Pig Sty Avenue

Welcome Them , originally uploaded by smoothdude .

My mate Smoothdude has a photographic exhibition in Brooklyn next week. Go if you can. Details on his website .

An inspiration. I'll have to get down to the Side Gallery - perhaps on the pretext of a trip for my students - and have a shufti. Yes indeed.

All change! The academic blog remains as it was: a place for links to sites needed for studying, and a place to publish drafts of essays and other work. It's had a wee face lift to reflect the fact that I'm studying two courses this year. It'll probably see a lot of traffic and further changes in the next few months. I've deleted the Jarrow and Hebburn blog. The local news and a lot of the photos can better go on here. But I have started a blog called Jarrafellas . This is to encourage me to further a plan to get photos of the people my home town. It's going to be almost exclusively photos. Nothing much new to see yet, though I will be posting some old ones from Flickr until I manage to get out with the camera again. Speaking of which, this (albeit rather jokey) thread in HSP got me thinking again about this whole street photography malarkey. The whole "candid" thing seems to me a bit creepy, and is the sort of behaviour which could lead to someo...

I'll be over on the clever blog . Which will be delightful over the next few months for anyone interested in Sociolinguistics, Discourse Analysis, and the Teaching of English as an Additional Language in Further Education... Wake up at the back there!

The World of Numpty makes inroads on reality every day. The latest is, loaves of bread with the crusts already cut off . I'm not fucking kidding .

Dad's a digital age illiterate. Nontheless, he's got a good idea of the potential - a bit like Rupert Murdoch. Anyhow, he's got me digitally cataloguing his dahlias. I'm strictly a veg and herbs kind of gardener, but I must confess to being wowed by the fibonacci -ness of this bloom. I don't know if it IS called "Hamari Rose", btw. There was another label in the pot: "s dream". The importance of careful labelling with gardening cannot be underestimated.

ugly face , originally uploaded by PigStyAve . We say to her: "Do your ugly face," and she does this! Well, sometimes; and usually when there's no camera in sight. I know this one's badly framed, but I love it nontheless. And it's the only "capture " I've been able to make of this expression from her repertoire. What a comical bairn she is.

Teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL), aka, teaching English as a foreign language (EFL), or, less often, teaching English as a second language (ESL), has a marvellously complicated professional structure. Even people who do the job have only the dimmest idea of the big picture. Those of us doing the job in Further Education colleges in England need a qualification called, - God knows why - "Module 2". That's what we call it. Its real name is much longer. Anyhow, I'm studying for this now. But that's in addition to a Masters' degree in TESOL and Applied Linguistics, which is something quite separate: it's the same essential subject matter, but rather la di da: theoretical, let's say... So far so good. I'm actually teaching, AND studying the practice of teaching, AND the underlying linguistic theory. I'm as happy as a pig in straw. But at work, my colleagues put on, each year, a pantomime , "for the students"...

funny face , originally uploaded by PigStyAve . Molly keeps doing these funny faces. We say: "Do us your funny face!" And she does. But it's not easy getting her on camera. She also does an "ugly face". She seems to be acutely aware of the comical effect.

...can be a lot like going to University. Your first year, you make friends with almost anyone. The second year, you devote some energy to avoiding a proportion of the buggers.

pig sty ave , originally uploaded by zombizi . Clever, I call it. That's how I feel quite often.

It was a right laugh.