When good tales are told.

Life is full of those all too familiar ups and downs. Situations we experience, see or hear about that create the everyday stories we remember for a short time. They turn into tales we tell to get sympathy or to make someone laugh. Sometimes we tell them to cause a bit of drama, other times we tell them to support someone, which may lead to the terribly unfortunate episodes of slander travelling across minor, or major, parts of people and area.

Sometimes the stories make an impact, other times they are just food for swift entertainment.

I am not good at telling stories, never have been. I can't even tell a joke properly. 

Actually I write a lot better than I tell, which is a strange perplexity to both me and others when you think about the nature of my profession: being a teacher.
A teacher should be good at telling stories.
A teacher should be able to get the students interested in any topic, just by adding "fun facts" and stories related to the topic.
A teacher should trigger all the knowledge a student has, which can be linked to, and fill in gaps, which they achieved on different arenas in the past. School is not a separate department apart from the rest of your life.
School is part of your breeding and growth, a compliment to all the other experiences and knowledge that you  acquire through life.

I often get students who claim they don't know English. They can't speak it, they can't write it. Of course it's just nonsense: they chat while gaming online, they listen to music with English lyrics, sing along even, they watch a lot of movies and they speak English when travelling abroad. But they think this is something different than the English they are supposed to perform in school.

Often my job is to push the right buttons and trigger their understanding of English and Norwegian  as English and Norwegian, and not English versus school English and Norwegian versus school Norwegian.

I try, it's not that I accept my shortcoming and admit to failure, but I trust my students to carry the story on and add the remarks and catchy associations. It works. It works the minute you make them pay attention.

Yesterday we had Global Dignity Day here at our school. HRH crown prince Haakon Magnus visited, and it was a surprisingly pleasant experience.

That too culminated in stories. Not mine, but the students' stories about what they understood dignity to be all about.
They told about everyday situations in which they had contributed to somebody else's dignity. Or when somebody else contributed to theirs.

We heard about young talent, making the wrong choices, siblings with extraordinary challenges because of some diagnose, we heard about hospitality, kindness to strangers, arrival to a new home country... the stories were many and ever so warm and told with heart.

Listening to them I was rather proud how their everyday, little stories showed what material these youngsters are made of. The stories they carried with them, and told with such shyness, defined dignity in brilliant ways.
Makes me think their tales of everyday life will improve in the future, just like good wine.

Dandelion writing

OK, so I make another attempt. I have started so many texts and given up I am curious if I'll complete this one, and not delete it.

I started writing about RUSS. A long tradition here in Norway, which have now outplayed its role. It used to be senior highschool students who dressed up in red, blue or black suits, drew characters and wrote slogans on them. They had nicknames complimenting their personality and did pranks to get knots in their hats.

The colours on their suits displayed what kind of school they attended, and completed, and they have cars in same colour as their suit, and "businesscards" which they hand out to kids.

These days it has turned into a very expencive, several months long, ongoing party for everybody about the age of 18 (and a little older), who would like to act out and pretend to be above law, order and proper behaviour.

That didn't go very well writing about.

I started writing about the time when our den smelled so bad it was impossible to stay in the room. We tore down the exterior wall, and hundreds of dead mice, decading, tumbled out when we removed the cladding. They had been trapped when the wall was previously fixed.
But then I thought about my friend who wrote about That Smell, and there is no way I can top that.

I took another facebook-test today, what my birthday says about my personality. And it stated: "You are incredible likeable. You are blessed with an amazingly magnetic personality. Other people actually feel pressured and uncomfortable when you are around. You give good advise and are definitely someone who others trust easily".

I somehow found it very contradicting and not very nice, and it wasn't at all fun to write about. Maybe I should stop taking these tests... which I love. They don't really paint a pretty picture of me.

(One even came up with the characteristic: "You are a very demanding woman!")

Maybe I am just tired, maybe what I really need is a muse. I need inspiration... and a vacation.

On the positive side of it all: I have not yet fallen into the compulsive habit of watching funny cat videos on youtube. Then I would have been a tiny bit worried about my sanity.

However, on that note, my friend told me that "my, like his, craziness is not damaging to others. It's more quirky and endearing, and it sets us apart from the general crowd... Sometimes it's lonely, but it's also like being away from just normalness. It would be too common like... when you stop being pleasantly surprised by your own thoughts. I like my thoughts at times; random thoughts that, later, I find amusing and interesting. Sometimes they tumble around in my head. At the end of the day I think we are people who can keep our heads open".

I like to think I have that craziness in me.

Oh, I just remembered: I was journalist and editor of our high school graduation newspaper! Should probably be on my CV, don't you think? Hardly any school's RUSS make those newspapers anymore, but we did. We wrote about the school, what had happened during the past year... a lot of good things, but more bad things and funny pranks, and we presented all the RUSS, which is what we call high school graduates here. and then we sold it to benefit a charity cause. Our was the national cancer assosiation.... long before that was really known, let alone popular.

I probably should add that to my CV.

Maybe I should go out in the garden and weed out dandelions. That should inspire me, I think. You know; the way all great authors are inspired by the grand splendour and wonders of nature, I settle for gloving, fragrant, radiant, vulnerable, hopeful, slender, lively, applicable, legendary dandelions.

On second thought... I'll leave them be.

One of those wonderful, honest and truthful speeches worth listening to more than ones.

Mary Maxwell, a 72-year-old friend of the couple who founded Home Instead Senior Care, was asked to give the Invocation at a convention a few years back.