Walk This Way

So then there was Thursday (the day of our much awaited Yeats trip.)... Needless to say this week was gonna be a busy one! After registration in the 2nd Year Mall we hopped onto our bus and headed into town (which lead to me mostly being lead around and following others due to a complete lack of spacial awareness). For our group the National Gallery of Ireland was the first stop. Naturally we began at the exhibition of Jack B. Yeats who was a fantastic artist (making the Yeats family one of the most talented families of the 20th Century in my opinion.) This was by far my favorite piece on display:

Grief- Jack B. Yeats. Source: artlisdoon.blogspot.com

We then had time to take a quick look at a Picasso painting (Still Life with a Mandolin, 1924) 

I really liked something about the impressionism of Picasso's piece. It was so stylistically innovative in comparison to any other art I'm aware of that dates from the 1920's. 

After our artistic beginning to the morning we headed to the National Museum of Ireland on Kildare Street to visit (in particular) the Bog Bodies exhibition which had inspired the poetry of the late Seamus Heaney. The exhibition was very interesting and the helpful curators talked us through the process involved in preserving the bodies and gave us information that they had discovered during their research. 

Source:irisharchaeology.ie 

We then moved onto the National Library of Ireland, to see the Yeats exhibit that they had there. There was an interesting area where you could listen to poems being dictated by famous or significant people affiliated with Yeats. Here we were able to have a nice conversation with the very friendly guide and find out more about the Yeats family, including the fact that Yeats received average grades in English in secondary school.

We had the chance then to have lunch on Grafton Street and we headed around the bookshops for what was pretty much the remainder of our lunchtime.

Spin The Black Circle

Today we went on a trip to IIT Tallaght to watch a demonstration in honour of great scientific innovation- this being science week. First we went into the bio-chem labs where we were talked through the mechanical processes that must be taken when preparing samples. We were also talked through the interesting research the lab was doing regarding the lack of vitamin K in new born infants- it involved checking feces samples... but y'know- SCIENCE!

http://gingerhaze.com/nimona

 Then we had a bit of a fainting incident which was a little scary, and we had to make our way from the crowded little laboratory to give poor Lauren some breathing space. Then it was on to a rather interesting demo of experiments that illustrated a simplified version of the major scientific breakthroughs of Galileo and Boyle-to name but a few.
It also involved a rather scary explosion of a balloon- we were asked to guess if it was hydrogen or helium.... it was hydrogen which went like this:
Kaboom
 Then we had lunch in Liffey Valley, which was nice. We then went on a hunt to the resident music shop. We spent all of our time choosing which ten vinyls and CD's we would take with us if we were stuck on a desert island.

Chloe Dancer

Yesterday was our first Zumba lesson in the hall. I won't lie, Zumba (or any form of dancing for that matter) is not exactly my area of expertise. The dancing was quite funny though, and the ridiculousness of everybody's attempt at 'busting moves' made it clear that diving in head first and giving it a shot was the only way to go about it. However, I've been dealing with a little niggling cold for about a week now and during the dance I got a nose bleed (which is a regular cold symptom for me) so I had to spend a few minutes shoving tissues up my nose before making my epic return to the dance routine.

Source:naas.olx.ie

To be completely honest I had images of us being the teenagers in those street-dance films that come into cinemas every summer, where there's a social tensions between the different classes of dance. They usually look like this:

Source:background-pictures.feedio.net

I'm looking forward to adjudicating a mace debating competition tomorrow. So hopefully that will be interesting. 

Smells Like Teen Spirit

Fun walk. Always an interesting day of the year in St.Wolstans. It's practically a colour themed pre-halloween event for the students and particularly the staff- who mostly end up cross-dressing. Due to being given the colour yellow,we went with a taxi theme in class Tabei and... well this happened.

Yeah, THAT was our intro... So we didn't exactly win. I think we actually filled the fun walk criteria pretty well though; a bunch of teenagers jumping around dancing to cheesy music that had what was easily the heaviest friendship theme in the year. Everyone in the school was pretty hyper-spirited throughout the day.
 After busting our moves on front of the rest of the school it was time to go on a walk. The walk was MUCH shorter than usual which was a god sent after we all had a sugar crash after the excitement of our dances. So as we walked through the outskirts of the town with young children in cars waving frantically at the brightly coloured teenagers (which-come to think of it- is an achievement in itself). Then it was back to the grounds for a drink and a rush inside to grab our bags and begin the weekend. It was a day of high-spirits if nothing else.

Back and Forth

On Thursday we went on a trip to the Pearse museum in Rathfarnham which was nice. It was a nice house full of expensive furniture and highly intellectual artworks, so I was less than surprised when we were told that the Pearse brothers went bankrupt as a result of maintaining the school. After playing a competitive game of 'concentration' on the bus we arrived in the car park of the museum. In  a panicked and rather unfair fashion the rain decided to fall on us with increasing pressure. We took a walk up a well-kept pathway through a rather fabulous set of gardens.  To be met with this:

    Now, I am not one who believes themselves to have authority in the world of judging the quality of buildings I do however think there are a few things the Pearse brothers missed considering that their aim was to educate the maximum amount of Irish children about the Irish language and culture.

       1. Why so fancy?! Now, one would assume that if you want to educate as many young people as possible about Irish that you would focus your funds on resources like... Hmm I don't know... teachers,scholarships, equiptment, etc? (rather than a fancy building)

      2.Why build your school that wants to educate the young Irish population (most of which would be within the city of Dublin)and then choose to hold lessons in the middle of nowhere?!

