Larry the Larrikin

This week I heard the story of a workplace where one of the members organised a private party on the weekend and invited some work mates. One of her colleagues, not invited, raised a formal complaint with her supervisor, that she was being excluded. The upshot was that the party organiser was ordered to issue an open invitation to all colleagues to attend the party. Two things amazed me: first that the supervisor took the matter seriously and  felt he/she had a right to respond to a private matter, but more, that the party giver, a good Aussie,  actually complied with the order. 

It’s been a week where the larrikin spirit has been in the spotlight.

When you check out the meaning of larrikin, the Oxford and Britannica dictionaries describe it as a rowdy,  badly behaved youth. 

The Britannica especially reveals it as a young hoodlum or hooligan in the impoverished subculture of urban Australia. The term was applied to the large numbers of sporadically employed teenagers and young adults who banded together in gangs, or “pushes,” glorified the outlaw bushrangers, engaged in gang fights with each other, assaulted citizens and generally defied and ridiculed the authorities.

While these may be historically correct definitions they somehow miss the mark. I prefer the description given in an ANU paper (http://andc.anu.edu.au/pubs/ozwords/June_98/5._larrikin.htm which says that :

The term larrikin came to be used affectionately of a person who did not always adhere strictly to polite social conventions; a bit of a stirrer. It was used in political contexts as well—used positively as a term almost of endearment. The negative meanings gradually died out completely in Australia, and the larrikin came to be seen as someone who defied social or political conventions in an interesting and often likeable way. 

One of the indicators of our larrikinism lies in our use of language. We call redheads Rangers or Blue; one armed friends Lefty or Bandit  We add ‘ie’ to common words like bickie, sickie,  reccie. I’ve lived in towns called Bello, Lizard, Canbubble…not dignified official names you will find on any local map, but well known to those in the locality.

I travel with people who have strange nicknames . By day they hold down responsible jobs, contribute productively to their communities, raise well adjusted families and go about their chores like the mild mannered Clark Kent. But look out when they let their hair down. Larry the Larrikin looms large.

This weekend I have seen a diligent health and safety officer scale a spiked fence, naked at 3am, in order to have a swim with three others all in the pink. The pool screamed keep out from the padlocked gate. It was an authority challenge, and a good thing we had passed the full moon, so to speak.

The following morning at breakfast, one of the night dippers, who has taken to writing messages on her arm to ensure that she stays on the straight and narrow (eg: Don’t take off your clothes. Don’t drink rum) was asked if she had any new messages for herself. She opened her palm to reveal in large capitals:

Stay away from these people. They get you in trouble.

My father always said: Show me your friends and I will show you who you are.

I think I have discovered I am a larrikin.

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This week's Art Work

Sea Spray

I am still  making  tea cosies - probably little larrikins themselves

Building Bridges

I always loved Mathematics. When I was a small child I would have my mother set sums on scrap pieces of paper – the backs of envelopes, the torn off ends of cereal cartons- and while she beavered away ensuring the house looked like it should have been shining off the cover of Women’s Weekly, I would solve the additions, subtractions, multiplications and divisions.

Education was delivered differently. We sang song our tables with no real understanding, drew a working out margin to show the thought processes we had used, wrote pages and pages of numbers, and had daily mental Arithmetic. Calculators, if you discount the abacus which we did not have access to and didn’t even know about in my parochial little school, were not available for general consumption. 

I arrived at boarding school at the start of my fourth year at high school and discovered to my horror that I couldn’t do Maths. Or so the teacher finally convinced me. She was known to have a brilliant mind, but to be an absolute dud in transferring knowledge to fertile minds. I laboured for hours, filled pages and pages with working out, setting out, pondering and solutions. But if the answer was wrong, her response was that I had not done my work. And if I laughed, she smacked me with the ruler.

Moving in to my final years I took the basis course that I could get away with.   At the trial external exams no-one in the class go over 15%. Thank god for my father’s foresight in booking me some private tuition with a local teacher who helped me to get a decent pass and restored some faith in my ability to understand.

At university I found logic –The  highest form of Mathematics they say- an discovered what it was to shift into an entirely new brain space.

There have been some light bulb Mathematical moments over the years. 

