[Year 12 SofDev] Please thank Mark Kelly for all he has done for us

[Mark]

Golly.  This is like watching one's own funeral ceremony, with special
interest from those at the back who turned up just to make sure I was
really dead.  :-)

Yes, folks, at 55 I have had enough of ethos, powerful learning, E5, VELS,
Australian Curriculum, immersion, curriculum review, "making a profound
difference in the precious lives of each and every student we have the
honour to teach", being accountable, jumping at the sound of bells like a
champion Pavlovian stunt dog, attending hour-long meetings that could have
been replaced by a one-paragraph email, dealing with adolescent
bush-lawyers who know only their rights and not their responsibilities,
settling disputes about which year 7 took something from another year 7's
pencil case, marking endless SACs, and driving to and from work with the
headlights on during cold, wet winters .

Ah, the memories.

I will now have time to do stuff like writing "Buckets of Knowledge" for
ITA and SD (focusing on the tricky bits that everyone gets confused about),
and a Jumbo Collection of multchoice questions, perhaps as an app.
And for years I've been planning on converting vceit.com from static HTML
to CMS... now I have time to choose a platform (perhaps Joomla or Wordpress
- whichever is easier to convert to.)  And learn MySQL.
And I want to play with Python on my Raspberry Pi... which sounds pretty
odd, if you don't know them both.

And if, on a Wednesday night at 10pm I suddenly get a craving to re-watch
an entire season of 'Breaking Bad' just so I can work out if Walter
actually poisoned Brock with ricin - I WILL. 'Cos I CAN.  The thrill may
wear off after a while, so then I'll satisfy my lifetime desire to get a
part-time job at a hardware store selling hammers.  Nothing else: just
hammers.  Sweet.

But most of all while in my Gentleman Of Leisure mode, I will be strolling
down the sand at Bonbeach in the sun thinking kindly of you all sculling
your coffee, grabbing your laptops and whiteboard markers and running off
to double year 10 while you KNOW that it's a beautiful day outside and that
at least one person is CERTAINLY strolling down the sand at Bonbeach
thinking of you.

I do thank Kevork for his gracious message and noble sentiments.  He really
is one of the nicest people in The Real World (TM) as well as the IT
community.

Have a rich and rewarding year, everyone!

Regards,
Mark K


On 3 February 2013 09:33, Kevork Krozian <kevork at edulists.com.au> wrote:

> Hi folks,****
>
> ** **
>
>   It may or may not be entirely in the public sphere that our very special
> colleague Mark Kelly has decided to retire from the day to day pleasures of
> teaching teenagers in the school system.  He stresses this is retirement
> from the Department and not from our community for which we are grateful.*
> ***
>
> ** **
>
> It would fill many pages to itemise all that Mark has done for us to help
> with our VCE IT teaching, assessment and exam preparation. ****
>
> So how do we do justice to all this selfless giving, hundreds and hundreds
> of hours of preparation to make available web content that we can just lift
> and use in class ?  We certainly cannot repay Mark for all he has done but
> in our own way express our thanks for his assistance, moral support and
> ever present community contribution to support everyone in their day to day
> challenges of delivering a fast changing IT curriculum.****
>
> ** **
>
> Please feel free to express your thanks here and also detail how Mark’s
> help has influenced and supported your work as a teacher. ****
>
> ** **
>
> ** **
>
> Kind Regards****
>
> ** **
>
> Kevork Krozian****
>
> Edulists Creator Administrator****
>
> www.edulists.com.au****
>
> tel: 0419 356 034****
>
> **
>
-- 
--
Mark Kelly
mark at vceit.com
http://vceit.com
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