Archive for January, 2008

Doing a PGCE and cant take it anymore

January 28, 2008 at 12:15 am · Filed under Blogroll, city life, computing, downsizing, dropping out, IT, Just in time, PGCE, Student Teachers, teacher training, teaching

That’s not actually how I feel at the moment, but it is something, if you type into a search engine, that will send you careering down the information superhighway to this blog. Strangely, googling “Doing a PGCE and having an absolutely splendid time” doesn’t register at all, so I guess that tells me something about where I’m at.

Last week was a bit of an epiphany. Well, epiphany is a bit strong, but I’ve just finished a draft of my RE assignment (hoorah!) and my brain is steeped in religious sounding words. If your substance is an insult to the readers intelligence, you better have some nice window dressing to wrap it in (to be clear, I’m talking about my RE assignment here, not the blog).

Following my observed lesson early in the week, when an academic expert comes in to watch you teach and tell you exactly how inept you are, one piece of feedback I got was that I should go down the pub. I’ve been waiting my whole life for someone in authority to tell me that. Unfortunately she didn’t write that down. There was a lot of stuff that she did write down, and I’m not sure that it was absolutely essential that she used red biro for doing so, but I’ve chosen not to dwell on that, but concentrate on that pearl of wisdom – “go down the pub”. Epiphany.

Its not clear exactly why she gave that advice. If it was because of the way that I looked, I think she would have said “go to bed”. More likely, she had been observing other students, and had come to the conclusion that something needed to be done to stop the college having a bad completion rate due to suicide.

But good advice is good advice, so I followed it. I went to the pub with my fellow student for a couple of glasses after school. And then went to the pub in the evening, for a few more glasses and a couple of pints of beer.

Unfortunately, my ineptitude in teaching is matched only by ineptitude in drinking (I don’t need an academic to provide this piece of self-knowledge), so not only did I lose that evening in terms of doing my preparation, but the following day as well. I did have one lesson to teach, and either the class was very good, or I was concentrating so hard on physical survival that I didn’t notice, but teaching seemed fine (maybe there is a lesson here). But that meant that there were 2 nights where I wasn’t up until the small hours preparing lessons, and the week seemed to pan out just fine. Epiphany.

And so, this weekend, I haven’t done any lesson preparation. To be fair, for one reason or another I don’t have to teach until later in the week, but still, I’ve made the conscious decision not to spend every waking minute immersed in planning all these lessons, but to see how it works winging it a little bit more – “just in time” rather than “just in case”. Of course, I wont know until later in the week how this pans out for me, but its looking good from where I’m sitting now.

And it does mean that I’ve been able to get a draft together for my RE assignment. I think maybe, just maybe, it will get me a pass. I’m not looking for glory here, a “this guy is really taking the piss but he seems to have met most of the criteria so I guess we should pass him” is absolutely fine by me.

This really should make me feel quite good, but a couple of things are disturbing my happy state of mind. Firstly, I can’t help myself feeling a little guilty about producing work of such appalling quality, and secondly, it did give me the chance to look at what I need to do for my science assignment. This is twice as long as the RE assignment, has a reading list as long as something that is really, really long, and I am told is marked a lot more strictly.

Only one thing to do at a time like this, follow the sage advice of my observer.

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Failure is not an option

January 21, 2008 at 12:23 am · Filed under Blogroll, city life, downsizing, dropping out, IT, PGCE, Student Teachers, teacher training, teaching

Run over by a truck. That’s how I feel, like I’ve been run over by a truck. Not a car, or a van, or even a lorry, but one of those monster trucks they use for defacing the world in Australia. I’m guessing it doesn’t make that much difference exactly how big the truck is that hits you, but for the split second before impact, you’re feeling of dread and impending doom is going to be that little bit more profound.

It’s the end of my second week of school experience, and I haven’t been to bed anywhere near midnight in that time. Its not just the not getting to bed thing, there is the crying baby to throw into the mix as well. As I type, I can hear her screaming for England, and can feel the pain of the MOMC (Mother of My Children), as she is lying there with her. So even when I do get to bed, I don’t get to experience that mythical state I have heard people talk of – sleep.

So now I feel like a walk on extra in the night of the living dead, and look like it as well. This I know because people keep telling me. To be honest, I don’t find that particularly helpful. Especially from people who look like they have just had 8 hours beauty sleep followed with a 2 hour facial and massage. Can’t they all form some kind of fresh-faced, relaxed and toned club and leave the rest of us zombies alone?

Lots of people told me how hard the course was going to be, and, to my shame, you can track in my blog how disdainful I was of these harbingers of doom. In my previous life in the Eastern Edge of Reason Bank (EERB) I’ve worked stupid hours, for months on end I have been working 14+ hours a day, and had nights when I didn’t get home.

