have reached your notice that I have moved to Geneva )

- Doing English (2000) is primarily aimed at an A-level audience, with first-year tertiary students being its secondary audience
- It provides an interesting survey of the history of English as a discipline (eg: I now know that the study of English literature was pioneered in India... as part of the British govt and East India Company's efforts to civilise and pacify the natives. Whoo), and a nice simple explanation of the failings of a 'traditional' (for the Eaglestone's purposes, 'traditional' means following the practical criticism approach of the Leavises and subsequent scholars) approach to literature.
- Despite being strongly in favour of 'theory' generally and giving a good account of why 'theory' was needed, the book doesn't actually give you much in the way of concrete examples of why 'theory' is useful.
- Its 'Death of the Author' chapter is the kind of thing which turned me *off* the Death of the Author to begin with. It more or less convincingly argues that meaning is created between reader and text... but doesn't give any framework for deciding what's a 'good' reading for critical purposes and what's not. Given this is designed for A-level students, how are they supposed to know what they're being marked on?
- Likewise, while making a nifty distinction between 'intrinsic' and 'extrinsic' approaches to literature, the book seems to work on the aggravating assumption that 'intrinsic' readers (close readers, etc) all take a practical criticism approach and look at the text in isolation; and that 'extrinsic' readers all want to read the text as evidence of historical, cultural or other contemporary phenomena. Eaglestone does hint that some extrinsic or historicist critics use contextual evidence to construct new readings of the text, but then proceeds on to talk about extrinsic readings going out from the text into the context.
- He doesn't try to tie the intrinsic/extrinsic dichotomy into the dead/alive author thing. You can do either brand of criticism with a dead author or an alive one!
- The chapter on metaphor, narrative structure, and closure seems to be fairly basic (and traditional!) but useful.

Conclusion: Probably more useful for high school students than university students (and possibly outdated for A-levels by now?). I can see how this textbook would have been very applicable to the HSC English curriculum, but I can also tell that if you'd given this book to me, age 15 (or indeed, anywhere up until my fourth year of uni) it would not have convinced me that 'theory' is good and practical criticism bad: it would have convinced me that 'theory' was a load of waffle, practical criticism stuffy but comprehensible, and History a better use of my time than English. Which, oh, wait, is what first-year English did for me anyway! So perhaps this would be a perfect complement to first-year courses?

What I will do with this book: I think I may photocopy his chart of intrinsic/extrinsic approaches and save it for classroom use, mostly for the purposes of talking to students about why this is a bollocks dichotomy. I may also recommend it, with caveats, to students who feel they need a really basic primer to literary study. But then I may not, since it doesn't seem to provide any argument for a *point* of literary study.