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+--- Thread: Teaching qualifications (/showthread.php?tid=6316)
Teaching qualifications - Bob Schroeck - 05-02-2017
The following is actually a passage (mostly) excised from chapter 3 of DW8, but I've just pulled it out of my discard file for that Step and pasted into the master dev file for DWS. I don't know if I'll actually use any of it, but I have several points coming up in the next few dozen kilobytes where at least a summary of this would be an appropriate answer to questions from Usagi.
To start with, at the time of my exile I was one of the primary
combat trainers for the Warriors' powered infantry corps.
Skilled soldiers and volunteers all, from the militaries of every
member nation of the U.N., these were the guys who served as our
ground troops, doing everything from security at the Mansion to
backing us up on the really *big* operations. I was one of the
Warriors tasked with getting new troops up to speed on using
powered armor to combat metas, and with keeping the experienced
troops in fighting trim.
In addition to that, like every other Warrior I had taught the
occasional class at Warriors Academy, our in-house private school
for kids with early-manifesting metatalents. The only real
difference I could see between Hogwarts and the Academy was the
class size -- a half-dozen students at the most in an Academy
class vs. twenty or so here. And none of the Hogwarts students
would call me "Uncle Doug" like Nina, Ruth and Gracie did.
After being ejected from my home timeline, teaching naturally
became one of the ways I chose to support myself. Over the past
75 years, I'd have to say I've been a teacher of one stripe or
another more often than any other single occupation. Hell, it
was the way I initially earned my keep in Velgarth, the first
world I was stuck in after I fell through that damned teleport
gate in Piccadilly Circus. Starting with Alberich, their
existing instructor at the Collegium at Haven in Valdemar, I
taught unarmed combat to Heralds who were interested -- and it
kept going from there.
A few years after that, I was a bodyguard-slash-tutor to the
twelve-year-old fireball that was Kurata Sana. To be honest,
though, that wasn't a classroom situation -- it was more like
structured homework time plus catch-as-catch-can life lessons.
(And no small amount of early-pubescent relationship advice --
something I dearly hoped I wouldn't be called on to provide for
a few hundred underaged wizards and witches). Still, it *was*
teaching.
Then when I ended up among the Hong Kong Cavaliers, I earned my
way in part by providing unarmed combat training again -- this
time both to interested Cavaliers and to their auxiliary corps,
the "Blue Blazers".
Almost a quarter-century into my exile, I actually ran a
storefront dojo in a place that, although it was on the site of
the Japanese city I knew as Hakone, was called "Tokyo-3". There
I had dozens of students, but none more special to me than three
very exceptional teenagers and their guardian. (I had foolishly
left them behind as soon as an opportunity to move on had
presented itself, and I was still kicking myself over that. If I
ever found my way home again, I was going to convince the
Warriors to make a sortie to their world to offer them all the
help we could give.)
And of course there was the training I gave Utena as we crossed
from the East Coast to the West, not many years back: combat,
both armed and unarmed; tactical and strategic thinking; bringing
her English up to native-speaker level; and generally being the
parent and general question-answerer she'd been denied for most
of her childhood.
In other worlds I've helped a tribe of Bronze Age nomads reach
for the Iron Age, "invented" 20th-century first aid for several
different medieval armies and trained their first true medics,
helped a time-traveling doctor teach 21st-Century medicine in
19th-Century Tokyo, and taught at every level from kindergarten
to grad school wherever local customs (or the ease of
counterfeiting teacher certifications) allowed. I've been a
martial arts sensei/sifu almost as often. And then there was the
year I spent as a general science instructor at St. Trinian's
School for Girls... the less about which I admit to, the better.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
- ordnance11 - 05-03-2017
One interesting fact about tutors to royalty. They become significant political figures when their students mature and come into your own. After all who do you trust more than the person who molded you into the person you are? Someone who is a surrogate parent to you. I can easily see Doug being a minister without portfolio in the Silver Millennium. The equivalent of Miles Vorkorsigan's Lord Auditor. Because he would be bored shackled to a desk job.
