Cooking

I baked some lemon cakes to take to my mother-in-law. She used to cook a lot, but is quite frail now, so I like to do some baking for her.

She had a 'strange vegetable' in her 'organic veg' box - although we told her it was just a cauliflower she seemed a little reluctant to eat it, so we took it away for her. I love the way that the whorls are so mathematically constructed - the spirals are in prime numbers.

Today I made huge quantities of mushroom soup, and small seeded loaves.

Student teachers

We were expecting a new student teacher a couple of weeks ago. He didn't turn up - not a word, no idea where he was. Our head of department 'phoned his college to be told that he'd left the course - nice of them to let us know.

We were then contacted by another training college who have sent us a different student. He's very keen, wants to try lots of things, all very good - although I do have some reservations. Having been educated abroad he doesn't actually seem to know very much about education in the UK and what the syllabuses entail. I hope that he doesn't have a romanticised view of what teaching in a school is all about as we've had at least one student come for a couple of weeks and then leave saying that he really hadn't been aware of quite how much hard work is involved. I think that this student is prepared to work hard, but I don't think he knows (yet) how limiting the syllabus is at A level, and having come from a business environment he's not yet used to the standard of work at different Key Stages yet. Even at A level it takes many new teachers quite a while to realise that most of the students can absorb information at a far slower rate than we can with all the practice that we have had. My main task when mentoring new teachers who are teaching A level for the first time is getting them to halve the amount of material they expect to get through in an hour.

Teaching can be enormously rewarding but it is actually a hard slog, with lots of preparation and a lot of marking. You have to stick very closely to the National Curriculum and the exam syllabuses, and you have to work hard to get through the work in the time you have. All this has to fit in with gym displays, sports matches, Christmas concerts, field trips, individual music lessons, study days, and pupil and staff absences. I don't think that the government helps with the type of advertising that they use to encourage new teachers. It tends to give the idea that you can hang out with a load of interesting and interested students, and doesn't mention the stress, levels of work, or poor motivation of some students.

Open Evening

Open Evening this week - school finishes a bit earlier and we get the pupils off the site. Obviously we check that all the displays and information on the walls is up to date, interesting and attractive. The school is given a through cleaning.

I turned up at about half past five, having spent the afternoon making interactive games about the school and open evening, and Wordle keyword posters for my classroom. The parents were going to be arriving for the Head's first talk at about 6:00 pm.

AB, an old friend, who works in another department had agreed to be in one of our ICT rooms as we don't have enough teachers who are exclusively IT teachers to cover all the rooms. I needed to make sure that she was well set up with a PowerPoint on a loop displaying in her room, as well as the looping PowerPoints that all the year 9 students have been doing to welcome and inform the year 6 visitors. Then we put the interactive games on a couple of the computers too. AB was a little concerned that she has got everything right, and knew where everything was, but I was beginning to panic about the fact that I had to get my own room ready as well as check that AQ (our new staff member) was set up in her room too - so I dashed off. Once in my room I spent ages getting all the computers turned on and the displays all going, by quarter to seven. Then the visitors started. I spent the next couple of hours showing kids the games, discussing ICT in the school with parents and explaining that no, this isn't the only computer room we have, there are three larger ones, and another that is exclusively used for technology. Yes, we are remarkably well provided for, but that is one of our strengths.

I finally switched everything off at about 9:15, wandered down to the hall where the senior management team was saying goodbye to the last parents. How had we done? How can you measure it? However, the general consensus was that we had done well.

I went home, sank into the sofa with a snack and a glass of wine, and watched "the Making of Lost in Austen", having missed the last episode of the programme itself. What a load of rubbish that was! As a great fan of Austen I watched it, hoping desperately that it might prove to have some small glimmer of the magic of Jane herself. What I saw was a programme with very little understanding of the manners and mores of the period. Amanda didn't seem to understand the least about acceptable behaviour in the book that she was supposed to have read so many times and the characters from the book behaved outside the normal accepted behaviour for the time. Whoever wrote it should have done a bit of research into manners and behaviour and not stuck modern manners onto people from 200 years ago. Yes, I know, it's entertainment, but it irritated me enormously - Austen herself would be dizzy from the spinning.

I don't know why, I got to bed at the usual time, but I am so tired after all the rushing around and extra stress and strain of Open Evening.

