What are you reading?
'Felix Frankfurter Reminisces' by Harlan Philips (1960). In the bookcase for a decade, I have now made time to read it.
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What are you watching?
ABC News, 7.30 and Mystery Road
What music are you listening to?
I just downloaded 'Cut to the Feeling' by Carly Rae Jepson, for Camilla.
What are you cooking?
Sugar-free breakfast bran muffins and fruit-based pikelets for home-school morning tea.
How are you staying fit, both physically and mentally?
The afternoons are allocated to long walks with the children, or getting them to help me with farm jobs. I'm weeding, mulching or pruning in the garden when I have a spare moment.
What's the one thing keeping you sane?
For me sanity is meaning in actions and conversation. Placing COVID-19 at the centre of the home school literacy ensures that our isolation is contextualised.
I'm also studying part-time at Deakin in agricultural health and medicine, which I really enjoy and I can apply what I learn to the farm.
Are you working from home? If so how's that going, if not what's work like for you now?
I teach first, second and third years in the Bachelor of Social Science at Federation University in Horsham. I am now delivering my three tutorials online through Zoom and we use Slack as the platform for discussion threads.
I still need to induct a new worker for the farm OH&S, but making a time for is much harder now with the children at home learning from our kitchen table. My work and study has becomes extended in the evenings.
What's something positive you've witnessed or experienced since the coronavirus hit?
My family thank all the staff at the Skipton and District hospital for keeping both of my elderly grandparents, Ruth and Arthur Welfare, in extended residential care during the pandemic. Arthur has not been well. He is 92 years of age and a farmer, and he is referring to COVID-19 as the Calici virus, which makes me smile.
What have you learned about yourself amid the crisis?
I regularly reflect on myself as a learner, but during the crisis I have noticed that I'm becoming most tolerant of wearing knickers with worn out elastic.
What's your advice for others to cope with the crisis?
Dust off an old book, and keep putting on your stretched knickers.
- Amity Dunstan is a teacher at the Federation University, Horsham.
