kitchenutensil

I'm kind of bored of this blog. There's seldom much exciting and new to report anymore. I'll do a news digest once a month or so, unless there's something more urgent. First digest later this week...

Sunday nights are horrible these days. I realise nobody looks forward to monday mornings and the end of the weekend, but I really object to my current system. Spending weekends at my parents' place is fine, I can take it or leave it. Friday afternoons, I don't really mind where I am, but since my entire social life is up north, it's just more convenient. But that then means that Sunday night, just as I'm getting used to the good life (with fodder I don't have to pay for!), I'm suddenly ripp'd untimely from my mother's house and thrown into the cold, dark night, there to drive along the N1 south (which is not much fun at that time of night), and into a house which is fine, but still not as nice as home. And then I STILL have to go to bed early and wake up before noon. So sod it.

Been playing with the van de Graaff generator all day. It's working great now, and I've been stung about a million times already.

Unfortunately, there wasn't anyone else to enjoy this with me, as we ran out of time with 11F & 11G, and then 11A didn't show up because someone decided the school was closing early today, without bothering to tell me about it.

Meh.

On the plus side, the damn exam revision is now out the way.

Why must EVERYONE else be so optimistic about my teaching prospects? I don't generally like to mindlessly follow the crowd, but I do feel a little defeatist when nobody else seems to think that the situation is as hopeless and pointless as it seems to me. All my colleagues, all the kids, all my friends who're teachers, all my family and anyone who knows anything about my situation, tends to agree that it's rather shitty, but also seems to think that if I only did X or just gave Y a try, then all would be well again.nI makes me wonder what I've missed.

Also of interest, my independent sources within the Department of Education tell me that the department is just as unhappy with Teach SA's training programme as we teacher-trainees are. However, their demands are a little unrealistic: They want us to be supervised by a qualified teacher all the time. If there were any teachers to spare for that, then we wouldn't be needed in the first place.

It's not been a good week. I couldn't even face the prospect of going in on wednesday, so I took a sick day. I gather Eric wasn't at work that day either. At least that gave me plenty of time to finish marking those exams, so naturally I played games all day instead. Ended up staying up til 03:00 marking papers, and just about managed to drag myself out of bed on thursday morning. 11F and 11A both bunked, which suited me fine. Just dealing with 11G and their discontent over the poor marks was enough for one day.

The final results? Of 147 kids, 3 got over 30%. None reached 40%. The average mark was 10%.

What was I there for last term? What am I doing there now? Can anything be done to improve things? I don't know.

After that, Teach SA wanted to have a meeting with all of us, and I don't really remember what the point of it all was. Something about how they couldn't sort out our SACE registration, and a lot more talk suggesting that they still don't have much of a plan for us. I pointed out that the biggest problem I have is that my kids are missing about 3 or 4 years of learnng that I need them to have in order to teach my own work properly. They avoided the topic.

Then today I found out that a big part of the problem is that the big syllabus change of 2005 essentially removed all physics and chemistry until grade 10, instead focusing on basic biology (plants and shit). That's utter bullshit! I started basic chemistry (and physics too?) in grade 6 or 7, and I still struggled with the higher level stuff. How can the department honestly expect today's kids to do the same stuff I did in half as much time? It's complete bullshit.

Time to break out the old destructo-ray and the plans for blowing up the moon. Pity. I quite like the moon.

I'm seriously considering getting out of teaching as soon as I can. I enjoy it, so long as I've got the kids under control, but I'm apparently not very good at it. Apart from 1 or 2 bright sparks (who don't really need me), my kids are all doing dismally. The median mark for the March exam is somewhere around 10%. Part of me hopes that Teach SA falls apart in disarray (which should be pretty likely, with the likes of Nalini Reddy running things, but realistically there are just too many high-ups with too much invested in it to let that happen), just so I can leave early but honourably.

This holiday has shown me a few things:
1. I really like doing nothing all day.
2. Early mornings are bad for my health.
3. Living so far away from all my friends really, really sucks.
4. Being away from my kids makes it much easier to consider abandoning them.

I'm not sure if my current mood is just an inevitable post-holiday depression, or if I really am as miserable about all of this as I feel.  I have definitely made no impact on these kids at all. I know that one rushed term is not exactly enough to judge on, but I've seen no evidence of progress at all. The eager ones are still eager, but not doing well. The rest are still uninterested and not doing well. I have changed nothing.

I'm not going to hand in my resignation tomorrow morning. (I'm still not even officially an employee of the education department, so that formality might not even be compulsory.) But perhaps I should start looking at job ads in some other field, preferably closer to home. And I'd really love to work somewhere where people can actually understand what I'm saying.