So that was my half-baked philosophy regarding St.Edna's. Catriona told us about her ancestor John Mitchel, who quite frankly sounds like he is an unfortunate characterfrom a great adventure novel. Link to more about him: catrionaty.blogspot.com

source; www.militaria-archive.com

   Then we spent Tuesday in a talk about road

safety called: Drive For Life it was scary enough

 to be honest, which is exactly why it was

 effective. I think everyone in the room teared

up at this scene: (discretion advised)

I was a lot more wary than usual about getting

 into a car afterwards, and at one point during a weekly

 journey I panicked and threw a ringing phone into the

 depths of the glove compartment, so...

 yeah it's fair to say the entire experience

 was pretty gruesome.... But it DID

work.

Two rounds of work experience have passed since I last blogged here.

 Both were great! Even when it came to doing tasks like cleaning labs and shredding papers it was very relaxed and therapeutic.

Bittersweet Symphony

(This has had to be reposted- actual post date: 27/09/13) 

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Monday morning was an early wake up compared to usual, and I partook in the usual running around double checking things activity that always occurs before a trip! I was excited to be going to Carlingford Adventure Centre because if you ask any TY student they will tell you that it was the highlight of their year, but I was also marked with a painful stinging because (in going to Carlingford) I would be missing Soundgarden's Dublin gig for which I had been excited about attending since early May at least. It was my J.C present and I came very close to missing Carlingford for it. I tried to put that fact from my mind as we stood in the cold outside the petrol station awaiting departure. We were off at 7:00am and before too long we had arrived, to be greated by less than desirable weather!
       The weather slowly improved and we spent the morning playing laser tag, in a forest that lay on top of a VERY VERY large hill. Laser tag was really good fun, although in retrospect I think I may have acted as a bit of a team sacrifice by running ahead fighting rather than just finding a cozy hiding place to shoot from!

 Then after lunch it was off to a series of games to earn gems with our lovely instructor unto whom we bestowed the name 'E-Dogg'. Out of the three groups we actually won the challenge, which no one expected because there were groups far more athletic and competitive than our own! We headed back then for dinner after which we had an hour or so to prepare for our evening activity- a walk through the forest (up the VERY VERY large hill) where we made our way through the terrain- BLINDFOLDED!! We came back down said hill (after some games in the dark- which I was rather brilliant at.) Then we came back, visited the local sweetshop and I phoned home. We had a night of sleep and very little else.... due to VERY VERY big mountains.

       It was another early wake up on Tuesday and we went on a mixture of delightful trips after breakfast. However first we had to go up a VERY large hill ( though it wasn't as big as the VERY VERY large hill) where we played archery, crawled through a darkened maze and body-zorbing. We failed the maze challenge, I was mediocre at archery and the zorbing caused me to be upside-down in a constant state of flustered confusion! 

       Then it was onto kayaking where I definitely toned my biceps! We were brought over in the kayaks to a water trampoline off of which we were propelled into the sea. The water was chilly enough but the ultimate conclusion reached was that the inventor of the wet-suit was an absolute genius.
Then it was time to go! We all had a great time and we were all drained of whatever energy our feeble T.Y bodies possessed. I got home and against my better judgement I searched for images of the concert I missed... ouch! I really shouldn't have done that!

Reflektor!

If the objective of work experience is to give a harsh and caustic view of the work place to students then I must say it fails miserably!

       I left the car this morning outside the college with typical butterflies in the abdomen and worry on the mind. I was less than confident about where to go, so I strolled off on a tangent in search of the college's chemistry department until my ticking wristwatch over-rode my pride and I asked some students for directions- only for them to inform me that I was in fact outside THAT very building (luckily students are reliably pleasant beings and they didn't then laugh at my ignorance). Next I had to prepare myself for actually going inside- which revived the butterflies! However as I walked into the Chemistry Department I was magically mellowed- except NOT magic- science! I went to the office and met my very welcoming supervisor, read the health and safety regulations and had a chat about what we'd be doing over the next 8 weeks.

      Then myself and my co-T.Y worker/ friend Lauren - who happened to have the same 1st placement as I- began to set up and carry out a titration experiment to ensure there were no flaws in it for the college undergraduates who would have to do it during the year. It was more complex than our Junior Cert. course, but we fared quite well and (rather miraculously) the results were flawless. That experiment occupied most of our day because we had to complete it in stages and there we're often long gaps in between the processes.
            During these gaps we did some photocopying. At one point the printer became severely jammed- though luckily it was not whilst we were using it. We also got the opportunity to join the members of staff for half an hour in the staff room. Before long we were passionately discussing the new car tax scheme that was implemented that day- then I realised that people in the 'big bad world' were interested in the same things as I! I could have easily been sitting in our school lunch room having a chat with my table. It amazed me that within minutes such nice people had made our presence so wonderfully ordinary and comfortable!
           During lunchtime Lauren and I took a nice stroll around the grounds, had some lunch and stopped in a bookshop- which led me to fulfill the need within me to buy a book  (Bookshops are my weakness so I now own a copy of 'The Picture of Dorian Gray').

Image Source:itunes.apple.com

       We headed back after lunch to finish and to clean up our lab area. We then headed to the secretary's office and to their delight we brought their mail over to the campus mail-room to be posted. We left the building headed off in a circle around the entire campus (looking like confused students) and stopped for directions before actually finding the building. SUCCESS! We handed the mail in and collected some from the mail-room and we left feeling immensely proud... Then Lauren pointed out that the opposite building right out side looked rather familiar- yeah, we had been right across from the mail-room when we left our own building! We laughed the incident off and continued on the very short journey back.
      Then it was the end of the day and we picked up our belongings and bid everyone farewell for the week! I realised (that after one day in a college) I rather wanted to be a college lecturer. So either I am extremely malleable or I subconsciously chose this work experience because of an accurate instinct that I would like to venture in the general area of lecturing. Who knows? One thing is definite- it was a pinnacle day of reflection...