Staff Briefing Seating Plan

Toilet Humour

Opening a new free school? Knocking down a perfectly functioning old school so a famous architect can have their wicked way with you site? Building a brand new sixth form centre? You can maximise work efficiency with the new OFSTED endorsed toilet from American Company G-Love.

We all know that teachers will find any opportunity to slack off and research has shown that some teachers spend up to an hour a week crying in the toilets. G-Love industries is pioneering the one-size-fits-every-school toilet cubicle that can just be hoisted into your failing academy to improve workrate and teacher acumen. Inside the cubicle teachers are provided with a desk that instantly appears when the teacher's overpampered buttocks hit toilet seat; A seat especially designed in partnership with representatives of countries who are proponents of violent torture to be as uncomfortable as possible. This desk provides the teacher with blank lesson plans, the satisfactory completion of which is the only way to access the required toilet paper.

In the very rare case that the teacher is up to date with their plans then the toilet will ensure that the teacher's failing subject knowledge is bought right up to date by video lectures from eminent celebrity quasi-intellectuals such as Jamie Oliver and that guy from that programme about animals.

In the rare event that a teacher is in the toilet for reasons other than purging their body of canteen food and low-grade instant coffee, say, for instance, crying themselves out of their nervous break-down then the comforting words of the man himself, the minister least sinister, the sensationalist educationalist, The man who puts the Fun in Fundamental skills teaching, Sir (nee Mister) Michael Gove will agitate them out of their emotional quandary. A number of speeches have been commissioned to ensure that he is always revolutionary and inspiring to the teacher, therefore ensuring staff morale continues to be at the highest it has ever been (fact not verified).

As an added extra, any school that rushes their order in without a second thought for the future will qualify for the special standards improvement upgrade that includes the catapult attachment to forcibly eject any teachers below the expected standard of outstanding from the building and out of the school grounds, hopefully into the kind of grotty and unsightly PRU that doesn't need good teachers anyway.

The Teacher's Code of Conduct

To be included in every new teacher pack.

1: Teaching is a noble profession and should be treated as such. Whatever should occur, the teacher should maintain the constant facade of calm indifference; this will help the students know their place.

2: Clothing should never match. Always aim to display at least three different prints using five different colours.

3: The teacher should never use the language of the heathen child. The constant use of outdated colloquialisms such as 'hip' or 'snazzy' is encouraged however.

4: The teacher should survive using only four liquids: tea, coffee, red wine and gin. If these are not available in a situation then the teacher should leave the situation in immediate pursuit of one of these.

5: The headteacher should never be trusted. They should be trusted less if they refer to themselves as a 'principal', 'lead educator', 'director' or anything else suitably abhorrent.

6: It must be held in regard that governors do not exist. They are a lie told to the teacher by senior management in order to endorse unpopular decisions.

7: The teacher must never take work home. To do this is a failure of the school to give them enough PPA time.

8:When the teacher leaves school they leave the expectations of the school behind. As they leave the institution they are obliged to immediately drink copiously, swear and display dubious tattoos prominently.

9: The teacher should never, under any circumstances, find themselves on the dancefloor of a nightclub co-frequented by students. If found in this situation steps should be taken to ensure the students are immediately ejected.

10: The lesson plan is a myth told to PGCE students and students. Teachers should, at all times, strive to perpetuate this myth by constant references to 'the plan' in lessons and carrying around reams of paper at all times.

11: The teacher will never generate their own resources. That is clearly the job of TES

12: The teacher shall never compromise, even in the face of Armageddon. 

Sam

I told Sam, one of my students, off today for doing a forward roll in my classroom. He said that he was facilitating a flipped classroom and I was wrong. This incident is the latest in a long line of similar arguments. The week before Easter I put him in detention for drawing on desks, he said he was expressing his creativity. The week before he was kicking a football down the hallway. His parents rang in complaining that their son had been discouraged from leading an active lifestyle. I tell him off for calling out, he tells me he is taking an active role in student-led learning. I just can't win.

