Teacher Training Week Two (or three)

Hello. The workload has picked up. We’re into week 2 (or week 3 if you count the first two days as a week, which some people are), and the workload had defo picked up. I’ve got so much work set aside for the weekends that I actually, upon realising that I’m out all next weekend, wonder how I’ll get it all done. Jeez, hey. Two weeks in, or two weeks and two days, and I’m already losing my weekends. It does feel reassuring to be given so much responsibility in terms of planning at this early stage. It means they’ll be no surprises later on. Start as you mean to go. To that end, I’ve made sure I ask my mentor for marking at lunchtimes, so instead of sitting in the staffroom listening to people eating grapes with their mouths open, I sit in the classroom and mark twenty books in an hour. That’s my current rate; one book every three minutes. Is that good or not? Who knows. These kids are writing three sentences, so it’s probably not a great rate. The stuff they right is amazing though. We were looking at the Anglo Saxons the other day and I had to correct a sentence which stated that the King of England text the Duke of Normandy. Check your understanding, young man. What other gems have I come across? Somebody wrote that “there was a bird above me in the tree. I was aroused”. I think they meant “my curiosity was aroused”. Another girl copied, to the letter, a small text box that had been left on show on a website detailing the Bayeux Tapestry. The text box described an obscure panel on the tapestry, whose occupants were acting out a sexual scandal that was infamous at the time. The girl copied it all out, perfectly, without a clue what she was writing, so now her book contains this detailed, medieval sex scandal report.

I took charge of my first XC club as well. Five kids showed up. One did not want to run, one couldn’t run, one did back flips all along the field and the other two were gems. I’ve led many a cross country session in my time but never have I had 60% of the kids not interested in actually running. I seriously wonder whether any of them will turn up next week. The two that were good might not have felt it a very worthwhile XC session; unable to actually do laps or running drills, I had to just conduct playground games like Stuck in the Mud and Bulldog. I sat them all down at the end and asked what they’d like to do next week, what activities they wanted, what should I do so that they could really enjoy and get the most out of these sessions. The back-flipper asked if we could eat sweets. I said I’d look into it.

Our training provider is loading mandatory paperwork on top of mandatory paperwork. There are so many forms and trackers to fill out and upload on a weekly basis. I’M NOT EVEN TALKING ABOUT THOSE FIVE PORTFOLIOS. I’m talking about the online portal, where the providers need to see regular updates about our progress. The portfolios are for the end of the year. So many forms and trackers, so many. I can’t keep my head on top of them all and this agitates me greatly, being such an OCD, organised person. I’m hoping to just do what I think I should do and, in the event that I’m forgetting anything, hope that our school based trainer will let me know. We have very good in-school training staff at our placement, and they are constantly talking to the provider about what’s necessary and what’s not. Apparently, it’s all necessary. You need to have eight different documents proving that you can do one thing. The training provider that I’m with has a very good record with producing Outstanding teachers. I can’t work out if this is because they make you copy out the same thing on fourteen different forms and fill in fifteen different trackers and boggle your mind with a hundred different types of evidence sheets, or in spite of it.

Aside from not really thinking I’m organised AT ALL with all this paperwork (which agitates me GREATLY, see above), the only other thing that went wrong this week is that I taught a spelling lesson on prefixes and suffixes and didn’t use a single correct prefix or suffix on my root words. Lol. My teaching mentor quietly pointed it out and I was mortified to the depth of my very soul for about six seconds, before burying the memory deep, deep down in my psyche. I imagine it’ll erupt in years to come and I’ll have a breakdown about it. 

Oh man, I signed off on this, published it and everything and then remembered an absolute gem that one student said to me. We were setting up a Normans verus Anglo Saxons P.E. game and he came up to me and said "Do I have to be a Norman or a Saxon?" "Yes, you do." "Can't I be a Jew instead?" I looked at him, trying to work out if he was winding me up, "A Jew?" "Yes, teacher." "No, you can't be a Jew".