Awareness of mortality

Yesterday two people were murdered on a narrowboat only a day's cruise away from here. We didn't know these people, but we do know people who did, and the canal world is so small that it seems really close, and personal. It appears that three people had been drinking, a couple, and their friend who was staying with them. The boater stabbed both his partner and his friend, then called the ambulance service. He was taken into police custody. Not only is there the shock of this, but the realisation that it happened while the couple's young son was sleeping on the boat.

Then today my neighbour, M, called by to tell me that another neighbour from our close, J, had died suddenly of a stroke on Saturday. I'm shocked because I saw him striding out past the house on his twice daily walk with his dog only last Friday. OK, so he wasn't a young man, and he's had diabetes since before we moved here 17 years ago, and yes, he has recently been diagnosed with leukemia - although the doctors said he'd die with it not of it. But it's the suddeness, the fact that he seemed to be so vital only last week.

All very sad, my thoughts are very much with all people involved today. Hmmm....

Wordle - I love this

As an ICT teacher I spend a lot of time trying to keep up with new uses of ICT in schools - not just for myself, but for my colleagues too. I found Wordle a few months back, and I love it. You can enter text or just words, and create 'word clouds' and patterns in different colours and fonts. Changing the size of the word is done by repeating it - the more you repeat, the bigger it becomes. Clicking on a button will reorganise the pattern. You can save them to your computer (or a blog), or print them out.

Here are some of my favourite Wordle pictures that I've done using well known quotations.

Find Wordle at http://wordle.net/

Back to Uni

At some point I must have put information about my childrens' ages down on some form or other. My e-mail inbox is full of "Back to University" mails from supermarkets and bookstores. The junk mail is targetted enough to know that our kids must have left school now.

La rentrée - back to school

1st September, an INSET day - and the first thing on the Agenda is the Headteacher's State of the Nation Address and rallying the troops speech after the examination results of the summer. I've not slept well, so I'm gulping coffee - I've got in the habit of getting up late over the holiday, but none of us are bright eyed and bushy tailed. Nine o'clock creeps up, but no one is particularly inclined to be the first to go down to the hall - I listen as a friend describes the difficulties with selling her house. Eventually someone moves, and we all go down, where I sit at the back, so I've go some chance of seeing the new staff when the Head points them out. There are a lot of new teachers this autumn.

The Head beams, we've done very well, once again exceeding our target for GCSE higher grades - yes, it is good, we have done well, and it is very motivating to be on a winning team. I still feel tired, and look at the scummy dregs of my coffee. However, it's not all good news - we're scheduled for an OFSTED inspection again this year, so we are given key issues to focus on, these will come up again in the later pastoral meetings.

Through the day we meet, discuss, target, plan. I eventually get away so that I can begin to think about making sure that the scheme of work for KS3, years 7 to 9, is in place, as well as talking to the new teacher in our department about what she's doing this week. Lunch is hurried, then it's off to print out work - new booklets, plans of work and some notes I wrote up for a colleague over the break.

In the afternoon meeting session my Head of Department is not around, although we need to discuss things with her, so I try to orientate our new colleague. She's concerned about when she can get hold of her laptop, but locked up and unavailable today. There are so many new things for her to take in. She's a mature entrant to the profession, and clearly very experienced in industry, but she's surprised that we don't do some things the same way as her last school, where she started her qualifying year. "That worked well," she says. But that's not how we do it, and I don't have the clout to get it changed. Teachers are constrained by frameworks, traditions in the school you are in, and at the end of the day - funding.

Our HOD turns up, so we flick through the work I've prepared this summer, checking for her agreement on my changes to the scheme of work. She's happy, so I put it in for photocopying. We carry on discussing a few things and I get a phone call from my husband. "Where are you?" "At work." "Still? - It's nearly four, I thought you'd be back before now."

It turns out he wanted to go and meet with some people from the canal on their boat which was moored in Milton Keynes - he didn't tell me when the meeting was - I thought it would be the evening. So I drove home, and we went straight out again.

We had a good time, drinking tea, and then wine and talking about lots of canal based things - it was nice to meet Tony and Mo, and Sue, who had also agreed to meet them. Tony looks remarkably well despite currently undergoing chemotherapy.

Driving home took far less time than expected, a quick meal, then writing the final couple of days of my blog about our summer cruise, which I hadn't finished because of preparation for the new school term. I went to bed after 12, but I had so many ideas whirling through my head that I couldn't sleep for ages.