Posts by Jackie Clark
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And here's some doggies splashing off into the distance for your viewing pleasure.
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Ruby and I will be spending a bit of time at Kakamatua these holidays. It’s a wondrous beach for dogs and their humans, just designated officially off-leash, after being unofficially so for many years (it’s not a good beach for swimming or sunning, no facilites whatsoever). We’ve already been a couple of times in the last week and a half, and we love it so very much. It’s also a wonderful place to take houseguests of the canine variety.
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Capture: Someone, Somewhere, In Summertime, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
So as long as it's not those three weekends? Could it be the weekend after? Would that suit? I'd be in.
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Hard News: Merry Christmas, you all, in reply to Russell Brown,
Had food too late last night, woke up, didn't go back to sleep - being a middleaged woman sucks. Or maybe it's just me :)
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Merry Xmas my friends. However you spend your day today, I hope there is joy, and someone you love around you.
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Capture: Someone, Somewhere, In Summertime, in reply to Paul Williams,
It's Kakamatua, Paul. Near Cornwallis.
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And while we're at it, here's a game of Ever Decreasing Circles Until the Girl Child Falls Over. No children were harmed in the making of this video, and one of the women who's laughing is the mother of said child. That's how you know it's a dog beach.
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First days of holidays always involve a beach but usually not a human oriented one. So here’s a few of Ruby and her friend, Jessie, this morning at Kakamatua – a bit along from Cornwallis.
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This discussion has several points I'd like to address - James talked about arming teachers, which is a patently ludicrous idea, frankly, but I'd like to explain to him why. If guns were as freely available in NZ, as they are in the States, it is highly likely that I wouldn't be alive. We have policies for dealing with violent adults on the premises, policies I have written largely in response to having violent adults on the premises ( the premises being the kindergarten where I teach). If guns were available, hiding in the office wouldn't have sufficed now, would it? And certainly locking all the children inside wouldn't have sufficed. Not to mention the fact that teachers are there, by and large, to model positive learning (see: life) behaviours. So, no, I don't think teachers being armed is a very sensible, nor reasonable, idea.
And then there's the whole discussion around gender (hormones!) and violence. Men are more violent than women. Except they're not. Men seem to enact violence in a very different way to women, most of the time. Which is nothing to do with testosterone, and everything to do with what behaviour society condones in each gender. As a teacher of junior citizens, I can tell you that boys are not more violent than girls - and this is anecdata purely - they simply learn that expressing it more physically is more acceptable in their world. Even if you come from a pacifist family, there is a high probability that a boy will turn a piece of lego into a gun. Parents are often confused about this, but what a child sees and hears, everywhere, all the time, is subtle, and they don't have the filters (see:life experience) to understand those messages, nor decode them. Having said that, most of our girls wear fairy dresses and carry "guns", but that's about what they see around them in our very boy- heavy kindergarten. I don't stop them - playing with a gun doesn't mean they're going to turn into murderers after all - but it's something I've thought about for the last 17 years, certainly.
And so we come to hormones. I've fair experience of having an excess of hormones over the last couple of years. It's what happens as women age. And I don't think hormones are a reason for male violence - I'm not being funny when I say surging hormones can make you think differently, but the enactment of those feelings is everything to do with what's deemed acceptable.
I don't know that I've added anything valuable to the discussion, but those are my thoughts, anyway. -
Hard News: The Public Address 2012 Word…, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
I am in favour of bringing back words such as higgledy-piggledy and jeepers
I went to retweet this. How embarrassing.