If you know of such a job, feel free to tell me about it.

All parties (including De La Salle) have agreed that our observation there has been mostly fruitless, and so it's been officially called off. Unfortunately, it seems that Nalini Reddy has thrown a tantrum and cancelled the unrelated maths and science afternoon training sessions, which pisses me off greatly. That would have actually been very useful to me and my sciencey colleagues.

On the plus side, more time off. Maybe I can get some work done on my masters.

I've been saying that I'll go to this week's training, unless and until it proves to be a waste of my time (as a lot of Teach SA's stuff has been). So I thought I should set down my criteria for what a good training session should include, rather than letting the whims of the day (no doubt shaped by my desire to get more holiday time) determine what I do this week.

So let it be known that the following are my (semi-binding) demands for this training:
1. I've got to actually learn stuff.
2. It's got to be stuff I can use to help my kids learn stuff.
3. It's got to be stuff that I couldn't learn more easily or more efficiently on my own.
4. I will not allow it to interfere with the special roleplaying session I've prepared for my friend Alex's birthday, to be played on wednesday evening.

I'm also not inclined to stay there all day long; if there's any sitting around and waiting to be done, I'd rather spend it at home, preferably sleeping. So we'll have to see how the schedule looks.

I've also been invited to spend most of the week living with my friends, Arran and Sarah. Sarah teaches at De La Salle (the school that's hosting our training), and reckons it only takes 5 minutes to get to work from their place. And since my alternatives are staying at my place and taking on the worst morning traffic for about 45 minutes or more, or staying at my parents' place, where there's no spare bed for me, I'm thinking I might just take them up on their offer.

This week was not much fun. I started by invigilating a grade 12 class, and they were fine. But every class after that got worse and worse, until I had a grade 9 class where I had to actually run after a kid to keep him from leaving early. I had to prioritise the rest of the class, though, so he got away. And I was supposed to be free that day; I got conned into it by some asshole teacher who's never getting another favour out of me again. The rest of the time was spent bumming around my lab and preparing and giving an emergency extra lesson on stuff I hadn't taught the kids yet, because once again, nobody told me about it.

My kids wrote their paper on friday morning, and afterwards most told me they thought they had done well, although a few said they'd run out of time. I've only looked at the first 10 or so, and so far nobody has passed. A couple were just shy of the 40% pass mark, but most are closer to 0-20% so far. I need to mark all 140-odd papers by the 15th, when school starts up again.

I'm also really pissed off with the district. Not only did they include stuff in this test that they specifically said wasn't really part of the syllabus, but they also cocked up the marking memorandum for it. There are answers they've given us to mark with that are simply wrong. I also only got a copy of the official policy document regarding that practical investigation my kids had to do (on Charles's law) this week, showing that I'd not approached it in at all the right way. It's all utter cock, and a thorough waste of my time, and more importantly, a waste of the kids' time.

But I'm free now! Sort of. Still got that marking to do and all of next week is training with Teach SA at a school called De La Salle. But just the idea of term-end feels great. First thing I did when Eric and I got in the car to go home yesterday was put on Alice Cooper's School's Out. What a relief, however fleeting, to get out of the grinder.

I have survived term 1. More details later, cos right now, I'm exhausted.

1. Check the science paper, when it finally gets delivered, and see if there's anything I still urgently need to teach my kids. I won't have time for more than 1 extra hour per class, but I'm reasonably certain we'll still be a little behind.

2. Write my fucking master's proposal. I formally applied to start it in July 2007.

3. Get some furniture.

4. Look through all the marks I've got and see which kids need the most attention next term.

5. Plan out everything I need to teach next term, even if it's only in very vague detail.

6. Plan, budget and book my trip to the US in July, for the Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas.

7. Pay the rent.

Today just dragged on and on.

The teaching part was ok, as always. It's just everything else that kills me. I organised an extra lesson timetable with my classes, and now I have to stay an extra 30 mins later every day but friday. Fortunately, we managed to keep the lunch-break lessons to a bare minimum, and I've dogded the saturday-class bullet for now too.

I'm also simplifying the hell out of my lessons. Rather than trying to cover as much as possible, in as much depth as possible (as I'd prefer to be taught myself), I'm limiting each lesson to one super-basic concept, plus a little, related class exercise. Hopefully this minimalist approach will make the concepts stick in their minds better.

Then Teach SA convened an emergency meeting, which turned out to be just more of windbag Nalini yammering on without much point. We (the Landulwazi people) got there 30 mins late, and I was hoping we'd missed the bulk of it, and yet we only got out 2 HOURS LATER!!!! I really can't stand that woman.

Bottom line: My job officially ended at 14:30 today, and I only got home after 18:00. Tired.