Since I'm on half-term break (YAY!!!), I finally have time to update this blog more thoroughly with everything that's sort of happened over the past 6 weeks.
I suppose the good news is that I'm still alive and no-one seems to hate me yet :D. It's been a bit of a hard slog though - the pace of the school, as I keep saying, is absolutely insane, and I'm usually running around from 8am to 6:30pm, when I finally drag myself home (whether I'm finished working or not!) to continue working at my desk until I drag myself to bed (again, whether I'm finished working or not!) round about 11pm-midnight. I think the hectic pace is due to the lack of transition time between classes, the 24-hour marking policy, lesson planning, the pressure of knowing that exams are coming up and that some of them actually count for a heck of a lot in these kids' lives! Since the Year 8s are writing Common Entrance exams that dictate where they'll go for secondary school, and the Year 7s are being groomed for writing the extremely difficult scholarship exams for their respective secondary schools, I'm feeling a lot more pressure for both of those lots of children. I suppose the first test will be how they do on their end-of-term exams - I'm crossing my fingers that they all do okay, or I'm going to have a lot to answer for!
Other than the pressure and the pace, I'm loving Danes Hill. The kids are really lovely (for the most part), and the staff are friendly. I always say that my happiness as a teacher depends on the kids and, for this school, I'm happy to report that I do love most of them and, as a result, the fact that I'm always exhausted and stressed out isn't a burden like it would be if I hadn't connected to the kids. There are days when things go wrong and you get cross and have to scream a bit (I should actually do that more often), but then you'll have a class come in and make you laugh and suddenly everything's alright again. Teaching is the strangest profession ever! :D haha. Talk about an emotional roller-coaster.
Apart from the normal grind of the school day, there've been a couple of special/abnormal things happen in the first half term. The first thing was Trips Day, which was a lot of fun. Basically, on Trips Day, the entire school goes out - the Y2s went to the Tower of London, the Y3s went to a castle somewhere, the Y4s had a writing workshop/drama day, the Y5s went to Portsmouth, the Y6s went to the Science Museum, the Y7s had a team-building day at school, and the Y8s did some geography fieldwork. Apparently this happens once a term, with a week-long residential Trips Week happening in June. Anyway, since I'm a Y6 tutor and I teach most of the Y6s, I went along to the Science Museum. It was actually a lot of fun - my tutor group is a bit of a handful but, off-site, were quite good. There was some whining ("Miss Choi, I'm HUNGRY!", "Miss Choi, this is booooring"), but they also paid close attention and did what I asked. All I had to do to get my tutor group to come together was stop and look around. As soon as they saw that I had stopped and was looking for them, they'd converge on me and wait until I had made sure they were all there before wandering off again. On the ride back to school, I sat with some of the kids and we played games and chatted. All in all, it was a really pleasant day.
Another strange thing that has happened recently is that I've been kind of made the unofficial Korean interpreter at the school. I had a suspicion it might happen (the Headmaster was awfully interested in my ability to speak Korean at the interview), but it's become a bit of a pain. The first thing I was asked to do was go down to the Lower School to translate a test for a Reception-age child (age 4? 5?). I've since been asked to do a couple of other things, which is fine - the thing is, however, that I'm being asked to write or translate or phone or whatever, and you all know I'm not fully fluent. It does tend to prey on my mind a bit, and it's definitely adding to my workload/stress levels. Ah well.
The final extraordinary thing that's happened recently was that the school was inspected. Schools in the UK are inspected every 4-5 years and, for independent schools, it's kind of a big deal - parents always read inspection reports before deciding where to send their kids, so it's important to get a good report. The team of 7 inspectors were around for an entire week and, basically, they were interviewing staff and pupils, scrutinizing books and policies, and sitting in on lessons. This meant that we all had to do thorough and extensive lesson plans for every lesson we taught, and we always had to be wary that an inspector might pop into our lesson and settle him/herself down at the back to watch at any point.
I suppose I was fairly lucky - I was inspected first thing on the first day of the inspection. It was, however, my Y4 English class - the only English I teach, and the youngest kids I teach. When I had been thinking about which class I hoped they wouldn't come to, it was Y4 English that immediately came to mind. I felt fine when the inspector walked in, however, because I had planned a good lesson using ICT and all the rest, so I felt fairly confident that it would go well. How wrong I was.
The first thing that went wrong was that my projector wouldn't work. My starter depended on being able to show something on the whiteboard from the computer, but the damn thing just wouldn't switch inputs from video to computer. As I puzzled over this, keenly aware of the inspector watching me and the children beginning to fidget, one little boy pulled a chair underneath the projector and said, "Oh, Miss Choi, I can help!". Now, one of the chief inspector's pet policies is Health and Safety, and we were all instructed that we were in no circumstances allowed to have children get up on their chairs. You can imagine my panic when this boy, therefore, started to get up on his! I immediately yelped, "No! That's alright, don't get on your chair!" and, thankfully, for once the boy obeyed. I ended up salvaging the lesson by writing things out on the whiteboard instead, but I know the whole thing must have seemed disorganised and I was pretty drained by the time I walked out of class.
That was, of course, also the day that some of my Y7 scholars stayed behind after class to talk to me about how they were frustrated by the other kids messing about, and how they felt that we were wasting a lot of time trying to get to the point of the lesson because I constantly had to deal with them. Yeah. It wasn't a good day!
Anyway, the inspection seems to have gone well and the Senior Management is quite pleased with the preliminary report. I'll post a link to it once it's published (it's supposed to take about 2 months!) but, in the meantime, I'm going to forget about it. lol.
In more recent happenings, I'm visiting my old school on Thursday to say hello to the kids and staff, which should be fun :). I'm also off to Vienna on Monday for 5 days before having to head back to school the week after that.
Expect a big update after Vienna (if I can find the time!) :D.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment