PTA

pain in the arse.

Noooo. or maybe yes.

I don't know.

Parent Teacher Association.

Desperate for more parents to get involved. Really desperate by the sounds of the school newsletter.

All this activism and involvement malarkey I go on about til people have to leave to be sick. I like to do it with romantic aims. Save the whales and join Greenpeace. Tick. Done that replete with posters of boats and sealife on my student walls. Support the call for a just world with New Internationalist. Tick. Done that and got some posters then also. They went on the walls of my classroom when I started teaching. Get strong and defensive against violent strangers in the night. Tick. Organised and attended a women's self defence class in my local community in the early 1990s. Fight poverty. Tick. Got involved in the Child Poverty Action Group in Auckland. Stop the War. Tick. Marched against US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Got involved in the Socialist workers group in London briefly around then. That's a whole story for another time. Being Green in the community. Tick. Got involved in a local recycling lobby and promotion group here in small town last year. That had its own dramas also.

And now it appears that Fionn's school needs parents to get involved. They listed the things the PTA fundraises for and I approved (I don't always). It was the community feel of the school that we warmed to when we went to the first school gala 18 months ago. That won't continue without parental involvement.

But PTAs are so unromantic. So not glamorous or visionary and actually likely to be time consuming (no matter what they promise) and frustrating.

So am I going to be a 'good' girl? A 'good' mummy? The last sentence makes me want to go and drink the school fees money at the pub now and not bother to get dressed tomorrow.

I don't know.

The meeting is next Monday.

A story from Central Otago

Once upon a time, soon after World War Two, the good people of the New Zealand Broadcasting Service took their huge truck around parts of New Zealand, recording interviews with people they met. This was hot new technology, developed during the war. One of their trips was through Central Otago, an intensely beautiful and also harsh landscape. Although it's now famous for wine and skiing, it used to be famous for gold. So the people interviewed in the 1950s were mostly as old as possible, sons and daughters of the earliest white settlers.

These physically enormous tapes (made of acetate) are of great value to linguists who are interested in researching the origins of the New Zealand accent. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time when the very wonderful Elizabeth Gordon of the University of Canterbury was looking for a history researcher to find out more about the interviewees from these tapes and to interview and record their descendants. Which is how I got to spend ages in libraries in Otago and Wellington and to drive round Central Otago looking up tiny museums and interviewing descendants of the interviewees. Along the way I fell in love.

With this:
So I went on to do my MA on women in the liquor industry on the nineteenth century goldfields of Central Otago. Which meant I got to go back there. New Zealand women won the right to vote in general elections in 1893 on the back of the temperance movement which argued that the woman's vote was a vote for temperance. Throughout the same period, parliamentary debate on liquor licensing often focused on the question: did a woman behind the bar raise the tone of a drinking establishment, or were hotels so corrupting that women had to be protected (read: prohibited) from running them? What I found on the goldfields was a much wider range of experiences. Wonderful, fabulous women running very astute hotel businesses. Degenerate lushes causing a stir with their drunkenness on a regular basis. Inventive women running sly grog shanties which turned into peppermint tea houses when the police came to call - at 3am.

Here on the West Coast I'm back in old goldfields country again, which I quite like.

So what has this got to do with anything? I just can't separate my life story from this idea of growing an activist. Growing an activist has just been me growing. I wasn't born difficult I'm told, (it started when I was about six according to my Dad). I've been fortunate, extremely fortunate, to have had many opportunities to get inside the heads of other inspiring people. And I love the stories of all people. And so I thought I'd share this little box of my history.

I will go back to history again some day. I may yet do more work recording the stories of our living taonga, the elderly men and women of our community. I won't do it for money from the elderly though. That's not giving dignity to the silent in our community. And giving the silent, the quiet, the underheard, a voice, a la Paulo Friere, is something I think is really worthwhile.

growing an activist: Paulo Friere

The adult part of my reflection (cos if I don't get round to this then Rachael will either tell me off or be disappointed which I can't have.) on triggers for an activist outlook and hopefully both a history and future of activist action, is rather random. I'm thinking spiral learning rather than linear.

I was introduced to Paulo Friere in 1998 by John Gourley, himself an influential thinker and activist in my opinion. Friere's key gift to me was his passion for education as empowerment. Not as empowerment through the gaining of certificates and degrees, but as a means of articulating ones own reality, of giving voice to the dispossessed. He achieved great things in terms of literacy amongst Brazil's poor people. More on him here.

Education is not just how I live, it's also how I earn money, as a high school teacher. I've also had the very great pleasure of getting to know people in the UK and in New Zealand who have taken the proactive choice to home educate their children and also those who have taken on significant commitments to supporting their local school. That has been a most fruitful encounter for me. As our family adjusts to new commitments this year (Fionn starting primary school, me returning to high school teaching), reflecting on what education offers and means is a frequent theme.

Gardening is very much my self-education project. Armed with the support of books and other tips, I choose my own seeds, plan my garden and own my own success and steep learning curves.

the mumsy look

That's the magnolia thbat we're aiming to save in the background. I'm the one mostly covered by my baby daughter Brighid. I had a fairly strident feminist phase at university (and still consider myself a feminist now) and I think I imagined myself wearing purple and doc martens and owning a motorbike at 36. And here I am in pale blue, holding the baby in small town New Zealand. I still find the mantra 'the personal is political' hugely relevant, and baby blue or boldest purple, I'm not going anywhere meekly.

Growing an activist

Activists are trees that keep growing, I've decided. I was thinking about activism (taking action for a cause outside my own personal needs is my current working definition) this morning and my first rambling thoughts had me pulling up trillions of life details. Which was telling in terms of how I define myself. But more telling about my whole life story than I care to share in minute detail online. So I've picked out a few key experiences that I think are really important.

1. It's 1981, I'm nine years old and New Zealand is being pulled apart by debate on the Spring Bok Tour. An all white team from South Africa is touring New Zealand and many many New Zealanders are protesting about the implicit support of apartheid that receiving this team gives. My beloved grandfather says that sport and politics don't mix. No one in my family protests against the tour. I disagree with Grandad for the first time ever.

2. I spent some of my early years in suburbia. Clean house, loving family, reasonable school life and a routine and sameness which could destroy the souls of many. My Mum was and is a devout Catholic and the hymns, ritual and symbolism and sermons provided a sense of life outside of suburbiana. I remember thrilling to the romance (for indeed it was romantic to read about) of the stories of sacrifice and commitment in the books on saints' lives which I got out of the children's section of the Church library.

3. I had a pleasant enough experience at high school. Of course at the time I moaned and avoided hard graft and lusted after the wrong boys but really it was fine. I was in the top set in a decile 7 school and had absolutely no idea I was alive. In the seventh form, I did peer tutoring of English as an additional language students and also of juniors struggling with English. One teacher asked me to support a particular student in her class. When we did newspaper reading tasks, he identified with the article relating to prison issues as his brother was in prison.

So that's some key childhood stuff growing me into an activist. Part two soon.