Wow – the Snails are booked up pretty much until the end of February, and with GenR8 continuing until the end of November, I’m not feeling at all slow and slimy! Being a full time storyteller turns out to produce a fairly frantic lifestyle.
Except I’m still not a full time storyteller yet, because I accidentally became a Latin teacher for two days a week and now I’m finishing THAT contract. I’m really enjoying it, actually – the world of putting silly actions to boring grammar, reading about the adventures of Scintilla and Quintus and dealing with completely unlikely translations of lengthy passages is just as much fun as it was when I was doing it all for the first time. I’m not sure that all the kids I teach agree, but I do my best. At the moment we’re translating Latin Christmas carols to sing in assembly and particularly enjoying the macaronic ones (inevitable jokes about pasta included). “Angel hosts are singing nova cantica…they’re singing in the new canteen, Miss?” It’s also revealing a fairly abysmal knowledge of the Christmas story among my year sevens. “The baby is lying in praesipio…what could praesipio mean, do you think?” Blank silence. “Well, have a guess…what was Jesus lying in?” Pause. “A cradle type thing?” “OK, good guess, but remember the story? Mary didn’t have a cradle so she laid him in the….?” Lengthy pause. Finally: “A box?” It’s not just my class. A colleague came into the staffroom last week in shock because NONE of her year fours could tell her who Jesus’s mother was. She said: “I thought EVERYBODY knew that.” Well, not any more.
So in between Latin lessons and sneaky theological instruction I’m writing scripts, learning ventriloquism and performing for the second time with GenR8…loving every minute. Especially the minutes when I’ve remembered every line of the Creation Rap in the right order and I can sit back down again and breathe.
By the way, this is my new vent partner, Gerald. He still can’t say the letter B, but he’s pretty cool.