Archive for December, 2007

Happy Christmas

December 21, 2007 at 8:11 pm · Filed under Blogroll, IT, PGCE, Student Teachers, city life, computing, downsizing, dropping out, teacher training, teaching

It’s very nearly Christmas. I haven’t been in school all week and should have been doing lesson plans and getting a head start on the remaining assignments. And, to give myself some credit, I did start the week in that way. On Monday I went to the college, got some books out on the reading list, and then went home and started writing up lesson plans, and emailed them to my class teacher for review. You really can’t ask for anymore than that.

On Tuesday morning I got a reply from her, basically I have to rewrite them. Bummer. And I had spend a huge amount of time, and even a few quid, getting the resources together for the lessons, which now are of no use as I can’t teach that lesson. Even bigger bummer. If anyone wants a CD of a pygmy honey gathering song, let me know. And, after you’ve listened to it, could you please let me know what it sounds like.

Thing is, this totally knocked me back, I was really, really (and totally unreasonably) pissed off. My limbic system kicked in (the bit of the brain that controls emotions and such like), and has stayed kicked in ever since, at least in respect of college / school. When this kicks in, your logic functions shut down and you just have to go with it.

In some ways this is great, I know that I am too pissed off to think about it, so there is no point trying. This is very liberating, especially around Christmas, it means I can just enjoy the festivities. However, there is a suspicion in my mind that this realization is itself logical, which means that I’ve got past the limbic system and am very capable of doing some work. But you can overanalyze these things.

More interestingly, I’ve always thought of myself as the sort of guy who was very open to criticism, and actually sought it out. I am aware that I can get defensive, especially on things close to my heart, but I’ve always thought that I’ve had a pretty positive approach to this sort of thing, but this little episode would indicate otherwise.

Or perhaps, I used to be, but am not anymore, which I wouldn’t really categorise as progress.

But that’s not the only thing I’ve noticed about myself. I was wrapping some presents for my kids (or, to be more accurate, one present, the Mother of My Children had bought and wrapped all the others – so no change there) and I wrote her name very carefully in very fancy script, lots of twirls and such like. If it had been half neat, you would have put your mortgage on it being a chick’s handwriting.

This is exactly the sort of thing that I would have never, ever done in my previous existence. I would have scrawled it quickly, if it turned out legible, that would have been a plus.

Is it possible that I am changing in some very subtle way, and I can only observe this from the things I do as I certainly don’t feel any different?

Or is possible that I drank one too many glasses of wine before writing this?

Happy Christmas.

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Note to self

December 10, 2007 at 8:15 pm · Filed under Blogroll, IT, PGCE, Student Teachers, city life, computing, downsizing, dropping out, teacher training, teaching

Lessons finish at 3pm, that’s good news, right? Well, yes, especially if its your last lecture before Christmas (yippee!), and actually, we’ve only got a few more next year, most of the time we are out doing experience in schools. So it’s very nearly our last lecture altogether, and I find this very scary. I really think that I need to be told an awful lot more stuff before I’m allowed to teach. I don’t know what it is that I need to be told, I just know that there is an awful lot of it.

But now is not the time to worry about that, now is the time to go down the pub, which we dutifully do. Having a few glasses of wine at 3 o’clock is potentially dangerous. One glass very soon becomes three (large glasses, so that’s a bottle) and you’ve still got to get home and help get the children to bed.

Lying down on a bed cuddling a 1 year old to sleep with a bottle of wine inside you, the inevitable happens and you fall asleep. If you slept through the night, that would be fine, but somehow you wake up at one in the morning, decide to cook tea, and can’t get back to sleep again. Not great when you have to be in school tomorrow, and you’ve committed to getting an assignment done by the end of next week. And its coming up to Christmas and there’s lots more bottles of wine to be drunk between now and then.

Clearly, doing your assignment at 1am isn’t a goer. I’m struggling to think exactly why not at the moment, but clearly it isn’t. So that’s how you end up blogging at 1am.