__________________
Into terror!, Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell
- Star Ranger4 - 05-03-2017
... General Science at St. Trinians? Shades of Breaking Bad, or maybe standing it on its head in a desperate attempt to keep ord... er... the school in one piece?
You know, this also works as kind of a Cliff notes version of the steps of the walk too.
Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky?
That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry-
NO QUARTER!!!
-- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children
- ordnance11 - 05-03-2017
Quote:Star Ranger4 wrote:I have never been introduced to this 'verse. So is it a school, prison, insane asylum or a combination of all 3?
... General Science at St. Trinians? Shades of Breaking Bad, or maybe standing it on its head in a desperate attempt to keep ord... er... the school in one piece?
You know, this also works as kind of a Cliff notes version of the steps of the walk too.
__________________
Into terror!, Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell
- Hazard - 05-03-2017
Quote:ordnance11 wrote:St. Trinian's is what you get when someone hears of the Montessori educational system, with largely self steered studies by students, and thinks 'this can't possibly be right, discipline would be impossible to maintain.' And then writes about it.Quote:Star Ranger4 wrote:I have never been introduced to this 'verse. So is it a school, prison, insane asylum or a combination of all 3?
... General Science at St. Trinians? Shades of Breaking Bad, or maybe standing it on its head in a desperate attempt to keep ord... er... the school in one piece?
You know, this also works as kind of a Cliff notes version of the steps of the walk too.
The student body acts in a borderline to outright criminal manner at the best of time, more of a criminal organisation than students. And they are effectively the ones running the school and getting away with it all.
- Bob Schroeck - 05-03-2017
"St. Trinian's" is to England what the Addams Family cartoons were to the United States in the 1950s and 1960s.
There was a series of movies (of somewhat mixed quality) based on the original cartoons back some sixty or more years ago, and there was a reboot ten years ago (with an all-star/future-star cast) which is quite a lot of fun -- Wikipedia article here.
I have a St. Trinian's nanoStep I've been meaning to write for the longest time; I just need to find our copy of the movie and rewatch one scene so I can get some of the dialog right.
Edit: I used to have a City of Heroes character inspired by the 2007 movie. If you want a quick sense of what a St. Trinian's girl is like, read this.. (EDIT 2 - changed link to copy of the same material here in the forums.) (EDIT 3 - new forums, new URL.)
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
- DHBirr - 05-04-2017
The school's fight song begins with the stanza (and yes, the full song can be found on YouTube):
Quote:Maidens of St Trinian's, gird your armour on.I think Mary Stewart shouted the series out in one of her early books, with the heroine jokingly claiming she was an alumna. At the very least, she explained her practicality by saying she'd survived a rather chaotic school where "they taught us a lot ... at the tough end of [school name]."
Grab the nearest weapon; never mind which one.
The battle's to the strongest; might is always right.
Trample on the weakest; glory in their plight.
-----
Big Brother is watching you. And damn, you are so bloody BORING.
- Norgarth - 05-04-2017
I remember seeing a little clip on youtube, all in B&W. First it showed s group of Roman Gladiators advancing, then switched to a mob of St. Trinians girls holding lacross sticks(?) menacingly and walking forward, then the Gladiator's fleeing.
Also I once made a female dwarf cleric for a DYD game and said she was a sister of Saint Trinian's (she was a fairly aggressive cleric)
___________________________
"I've always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific." - George Carlin
- Star Ranger4 - 05-10-2017
Heh... And today even google is giving Doug's preferred profession its props.
Happy teacher's day!
Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky?
That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry-
NO QUARTER!!!
-- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children
- Bob Schroeck - 05-10-2017
Quote:a mob of St. Trinians girls holding lacross sticks(?)Field hockey sticks. Which sadly CoX didn't have as a skin option for the Giant Mace brute power, so I had to settle for a shillelagh.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.