Well today I just reached the end of it and had had enough. I realised that really, it's all just Sam's antics.

Get Me A SENCO Up Here Right Now, Our GATCO is Down and They've Taken The EAL department With Them.

I don't know about any(thing)one else, but it's quite often I find myself in meeting so infected with acronyms and TeachSpeak.com that I have no idea what is going on.


Best Practice: An unobtainable standard that constantly resists precise definition.
Constructive Marking: Using kids' books to build a fort to protect oneself from the constant assault of the real world.
EAL: Educators Articulate Louder
Flipped Classroom: 1) The appearance of a classroom the morning after the staff party. 2) The point where one knows one's classroom management has failed due to chairs and tables being upturned by students.
Gin: Common substitute for water. Drunk by the litre.
GandT: Generally Artistic, Nerdy or Delusional
INSET: Inane, Non-Specific Educational Training
Learning Bicycle: When a class is taught something for a whole lesson, but they do not understand it and therefore the lesson just goes around and around in circles, always returning to the beginning.
Mufty: A way to ensure students are well aware of their social standing and relative affluence by making them pay for the virtue of the clothing they wear everyday. 
OFSTED: Oh Fuck, Shit, They're Entering, Dive
Parent's Evening: A way to ensure that department printing budgets are used up at the end of the month. 
PEP: Piss-Easy and Pointless

Response Marking: Marking a book in order to show that students are making progress by writing targets in line with work that they have already done. Most commonly seen on the night before an OFSTED inspection.
SEN: Generally, An euphemism for 'I don't have a clue what this kid's problem is'
SIMS: Sometimes Informative, Mostly Stalling. 
SLT:  Sarcastic and Light-Timetabled
Twilight INSET: A way of ensuring that staff morale is constantly at a low by forcing staff to cancel appointments with loved ones at the last minute.Commonly forgotten by all

Look At Them; They Have Nothing.

I have sat through an assembly today that truly typifies a terrifying trope in the teaching of today's teenagers. (ooooh, alliteration)

I think that you are likely to have seen this assembly, or something painfully like it. It normally begins in this way:
Now, I know that we're all going to have a good time over Easter eating our eggs and having fun with our families, but we shouldn't forget that some around the world have less than we do. These images are to give you an idea of how lucky we are in this country. 
 And then the powerpoint inevitably racks its way through heart-wrenching images of impoverished children, homeless adults and amputee dogs.
And then we all feel guilty for having a little bit of cash in our bank accounts and a tv and our good health andthe numerous other things that make us lucky. And we are lucky. Even teaching in a school such as mine where a large proportion of my students are eating free school meals the student body still represent some of the wealthiest people in the world. At least they have the (part-time) support of a country that attempts to helps its citizens.
These students, are in my opinion having any sense of pride eroded. This is especially true of young white boys; A group who are now rapidly rising to being a statisitically failing group across the country. These students are not taught to take pride in their heritage because it is constantly demonised. It is only correct to teach about the plurality of social histories. I also firmly believe that equality among genders is paramount. It can, however become an extended trial where white male students feel accountable for the horrors of their race. Slavery, yes, was a western invention, but it was white males who stopped it as well as started it. White men were a major part of the feminist movement.
I apologise. That was deviation. I am being caught up in speaking for the defence in a centuries-long trial. It is not just white Boys who are stigmatised by assemblies of horrors. Students from difficult backgrounds who now live in more comfortable scenarios are now watching the scenes of those left behind. I teach a number of asylum seaker children and refugees who had no choice but to leave people behind. I firmly do not believe that they should feel guilty living in comfort. It is a positive thing. As a cultural group we should ask our students to recognise that they are in a better position than others, but to inspire them to help to exact change. Why show pictures of poor starving African stereotypes when you could show the Medicins sans frontieres nurse or doctor helping? Why show the injured animal when you can give the aspiration for students to become vets?

