just another morning here

Some people at school didn’t know that it is Star Wars Day today Apparently it was a terrible joke, but I felt as though I needed a bit of the Force today.

Sometime, back along, whenever I wrote about Anna’s birth, I declared the end of my official teaching career. However, it looks as though it will be starting again – better late than never. This morning I had an interview for a temporary (1 year) teaching post at my school, and I got the job. I hated the interview, they asked *really* hard questions – and then afterwards told me off for not selling myself well enough. To be honest, I hadn’t dressed up or anything like that – I felt as though that would be stupid as they already know what I’m like so it would be false to try to give any other impression! So I wasn’t really trying to sell myself – perhaps that was wrong?

Just so you can all have a laugh, here is the ‘scenario’ I was given just minutes before the interview:

It is 9.30am. You are a member of staff down in class, leaving you with 2 teaching assistants and 9 pupils. One pupil has just arrived in class having been very sick on the bus. There is a social worker on the phone who wants to speak to you urgently. One pupil has come into class very distressed and is gradually wrecking the classroom. This starts another pupil screaming. The headteacher is coming in at 10am for a lesson observation. The intranet is down and you haven’t been able to access the resources you were banking on.
Talk us through what you are going to do.

Cue hysterical laughter. Actually most of this is fairly normal on any morning in our school, so it wasn’t very difficult to talk about! Easy answers: I would never leave resources till the last minute as the intranet at school is unreliable at the best of times. I would *certainly* never leave them till the last minute if I knew the head was coming in for an observation! Get rid of the social worker (perhaps find out what the urgent matter is) and arrange to call her back later – pupils are always my first priority. Get one TA to take the distressed child out of the class before they do any more damage/hurt someone then hopefully the screaming one might calm down (unlikely in real life, but hey ho). Of course I did have to confess that I’d be getting one of the TAs to clear up the vomit While all that is going on I’d be holding the fort with the other 7 children/phoning the nurse about the ill child etc. etc. As I said, all in a day’s work!

My presentation (on Further Developing Personalisation in KS4) was fairly boring but it must have been ok otherwise surely they wouldn’t have given me the job. I mean, I know I’m cheap as an NQT but that’s not a good enough reason on its own, is it?!

I am pleased, I suppose, although I can’t seem to get excited about it yet; firstly it doesn’t start until September, and secondly I can’t quite get used to the fact that it’s in Key Stage 4, which is way out of my comfort zone – I confess I prefer smaller children. Not only that, I must stop calling them children and start calling them students!

Anyway it’s felt like a bit of a strange day being offered congratulations and yet not really feeling particularly celebratory. We had chinese for tea though

Now getting through the slog of remaining music practices, homework, and bedtimes. Watching Anna on Linguascope – looks good for language practice though I don’t know if it’s a subscription thing (probably) – might be a good resource for anyone doing languages. Hmm, I just looked at it more closely. Only £200 for a site licence! Discrimination against HEors strikes again. Though perhaps if families clubbed together it might be worth it – or it might be worth contacting them for a HE friendly rate.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 4th, 2010 at 21:11 and is filed under languages, while at work .... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.