That’s was Thursday. It’s now Monday. I was up past midnight every day over the weekend doing my assignment, and spent large chunks of the days on it as well. I now know for certain that is no way to earn Brownie points in the run up to Christmas. However, it’s now nearly done (nearly), but, note to self, finish the assignment before you go down the pub next time.

Tonight its Monday, and Monday means football, so I’m going to have to put the finishing touches to it when I get back at about 10.

Unless, of course, anyone fancies a pint after the game…

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The games people play

December 2, 2007 at 11:20 pm · Filed under Blogroll, IT, PGCE, Student Teachers, auditors, city life, computing, downsizing, dropping out, teacher training, teaching

Or “Cometh the lesson plan, cometh the man”
Or “Know your enemy”
Or “How to handle an auditor”

The time we have all been fearing arrives, I need to teach my first lesson, and, worse, put together my first lesson plan.

Cometh the lesson plan, cometh the man.

In order to make something which, to be quite honest, is reasonably stressful, into an ordeal of Biblical proportions, the college have managed to devise a pro-forma of such devilish intricacy it can only have been designed to see who would crack under the pressure. Spend 40 days and 40 nights in the desert? Pah! If you really want to test yourself, try teaching a week of lessons when you have to fill out the college’s lesson plans template first, for each and every one of the lessons in a week. Then do that for 6 weeks running.

Bear in mind, this stuff matters. Staff in school assess us, and we get visits from lecturers at college doing the same thing. You can fail lessons (including the infamous less plan), start doing that, and you’re in trouble.

But fortunately, I’ve seen stuff like this before. Anyone who has ever been involved in IT in a bank, will be familiar with the omni-present auditor. You can view the auditor and the assessor as similar breeds, both purport to be there to be able to offer constructive criticism, but the harsh reality is that they are there to pick holes in what you are doing. They are answerable only to other auditors, and there is no right of appeal. If they ask to see something, you are obliged to hand it over. It’s a bit like the teaching equivalent of the Stasi.

Know your enemy

This doesn’t mean they are bad people, hey, they aren’t estate agents. In cynical self-interest I spent some time with an internal auditor. If you ever talk to one, you will find that they are more than happy to talk to you, probably on the basis that no one else will. And they are worth listening to.

Basically, most auditors have decided before hand how big a big black mark they are looking to give you. It will be based on the last black mark, and general feeling they get from talking to people, i.e. gossip. They then spend a couple of weeks looking to justify their position, and will have a target of the numbers of things they want to find which are wrong, and they won’t give up until they reach that number. In the end they produce a report, and you are obliged to act upon it.

How to handle an auditor

So, this is how you play the game. You point out some things that really need doing, and that really are critical, which are the things you were planning to do anyway, or, if you’re really sneaky, the things that you always wanted to do but no one would ever let you.

They still need their list of things that are wrong, so you plant these. If they are looking for 5 control issues, you collate your information such that 5 control issues jump out and smack them in the mouth (you can’t tell them what they are, they need to find out for themselves, it’s a bit like teaching year 2). And don’t be too subtle, I’m guessing auditors don’t have the crème de la crème to choose from when its time to pick graddies.

So to apply this to lesson plans. Start low, you’ve got a 6 week placement to get through, and they need to find holes all the way along. If you don’t give them the obvious stuff to go for, at least to start with, the mind boggles what they might start faulting you on.

And be careful about where you want these holes to be. They need to be in areas that you think you have covered, don’t give them something that you’re going to struggle to cover. But be honest with yourself, if there is something that you struggle with, try and do it adequately, and perhaps be a little more slack on the stuff in your comfort zone, it will be the stuff in your comfort zone that you will be asked to improve on.

And then improve, slowly and steadily, over the 6 week period. You’ll probably still be struggling in the last week, but that’s much better than starting to struggle in the second.

However, there is a significant risk with this (as with the auditor). If you really are crap, and you start adding in artificial holes into something that was barely hanging together anyway, than the whole thing might fall apart. But hopefully you should be able to judge that in your first week.

Hopefully.

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