Just seems silly to me.

STEM

The Department for Education is proposing a large-scale change of the education foci in light of the societal changes the country is undergoing. This 'return to our roots' education system will be focused around a re-invigoration of the STEM core foci. Please read the summary below and familiarize yourself with it before the extended details become available in the summer. 
STEM has always been a focus of the employment market but with students facing a world which is placing increasing onus on the real, vocational skills students need to prosper in life. With this in light the definition of STEM has changed to the following key areas:

Social Media.
Incorporating units of Facebook, BBM and Instagram. Students will learn key skills such as how to bully and ostracise those of a different race and sexuality.  Creative students will be able to explore the ways an Instagram filter makes everything look nicer; with suggested coursework topics of 'What I Ate for Dinner' or 'Snowy Streets That Look Exactly The Same.'

Talking
Students will explore the way in which they communicate with the world in a number of interesting modules. Students will develop speaking and listening orientated skills around unintelligible contemporary colloquialisms and then in an examined format they will complete tasks such as reducing the works of renowned authors to the minimum amount of words possible. Exemplary courseworks for this module will be available on twitter.

Earthenware and Porcelain.
This course aims to develop students knowledge of the wide range of earthenware products that can be used instead of polystyrene containers and paper bags. Parts of this practical assessment course will include how to correctly present fish and chips after removing them from the bag as well as an exam based around the choice of bowl or plate for various takeaway meals.

Motherhood and Fatherhood.
Students will engage in a nine-month modular programme that can be retaken in order for students who do not pass in the first instance to retake as many times as required.
Topics include a multi-modal project on identifying fathers, 'developing the shouting voice' and 'how to ignore successfully'. Expected entry requirements for this Level 1.5 vocational part GNVQ with 0.5 of an HND referral credit are for students to have achieved part one (of three) of their McDonalds chip fryer basic training.

Expect further information on these exciting new courses in May.

Please pick up, Please pick up.

I love a good initiative.

I even love the word initiative, with its facets of both an innate ability to succeed and the beginning of something enduring.

I love initiatives for those with initiative.

I especially love iconoclastic, establishment-questioning ideas that give a little hint of an idea to students that they should constantly question, constantly create, and, just occasionally, defy.

When I spoke about five things to tell NQTs I missed out a couple of important things. One of those was that you should never expect a student to do something that you are not prepared to do yourself.

It was with great pleasure and a wry smile that I told a group of students about poetry, because these students were sat, at lunch time, listening for about the twelfth week running to someone talk about novels, or plays, or poems, and this time I was encouraging these students to read their own poetry. By the end of that lunchtime nine students, along with three teachers, would have read poems to forty assembled students and staff. The lecture series was started as a way to provide students a path to exploring off-curriculum literature. (I started it. Me.) Each week someone would present on why it is they love the piece of literature that they do. To date there has been ten teachers and eight students who have presented to the thirty-odd audience, and we thought it would be a nice thing to mark world poetry day last week with a poetry reading by anyone who wished a voice onto themselves.

The week before the recital I had issued a challenge to my assembled bibliophiles; To hide poetry around the academy in books, in stairwells, on classroom doors. (that actually happened) Students took this challenge to heart and poems have been turning up all over. I adored this. It is a beautiful thing. Of course, in qualification of my previous statement, I joined in the game.

And here in lies the anecdote about my crass ineptitude and comedic lack of common sense, for I haven't told one in a while.

I am not a terrible poet. I am also not great. I am also not a children's poet. I had to make sure that if no-one as ready to read at the poetry recital I would be able to fill for a while. I dug up a load of poetry and hastily edited out the sweary bits with a biro. I read, They went down okay. Then, In a moment of vicious clarity, I placed some poems of mine in some books in the library. Then I taught my last lesson and got on the train home.