But this is different, its not like, if I need to take 10 minutes out, I can tell the children to go away and think of a solution themselves, and come back in 2 hours and we can discuss it. When you’ve got 30 of them sitting in front of you, bent on undermining your very inventive but as it turns out totally inappropriate maths lesson, disappearing into an office for 10 minutes to make a very important call I’m guessing just doesn’t work. I say I’m guessing, I don’t actually know because I haven’t tried it, but I’ve got a feeling it’s a strategy that I’ll be looking to road-test in the near future.

For anyone who hasn’t done this, which is the 99% of the population of there with a still functioning brain cell, this is due to the need to write lesson plans. Not just any old lesson plan, but lesson plans that meet the colleges sadistic (I would say satanic, but it’s a very Catholic college and that really might upset them) specifications. Personally, I would have thought it would be much better if we used the same template as the teacher we are aligned to (i.e. none at all) but, no. When it takes you an average of 2.5 hours to write one lesson plan, including getting the resources together, differentiation, blah blah blah, and you’re teaching 2 a day, you can see he problem.

Thing is, on our next assignment, we have to teach 4 lessons a day. Houston, we have a problem.

I have taken some steps to try and manage the situation. Firstly, I’ve decided not to go out for the duration of the placement – another 4 weeks. This may sound like some sort of grand gesture but is really quite tokenistic, I haven’t gone out in the last 2 weeks and there is no prospect it of it happening while I’m still at school. But it makes me feel like I’m little more in charge of the situation, small things small minds.

Second, my assignments. There still there and they still need to be done, and I don’t do them I will fail the course. However, the date for these is the end of Feb, so I reckon I can worry about failing for that reason in a few weeks time. I’m going to tackle the failure points in chronological order, and the next official one is me being observed teaching the day after tomorrow.

There is another one, tomorrow morning. Inability to get out of bed and drag my sorry ass to school I’m pretty sure is grounds for failure. So, excuse this rambling post but I have got a 15 month old that needs an ear to scream in to.

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Outsourcing – the modern way

January 6, 2008 at 10:14 pm · Filed under Blogroll, city life, computing, downsizing, dropping out, IT, Outsourcing, PGCE, Student Teachers, teacher training, teaching

I’m a bit of a swat. I don’t think I used to be, in school I always sat at the back of the class, and managed to blag my way through college through looking at friends notes whilst I enjoyed some quality time with my duvet. But, for this course, I have definitely turned into a bit of a Swat. Its born out of fear, which I believe to be one of man’s fundamental drivers (not sure that this is something I should be looking to act on as a teacher), the fear that I have been out of academia for so long that I would no longer be able to do it. And actually its served me quite well, whilst others were burning the midnight oil the week before Christmas, I had handed in my assignments and was free, as demanded by the season, to make merry.

But, I kind of took the making merry thing a bit to heart, and more importantly, took the not having to do anything very much to heart. Not that I haven’t done anything, more that I’ve done very little and certainly am not ahead of everyone else, which is where I was before Christmas.

So now it’s Sunday night. Tomorrow, I start actually teaching for the first time in earnest. It’s not too horrible to start with, 6 lessons in the first week, and gradually increasing, but I can’t help thinking that I really should be nervous. But I’m not. At least not about that, what I am nervous about is the fact that I have a whole bunch of assignments that I should have started on, which I haven’t. And now my life is going to be full of writing lesson plans etc so that I don’t know when I’ll get the opportunity to complete my assignments.

Of course, there are mitigating circumstances – total disinterest. The assignment I should be doing (in fact, would preferably have done), is RE. And I don’t know why, but I just can’t engage. I should probably looking at what me preferred learning style is using that to find some way to motivate myself, but I really can’t be arsed. And the strange thing is that one of the first lessons that I have to teach is RE – Buddhism. And I’ve actually spent a reasonable amount of time mapping out the RE lessons for the next 6 weeks and getting what I believe to be a reasonably engaging lesson plan together for the first one, so its not that I’m not interested in teaching it.

In order to understand how fundamental this issue is, there is another exactly analogous situation that is occurring in my life right now – getting my tax return done. If I fail to do either, I’m totally screwed, but I really, really can’t seem to engage.

I have happened on a sneaky way of getting my tax return done, which is manipulate persuade my better half to do it. This has involved my sudden realization that I need to spend quality time with the 14 month old over Christmas in order to bond, and clearly couldn’t do the tax return at the same time – a top tip for any fellow shirkers out there (though I accept no responsibility for the outcome if you do try it, it was on a knife edge a couple of times), but I really don’t think it is reasonable to ask her to do my RE assignment as well.

I have thought about searching the web and lifting an assignment off there – there must be a bunch of them around – but we have been given strict warnings about the dangers of plagiarism.

So my solution is very modern – outsourcing, no-one said anything about that. I’m sure there must be a myriad of companies out in Asia that would write an RE assignment for me, but the stumbling block here is that they would charge. As you are aware, I am an impoverished student with no hope of any significant future income (I’m going to be a teacher). But if there is anyone out there who would be willing to do an RE assignment, your reward will be in heaven.

Hmmmmm. I wonder if I can work an RE assignment around this.

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