Elephant In The Room?

Nothing new to report recently since the snow has disrupted the week so much. Bullish statements from the Senior Management Team early in the week to the effect that the school will weather the storm and remain open whatever the conditions were quickly forgotten: when there are more teachers than students in a school of over a thousand kids there's no point in keeping the place open. So apart from being ticked off by the Principal for throwing snowballs at the few students that did turn up, I have no real news.

It's amazing, though, how little work one accomplishes when not under the cosh.

Here, then, is an anecdote that's been doing the rounds at the school for a while.

The Head of Year 9, Mr S, is a bullish, charismatic, impulsive and unpredictable P.E. teacher who, while his heart is undoubtedly in the right place, is known for speaking without thinking, especially in public. His assemblies are often unintentionally hilarious.

He nearly always picks an entrance song for the students to listen to as they come in and a few years back he asked another teacher to burn him a CD with a song on it. This other teacher duly obliged, but as a joke added another song on the end - Nellie the Elephant.

The students filed in in silence listening to the first track. When nearly all of them were in, Nellie the Elephant came on. Mr S saw this as an opportunity to improvise.

(This isn't word for word. But it could have been.)

Mr S: Calm down, calm down. I know this is Nellie the Elephant, but what can we learn from it? What does this song teach us? I'll tell you what...dreams. It teaches us about dreams. And resilience. It's a song about resilience. Nellie really, really wanted to perform in the circus. It was her dream. And it wasn't easy to get in! So she tried really, really hard. She trained for it and trained for it. And, like the song says, she finally got in to the circus!

So far, so cheesy. Except for one thing:

Nellie the Elephant packed her trunk
And said goodbye to the circus
Off she went with a trumpety-trump
Trump, trump, trump
Nellie the Elephant packed her trunk
And trundled back to the jungle
Off she went with a trumpety-trump
Trump, trump, trump.

(Chorus to Nellie the Elephant)

Thought for the day (or why not to Google 'assemblies')

As told to me by a teacher who was at the assembly:

Head of Year: So, Year 7, how do you spell the word "can't"?

Student 1: (hand raised) C-A-N-T?

HoY: No. Anyone else?

Student 2: C-A-N-apostrophe-T?

HoY: (sanctimoniously shaking her head) No.

Student 3: C-O-N-T?

HoY: No.

The rest of the teachers wince expecting the surely inevitable spelling of the rudest word.

Student 4: C-E-N-T?!

Phew! Surely the HoY can now step in and bring this Russian Roulette of Spelling to a close?

HoY: No. Anyone else?

Oh shit.

Student 5: C-I-N-T?!

At least it's Year 7. Year 10 would have spelled the c-word by now. Fortunately we are saved from embarrassment as the HoY decides to finally bring the guessing game to a suitably trite and corny end.

HoY: No, children. "Can't" is spelled T-R-Y.

Good form.

I was given the chance to become a Form Tutor half-way through this year which is relatively unusual since it's customary for a teacher to get their form only once they have achieved QTS. At first I was worried that it might prove to be too much of a burden, since a teacher's first year on the job is notoriously hard work without the added responsibility of a form group.

But now I am extremely glad that I have taken it on. For two main reasons. Firstly, my class are also one of my Year 9 French groups and being their form tutor gives me a chance to get to know them better and to build up a relationship with them outside the classroom which will hopefully benefit both me and them when we step back into a French setting.

Secondly, tutoring and mentoring is a genuine pleasure for me and reminds me daily why I became a teacher in the first place. It's actually fun to lead a group of teenagers, listen to them, speak with them, teach them and learn from them. They come from very different backgrounds: some come from London and their parents went to this same school (albeit in the days before it became Blair's Baby/Adonis' Adornment). Others are from Somalia, the Congo, North Africa, the Caribbean or Central America. Among the languages spoken are French, Yorubo, Spanish, Creole, Somali, Pashtu, Portuguese and Arabic. Like a lot of groups of students in the school they are "lively" (read: ill-disciplined and loud) and so it is a struggle to impose any sort of constructive routine on their chaotic dynamic.

The Senior Management Team (SMT) in their Infinite Wisdom saw it Fit and Correct to remove a traditional 'form period' from the school timetable. Instead we have individual conversations with groups of 4 or 5 students at a time each day. Over the course of the week I spend one-on-one time with every member of my form. There is one huge benefit to this system but also one drawback. The positive, clearly, is that I am given the chance to forge a mentoring relationship with each individual pupil. However the glaring absence of structured 'form time' has left the school with a major problem: lack of assemblies.

There is no regular meeting of each year group and concurrently no real sense of community or positive group spirit as could be fostered by regular assemblies where rewards are given out for dramatic performance, academic achievement or sporting success, where a single, unified message could be transmitted to an entire year group in one go. Sometimes this is precisely what is needed: there is a lack of school buses so most students will take the regular public bus home. A scrum of loud and often rude students forms at each bus stop and they flood onto the buses with little heed for the 'general public'. This became quite a serious problem recently, and an assembly was called as an extreme measure to ensure that all the students received the same message! How much better if an assembly were to be a regular occurence and the transmission of important messages factored into the school day. Instead children had to be pulled out from lessons in order to be sat down in the gym and shouted at for crowding the buses.

I love the weekend. Time to enjoy the sunshine.