REFLECTING

First, an update: I went to work today (and in fact am still here working an overnight shift) and my nasty cold has been beaten back to a case of the snuffles. It appears as though the end is finally in sight!

And now, a look back to the weekend, when Warren and Jen came down from Newton Stewart and Birmingham, respectively, for some good clean Cambridge fun.

Our guests arrived on Thursday night and luckily by that point I wasn't too sick to forgo preparing a nice homemade meal for them. I love to cook for friends! We spent a few hours visiting and then it was off to bed - we had several busy days of Cambridge exploring ahead of us. Over the weekend we poked in the shops, checked out some university buildings, ate some fine meals, and attended Evensong at King's College Chapel. The latter activity just about wiped me out...imagine having to hold back a stubborn dry cough in a chapel filled with several hundred people and choristers, for over an hour. Not fun!

One of my favourite aspects of the weekend was the time we spent talking and getting caught up. I haven't seen Jen much since we graduated from Elphinstone, eight (gulp!) years ago. It was so nice to hear that she and many of my and Ray's highschool colleagues are doing very well. It was also really interesting to get a totally different perspective on our highschool years, as Jen and I were friendly with each other but moved in pretty different circles. Some of the things we talked about really drove home the point that a lot of the behaviour I witnessed in my fellow students (both exemplary and less so) was the result of events happening in the background. It helped me to realize that people may have been snarky towards myself and they actually didn't have anything against me; they were just wrapped up in their own worlds - as all teenagers, myself included, are/were - and didn't think much about the effect of their actions. I'm now thinking back to some of the interactions I had with people and taking things a lot less personally.

The other topic that we all spent a lot of time talking about was teaching, as both Warren and Jen are teachers. I liked hearing the perspective from the front of the classroom, particularly a classroom full of a wide mix of students. I've given lectures before but only to university students, who even if they don't particularly want to be in your class, are still there under their own will. Not so the case with schoolchildren, making teaching a whole new ballgame. In any case, to those teachers from Elphi reading my blog: thank-you for doing what you did (and still do)! I appreciate your work more than ever now, and am thankful for the wonderful teachers I had.