In the corridor

"Sir, who's the prime minister of England?"

"Who do you think? Take a guess."

"Barack Obama?"

"No. Guess again."

"Tony Blair?"

"Closer, but no. His name starts with G then B."

"George Bush?"
"No. His name is Brown."

"Patel?"

"No it actually is 'Brown'."

"Prime Minister Brown."

"Yes. Do you know his first name?"

"No."

"It's Gordon Brown. Heard of him?"

"Oh yeah! I think so..."

Creasing the spine.

Excuses made today to avoid reading:

It's boring.

It makes my head hurt.

The words start spinning.

I look at the words then the page goes white and I can't see.

I want to listen to music.

He threw crisps at me.

Can I make a PowerPoint about my book instead?

Some students find reading difficult, it's true, but other perfectly literate students spend too much time playing computer games and watching TV. Their brains aren't trained to concentrate on a page of text. 

---

I saw the cartoon below and thought it sums up well what I felt when I walked into school for the first time. To a certain extent I still do aspire to this!

What you don't know...

Yesterday I was meant to go to the Houses of Parliament with a group of Year 9s. The Principal thought it best that the trip be cancelled because of the protests surrounding the G20 summit. What a shame! The cancellation, however, wasn't made final until the morning of the trip. As we sat and waited in the school canteen, 15 teenagers and 2 teachers, LC pipes up and asks, "So what exactly are the Houses of Parliament?". R, who was leading the trip with me, answered her question with a question: "Have you heard of the GOV-ERN-MENT?"
LC: Yeah...
R: Well, that's where they govern from.
Pause.
LC: But I thought the government lived.....lived in the White House.
No word of a lie!
R & I are speechless. The other children don't seem to think it was that odd an assumption to make.
Imagine if we had actually gone to the Houses of Parliament. 15 children would have learned something real that day! I'm starting to think that the value of trips cannot be overestimated.

Normal lessons were suspended for PSCHE day (I don't know what all the letters stand for: Personal, Social, C..., Health Education?). We all went to the local park for a trip instead which was nice because the sun was out.
In the afternoon I had an hour with my Form. I decided to have Circle Time with them instead of showing a video. We sat in a circle and I asked them about the G20 and if anyone knew who they were and why people were protesting. Among the speculative responses I got were:
- The G20 are a gang.
- The G20 are something to do with G-Unit.
- The protesters are having a riot for no reason.
- The protesters are angry with the police.
- The protesters are angry with the War in Iraq.
- The G20 are angry with the War in Iraq.

I tried to point them in the right direction by asking what recent events could have made people angry enough to protest. One girl worriedly asked if it was to do with Obama's election. Eventually someone shouted out "Credit Crunch"! That's more like it, I thought, before realising that if I felt my own knowledge of the ins and outs of the markets were sketchy, my Form's knowledge would be non-existent. Their awareness of the world outside their immediate circle of family, school and friends is minimal: based on a weird mix of media soundbites, random facts they remember from a lesson here and there, and perhaps a holiday they have been on. We had a jolly discussion, however, debating various things: from favourite holiday destinations, to what it meant to be rich, to what life was like in Afghanistan for W who moved here 2 years ago. I enjoyed the time to simply sit and have a constructive chat with my Form, many of whom I either spend most of my time chasing up for being naughty, or ignore while focussing on the naughty kids!

I cannot wait for the Easter break. Am running on empty at the moment!

Back-handed compliment.

"So Sir," asks M from my Form as I escort him out from his ICT lesson in which he is persistently and calmly ignoring everything the teacher has asked him to do in favour of wandering about annoying the others, breaking equipment and then complaining about how much the teacher is winding him up. "Sir, you're going to be our form tutor until the end of the year, right?"
"Yes, M, that's right."
"No offence, yeah, but that's rubbish."
"Why do you say that?"
"Well, I mean, when you were just our French teacher it was cool because we only saw you twice a week..."
He's being sincere and not intending to be rude. I can't see where he's heading with this one.
"...riiiiight..."
"Well, Sir, what I mean is that we kind of andIdon'tmeanthisinanweirdway missed you, so we looked forward to the lessons more, but now that we see you every day it's bate."
This takes me a second to figure out. 'Bate' is a pejorative adjective.
"Thanks, M?"
The delights of making a difference!

---

GCSE group. Waiting for silence. Again.
C: Sir you're always moany these days. You used to be nice.
Maybe if you shup up once in a while, or attempted your coursework, or came on time at least occasionally or didn't insult me in front of the rest of the class then I wouldn't have to moan at you. Till then get used to it....hoooold it...such rhetoric wouldn't help matters. Also, it would be pointless moaning.
Me: Thank you, C. Now please remember to bring your passports for the trip on Saturday.
C: Whatever, Sir! See-ya!

---

I think that teaching is most often thankless. You have got to get enjoyment from the actual process because you cannot expect acknowledgement from the pupils for the hours and hours you put into their education. You also have to have some intrinsic motivation: a deep-seated desire to do something good. I spent 12 hours in school today and then had to plan for a further hour and a half at home. Thinking back, I don't believe that I even realised teachers planned until I reached sixth form and had a young history teacher who was noticeably learning the course herself as she taught it to us. Until then I thought, as most of my pupils surely do now, that the teacher just rocked up and talked about the same things they always did and, moreover, that their lessons just flowed from somewhere inside them without hours of painstaking preparation. Actually "thought" is an overstatement. I never even posed myself the question as to where the lessons came from!