This week

This week I have mostly been doing…

Back to school today and straight back into the exams. There are another two days until the first of the English Papers which means, if you are some of the Year 11 students, plenty of time to go before any revision might be required. We took up reading ‘Abomination’ from where we had left off before half-term and the Year 8 class continued to thoroughly enjoy it. Having done so much work on reading and writing this year, we are taking this imply as an opportunity to read for pleasure although it does lead to some work on corporal punishment and the like. We certainly aren’t stopping every two pages to do some skills based work other than to check understanding through questions and brief discussion. It is so much more enjoyable.

The meeting with a parent after school brought much amusement although I shouldn’t say as much. The father of a girl came in to discuss her poor behaviour and bullying of others and made me smile several times although when he said that she’d been hit and wouldn’t be coming for a while I was shocked as it was a middle aged man who had hit her. I asked if he had any suggestions and received the news that sanctions certainly didn’t work. After that nothing for some time. Just a silence which, to use a cliché, spoke volumes. However, he offered the hope of T’ai Chi. Perhaps 20 minutes of that each day would help as it did in China he believed. He doesn’t take his daughter to T’ai Chi himself but perhaps it’s something we could do. I wonder where it would fit on the National Curriculum and how readers of certain newspapers would react if they heard this was our new behaviour management strategy.
Football in the evening set new standards in excitement with flowing skills, stamina and teamwork in evidence on the pitch. Unfortunately it was on the pitch next to us where Thirty Plus went down 7 – 4 in our first proper league game. The referee got in the way right from kick off and allowed the ball to hit him, rebound to their striker who scored and left us with a psychological mountain to climb. We were doomed from that point (you see the other 6 goals had nothing to do with us or our hopeless defending) and it fell to Kevin Trill to lead us to some degree of respectability with a hat trick.