It's amazing, that cold feeling in your stomach when you realise you have done something wrong and have absolutely no way of fixing it. The last time I really felt it properly was when I hadn't done my maths homework and the teacher was on their way around checking books. You can actually see it in their eyes now. It's sadistically amusing to watch it develop as you wonder from seat to seat checking homework. I was on the phone faster than Gotham city gets on the batsign. My head of department might just be at school. As soon as she picked up all I could hear was the unmistakable distant sound of someone on a hands free kit. The first think he heard me say was a shouted expletive about as socially acceptable as the ones that were only just scribbled over in the poems that I was pretty sure I had erroneously put into some collections of kids poems.

At that point I had no choice but to explain the error I was pretty sure I'd made. The next morning I was in school OFSTED early hoping that I hadn't inspired any kids to read anything. Thankfully I hadn't. There they were, tucked in Tennyson and hidden in Harry Potter. Smiles all round.

#Moral Write poems about happy kittens.

Cheers.

untitled

In his eyes, the teacher sadly,
surveys a scene of students madly
fighting over pens to scribble
nonsense and ill-thought out drivel
to be explained, badly, later.

He sits and checks chain emails
from old school friends and females
that he used to sort of know
but who used to flirt and go
around with better boys than him

It is only seven lessons left
until the much needed gift
of two weeks without these kids
their lies, their tales, the insipid
catalogue of little niggles

The independent project is genius
despite being simple and tedious
little do the children know
that it is all a sham and show
to gain an extra double free.

As Jane Will Expect, I Have Ignored Her.

I am an NQT. An angry, sighing one, but an NQT. It's one of those admissions like being eighteen and admitting you're a virgin. There's nothing wrong with it, it just seems to need qualifying, and despite any realistic qualification (I wasn't popular at school/I had appauling acne/I was a teenage chess prodigy) people will still look at you as if you have done something incredibly wrong.

It was with great trepidation that I stepped back into the hallowed halls of learning that eventually fed me, with abject prejudice, into the world of being a real teacher. I had returned, suited and booted in a way I never expected, and was ready to talk. I tried to give them a day in the life of a typical NQT and managed, instead, to talk for about an hour before reaching 9 o'clock in the morning. I cannot, due to both short term memory erosion (factor: Weekend of the sort of alcohol abuse I tell my students will kill them.) and my own lack of preparation, actually remember quite what I said, but I do remember one student actually in tears with laughter at one of my true stories of my own ineptitude. (I actually have a new one to add to this blog, but later.)

I am not sure whether that is a good sign.

The tutor who had led me along the treacherous path of PGCEism asked me to deliver a set of five things I wished I'd been told at the start of my NQT year. I of course totally ignored this and got on with a rambling diatribe. I decided, however, that I would atone for this enforced ignorance by coming up with a list and publicising it here.

5 Ways To Survive NQT

1: Find the teacher who has been teaching at the school the longest and talk to them about every single one of your students. The chances are that they've told some of their parents and will tell you more than any SIMS page.

2: Support your students outside of lessons. Even if you hate sport, get outside in the pissing rain and watch them be crap at whichever sport their parents are pressing them, mercilessly and vicariously, into. The next day, talk with authority about how well they played.

3: Find something that they're interested in. I hate football. I can't even bare to call it a sport, but that doesn't stop me picking up the Metro every morning, turning to the back pages and reading through some godforsaken illiterate article about some godforsaken illiterate footballer's affair with a girl more silicon and fake tan than human. Why do I do this? Because half my students probably wouldn't talk to me if I had no knowledge of sports trivia. That sporting chaff gives me an in.

4: The most important people in the school goes in this order (most important first) Students, Resources and Reprographics, Canteen Staff, Reception, Cleaners, LSAs, Teachers, Leadership. AND NOT THE OTHER WAY ROUND

5: Never shout at an individual child. Just stop, Have a sip of tea, and then deal with the situation calmly and with authority.

(Honourable mention; Always have a cup of tea to hand.)