Tied to my chair

I know, I know.  More fool me for going back to school, AGAIN, at my age.  But given that nobody seems to recognise that 30 years' experience in the classroom, a 4-year education qualification in Kindergarten to Year 12 Music (including teaching from 3-year-olds upwards) and having my own family has already made me an Early Childhood teacher, I'm doomed to further education until I get the 'right' piece of paper.

It's a credibility circus. There I am, being interviewed for Rattler Magazine, having my childcare blog read all over the world, turning up to work as a casual and improvising open-ended activities till I'm blue in the face with happy kids hanging off my every limb, ending up showing other teachers new ways of doing their documentation, identifying the interests of children I've only just met and writing obs on them when it's not even my job- because hello, you can do that easily when you've worked with kids for 30 years.

But I don't have the right piece of paper. I have everything, in fact, BUT the right piece of paper.

My textbook for EDEC310, 'Professionals in Early Childhood Education', arrived yesterday at 2pm. By 5pm I was good and ready to throw it out the window, where it could be trampled into the Bungawalbin mud by our flock of free-range turkeys until it was buried in slime. And then I could go join them. A free-range mud bath had appeal.

I don't mind being tied to my chair. Really. I sit here for hours at the Mac, writing my Aunt Annie childcare blog, reading about childcare practice and theory on other blogs and websites from all over the world and communicating with distant friends- hey, they're all distant from here, everything is distant from here, which is why I'm hooked up to an online university course in the first place. To me, professional development is fun. It's what I love, what I do.

So being told by a $60 textbook to watch my diet, take exercise, prepare my study area? To consider whether this is really the course I want to be doing? Give me a flipping refund, please. Childcare wages suck, and I'm already under the hammer just with the fees.

I'm 54, for chrissakes. If I don't know that stuff by now, there's no hope for me. Do you think I'd be sitting tied to my chair fighting my way through the morass of the UNE website instead of enjoying the Northern Rivers winter sun if I didn't know what I wanted, and how to get it?

And then there's the whole thing of learning how to write. Screen after screen after screen of learning how to write a paragraph, how to structure an essay, how to form an argument. Hello, I'm already a writer; a published writer. I know a few things about the art already.  Ask that journalist from Rattler Magazine: '...you raise some of the doubts/reservations many practitioners have about excursions, but don’t always articulate. PS. You write beautifully!' (Oh, don't forget to reference it. Weak author. Ingrid Maack, personal email, 19.7.11)

This very morning, I'm praised by a professional journalist for a respected industry magazine; this afternoon, I'm relegated to writer's kindy.

Does experience count for anything in EDEC310? Apparently not. I still have to swim through the treacle of the 'modules'. While tied to a chair.

Take plagiarism. Please, take it. Preferably a long, long way from here.  I've always rattled other people's chains for plagiarism. I picked 'My Sweet Lord' and 'She's So Fine' before the fuss began.  Yet here I am doing 'Academic Skills Online, Plagiarism' like a naiive schoolgirl, and remembering as the green ticks appear on my answers how I wrote a venomous letter to the editor of my high school magazine when I was 21 for publishing 'The Fog', by Erika Blenkinsopp (or something) without realising that a bloke called Carl Sandburg had actually had the blinking hide to write those exact words a few decades ago. (How dare he.)

I write, therefore I value my own intellectual property. And therefore, I value and acknowledge other people's intellectual property.

Tick.
Tick.
Tick.

It's just as well I'm committed, really committed, to staying in my seat and banging my head against the wall now and then on my way to achieving credibility. (On paper. I've already got credibility in real life. It's a circus.)

I live in hope that somewhere in this $60 textbook, there'll be something I don't know. Just one thing would be enough. Please.

In the end, I go on with the eReserve readings. I love the readings. I don't care if I'm not meant to read them yet; they're interesting. What the EYLF wanted to say, and what it was watered down to for political peace- that's a gem. Exploring indigenous culture and reconciliation in the EC classroom- right up my alley, confirming what I already do with the wildfire aboriginal preschoolers in my local community.

Yes, now I remember; this is why I'm doing this course. To learn more about what I love to do, to fill my consciousness with a heightened awareness of the issues, to stimulate my creativity about how to deal with them, to affirm that what I do every day has credibility no matter what level of the three-ring circus I'm dealing with.

That's why I'm here.