Poppalina

High School Formal Frock

A Kapinny post

Last year I made my step daughter's Year 10 end of year formal frock. She had found the pattern in an op shop.

 

Though the skirt was far too long and full for someone of her small stature, the bodice and collar are designed for her, really. She has one of those old-fashioned hourglass figures.

The trip to the fabric store was fun and excruciating in equal measure. It took ages, but finally we settled on a cherry red silk satin ...

... which looks a lot brighter red here than it really is, and a gorgeous black lace overlay.

And the lovely French lady serving us found a fabulous black lace trim we decided to put on the hem. After it was finished, and she had tried it on, I described her in it to my husband.

Me: 'Gina Lollobrigida. That's all I'm saying.'

Him: 'I don't know what you mean.'

Me: 'You know what I mean.'

Him, putting his fingers in his ears and screwing up his face: 'I don't want to know what you mean!'

4(8c-3) = 43 + 15c

Go on, then, you work it out. Don't forget to divide each side by 5 and 10, respectively. If you manage it in under 5 minutes, congratulations - the rest of tonight's worksheet should only take you three hours.

Welcome to Year 10 Algebra. And if your kid's only 4 years old and you think you don't have to worry about this kind of bullshit yet, think again. Blink, and it will be upon you, so I strongly advise you to get practicing, toot sweet.

I was actually pretty good at maths in school. I studied both pure and applied all the way to VCE, without ever really understanding a thing. And that's when I had The Epiphany, declaring to anyone who would listen that I wanted to be (back of hand settles limply on forehead and eyes turn heavenward), an Actress, thereby shattering my mother's dreams of me becoming a doctor, forever.

(which was a good thing, really. I loathe hospitals).

And so ended the maths.

All this happened, like, 30 years ago. None of what I learned had any bearing on Real Life. The little maths ability remaining to me has been archived in the deepest recesses of my memory and can only be accessed by......um.....

Nothing, actually. A frontal lobotomy. It's pretty much all gone, folks.

 

That said, I have been bent over algebraic equations, night after night, for weeks with the Creative Genius, whose considerable visual talents, as impressive as they are, developed at the expense of and in inverse proportion to, her numeracy skills. Just say the word, 'maths', and my baby will turn pale and need to lie down for awhile.

Leaving not a lot to go on.

You see, as far as I can tell, they don't actually teach kids maths in school, they just give them worksheets.

To take home.

For you to muddle over after dinner. Then teach your kids how to do it. And you haven't even done the dishes yet.

Yay.

So, yeah.

Good luck with that.

 

ps. Thankfully, the actress thing wore off. After that, I did something much smarter.....I became a singer. Thirty years on, I have a CV that reads like a dog's breakfast, but I can carry a shitload of coffees from one side of a room to the other.

Joys of Parenting #36 - The Note

Is it just me, or do all parents find themselves permanently extorted into the Writing of the Bullshit Note in order to exempt teenagers from mandatory school PhysEd?

Now, I can live with the fact that I have to lie. The relevant teacher is as aware as I that the whole stupid business is a charade. He's happy enough to let the girl off, knowing full well that she would rather be bitten by deadly asps than run a lap of the oval. He does, however, require A Note from The Parent, to keep his sheet balanced.

No, what kills me is the sheer, relentless banality of the process.

So this week I decided to make it more interesting for both of us.

Here's hoping that he has a sense of humour.

Okay, So I'd Make a Lousy Stage Mother

A rare flash of genius prompted me to show Jude's 'What if' to my daughter, as an example of a visual diary, and What Artists Do to keep track of their ideas.

Very inspired, indeed, was the Creative Genius and, being home for a week with the flu, she then spent a respectable part of it establishing her own, on paper.

However, it turns out that a visual diary, to Mym, differs from a conventional personal diary only insofar as the private thoughts and secrets recorded are accompanied by painstaking and elaborate illustrations. Exquisitely beautiful, naturally, but inaccessible to everyone but her, and quite unbloggable. Even I was reluctantly offered only the briefest glimpse on the solemn promise that I will not read the text ever, or look at any of it in her absence, on pain of slow and monstrous death.

Now, we take promises seriously, here at Chez Poppalina. You could blow your credibility for life, breaking a promise around here and this, let me tell you, is a Seriously Challenging Promise to Keep.

A part of me acknowledges that I have a lot to learn about teaching. Having her make art that I couldn't share in was Not What I Meant At All; creating work that I couldn't post online and brag to everyone about even less so. Somewhere along the line it seems I lost control of the ball.

But then, I paused to consider what Jude herself might have to say about this, and although I'm not sure precisely what that would be, I do know it would be something non-interventionist, philosophical, and celebratory. Something about letting it run and seeing where it might take you, about allowing the process to unfold, about the journey being the creative experience and the result essentially a biproduct.

In short, a brief and eloquent treatise on the Yoga of Art.

So I said nothing. I let it ride. The preconceptions and aspirations I had held about a controlled and structured environment in which my daughter would regularly churn out work to improve her skills and provide me with convenient blog posts to wow you all with, I tucked away in a little box at the back of my underwear drawer, along with a number of other Almost Brilliant Ideas.

After all, who am I to tell a Creative Genius how to create?