Mc² = E Learning Reflections

Well, I'm writing this blog post from the perspective of having just finished teaching my last class for academic session 2020-2021.  Frankly I've never felt so exhausted and relieved and I'm quite sure a lot of teachers will feel the same when they reach summer break this year.   However, I'm also in the process of studying for my #MAODE and I'm currently studying the module #H819 which recently required me to conduct a semi-structured interview with a colleague.  The questions I asked in the interview were intended to illicit information that would help me to answer my research question.  There's nothing specifically interesting about that, suffice to say that I'm investigating some of the reasons why students might drop out of education.   What surprised me (and I don't know why because, in hindsight, it seems obvious) but the theme of frustration came up in the interview.   ( "Frustration (was: threesixtyfive | day 244)" ...

This isn't one of my usual academic blog posts.  But still a lot of thought and soul searching has gone into this.   I want to share something of my experience of being a carer.  It's not a unique story I'm sure, but I think its a story that needs to be told. It's a story that started 8 years ago when my Great Aunt had a stroke.  Aunt Betty was so special to me.  It was like having a third Grandma.  Betty had herself spent so much of her life caring for people (she looked after her own mother when she had cancer and her brother who had alzheimers and downs syndrome).  So when she had a stroke, mum and I didn't think twice about stepping up to the plate and helping her.  Thats what families do. So I would go to work and Mum would look after Betty until I got home.  We worked in shifts like that for years.  But all the while we had to spend six weeks living with Betty, then Betty spent six weeks living with us....