Is la Bastille a baguette?!

It has been an interesting day. Went to the school I teach at first thing for more handover notes from the current teacher. I then got a crash course on how the library operates at the International School and took over for half the day. Thank goodness for knowing the Dewey Decimal System from Convent and being familiar with the library's lay out from before. It was quite fun though. Had two classes and their book of the week was Pigcasso and Mootisse. I then had to find books for the kindergarden teachers which related to different materials e.g. glass, plastic, wood etc., so Cinderella's glass slipper, a book called Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse, Julia Donaldson's "Stick Man"and others.

Afterwards I had my form four student, and we analysed the poem "Miracle on St David's Day" by Gillian Clarke, which is really beautiful - although my student really struggled to tell what the miracle was. From there I had my Chinese ten year old and he had to learn the song Chante which is sung by Kids United. I got him to translate the song to English with me and he got stuck on la Bastille - as a wild guess he asked if it was a type of baguette! We had to do a tiny history lesson. Perhaps I will elaborate on this a bit more next lesson.

Just put together a lesson for my Chinese five year old to do over Zoom at 7.30 tomorrow morning. Am going to tell him about Stephen Hawking as my student is into black holes. Have found a bit on disabilities but how people have overcome them in amazing ways, Stephen Hawking being one of these people. I then head out to Darwendale for the wedding celebration of two friends.

Here's the poem by Gillian Clarke for anyone interested.

Miracle On St David’s Day

All you need to know about this poem is that it is a true story. It happened in the ’70s, and it took me years to find a way to write the poem.

‘They flash upon that inward eye
which is the bliss of solitude’
(from ‘The Daffodils’ by William Wordsworth)

An afternoon yellow and open-mouthed
with daffodils. The sun treads the path
among cedars and enormous oaks.
It might be a country house, guests strolling,
the rumps of gardeners between nursery shrubs.

I am reading poetry to the insane.
An old woman, interrupting, offers
as many buckets of coal as I need.
A beautiful chestnut-haired boy listens
entirely absorbed. A schizophrenic

on a good day, they tell me later.
In a cage of first March sun a woman
sits not listening, not feeling.
In her neat clothes the woman is absent.
A big, mild man is tenderly led

to his chair. He has never spoken.
His labourer’s hands on his knees, he rocks
gently to the rhythms of the poems.
I read to their presences, absences,
to the big, dumb labouring man as he rocks.

He is suddenly standing, silently,
huge and mild, but I feel afraid. Like slow
movement of spring water or the first bird
of the year in the breaking darkness,
the labourer’s voice recites ‘The Daffodils’.

The nurses are frozen, alert; the patients
seem to listen. He is hoarse but word-perfect.
Outside the daffodils are still as wax,
a thousand, ten thousand, their syllables
unspoken, their creams and yellows still.

Forty years ago, in a Valleys school,
the class recited poetry by rote.
Since the dumbness of misery fell
he has remembered there was a music
of speech and that once he had something to say.

When he’s done, before the applause, we observe
the flowers’ silence. A thrush sings
and the daffodils are flame.