One was when the new Mathematics syllabus was being introduced into NSW and I had the regional consultant on my staff. His responsibility was to shift thinking about ‘thinking mathematically’. I went to a professional learning session with him where the teacher asked people to do a particular mathematical problem in their head and then to explain how they had arrived at the answer. There were as many different ways of reaching the solution as there were participants in the room. The second thing the teacher did was give us a solution and ask us to devise the problem- The answer is 7, what is the question? This was my sort of Mathematics.

Another was on reading Steven Hawking's And God Created the Integers, when I discovered that the square in Pythagoras’ theorem (which I know and have applied a thousand times) actually means a physical as well as a mathematical square. The theory suddenly made sense.

I read somewhere that 70% of all scientific knowledge is proven to be inaccurate or downright wrong, over a thirty year period. It doesn’t seem to be the case with Mathematics.

This year I am doing  Year 9 Maths. My granddaughter and I tackle it each week. I’m amazed that as I look at the text book I am seeing exactly the same things I remember from my youth – except it now has cartoons. We’re up to quadratic equations and parabolas. This is where my confidence begins to slide and I get flashbacks to Year 10.  But we are saved by a Year 11 student demonstrating solutions on YouTube. 

And we both get it. 

I  recall asking my high school teacher when we would ever use parabolas in real life. She said I would need it to build bridges. 

Metaphorical or physical? I ponder.

I haven’t built one yet

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This week's Art Works

 

Still creating tea cosies. Now for the Epic Christmas Markets to be held on December 14 and 15. I am applying my mathematical skills, but not a quadratic equation in sight.

Pencil me in for tea

Go Aristophanes

When I was working in education I was often invited to attend various school concerts, dance festivals, drama presentations and musical recitals. Some were excellent. Some were excruciatingly painful, making the scratching of nails down a blackboard akin to Bach.

There is nothing quite so horrendous, pathetic, embarrassing or cringe worthy as seeing a child who is tone deaf perform a solo on stage in full spotlight. Unless of course it is hearing the squeaks, beeps, clamours and clashes of beginner band as little lips try to blow all sorts of woodwind instruments, or hands miss ever beat with their tambourine cymbals or drum sticks.  

Oh well….OK…Yes….beginner recorder beats everything. It’s the royal flush of school performance.

For all that, I am amazed at how many kids have a go.

I have recently been to an Arts Extravaganza at the local high school. The students did some amazing hip hop dance; a young lad played drums with a passion and expertise that indicated it is probably the thing he spends most of his waking life practicing; another played flamenco guitar like a virtuoso. OK, I did have to screen out the words of one of the songs that was a joyful praise of Jesus and the way he worked in my life and how I should be repentant etc, but the voice was worth enduring the lyrics.

This weekend I have been at the local annual dance studio concert. Miss Michelle has every student in terrified awe. They know what she expects. They know they must work hard, they know she demands dedication, attendance, effort, pride, endurance and loyalty. She is not a woman to be trifled with.

The show is always spectacular: costumes that glitter, shimmy, sparkle and bedazzle to rival anything Brynne Edelsten would ever wear; cutsey beginner ballerinas and tap dancers; stunning exposes from the elite troupe; a crowd pleasing Dream Team - the class for students who have Down's syndrome; an act by the Mothers resplendent in silky orange with twirling pleats and feathered fascinators; Dad’s doing One Direction. The standard of performance by those who have been dancing with the studio for many years is exceptional – a tribute to the effort of the student’s, teachers and of course Miss Michelle.

The one thing that really grates at all of these is the claques in the audience who vociferously offer encouragement and appreciation by whistling at ear piercing pitch and  calling out ‘Go Shakira’; ‘Go Shenia/Cheneyah/Shanniar/Chinier’ I am yet to understand where they want these children to Go!

I guess I would have balked when Shakespeare’s audiences called out and threw garbage as well.

At my age I’m expected to bemoan the youth of today and look back with nostalgia at how we did things better. In fact everywhere I look I see kids doing great things, enjoying life, with great values. Sure they make mistakes, but so do we all.

 Kids are lucky: that they have a whole lot more time to learn from their stuff ups than we do.

When I was at school I studied the plays of Aristophanes. I recall at 17 reading The Clouds and finding the following:

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

That was written in 423 BC.

I’ve only just found some more of his wisdom

Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, and drunkenness sobered, but stupid lasts forever.

I’m now going back for a re-read.

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This Week's Art Works

Still on the Tea pots preparing for the Tuggeranong Festival markets this coming Saturday.

Tea and Licorice All Sorts