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.