Does Time Fly...

When you are having fun? Not sure fun is exactly it though. Busy is much nearer the mark. Busy is an understatement actually. I changed my job for the start of this academic year. It was a step up professionally and got me out of the madness that was the previous place. Of course I just landed in a whole new lot of madness, but different madness. The major difference is that the senior management have mainly done the job and they don't actively despise the teaching staff. This makes it a much better place to work as far as I am concerned. New job, new place, what could go wrong? Hmm. Well, while nothing is actually wrong, I now find myself doing 2 jobs on 1 set of remission. The remission amounts to 6 hours per week - for each job. This would reduce my teaching load to 12 hours per week. I am actually teaching 18 hours and trying to find somebody to take away the other hours. In fact I am interviewing somebody tomorrow. I am clinging on by my fingertips. 8 am to 6pm days are the norm at the moment and I haven't had a lunch break for as long as I can remember.

Of course none of this is helped by having had Ofsted in a couple of weeks ago. Everybody in the place worked 12 days straight: the week before Ofsted arrived, the whole weekend before the inspectors arrived, and then the week of the inspection. Now about half the teaching staff are ill. Well, it feels like it anyway. I spent most of Ofsted week with a sore throat and then came down with a really bad cold and lost my voice. Mostly it was OK but you want to try teaching a class of 16 year olds when you can't make yourself heard! Interesting. Not. I was lucky that the learning support person was able to do the shouting for me. Of course all the jobs that had deadlines during Ofsted week were postponed so this week has also been mad and I have had to reschedule and arrange cover for classes because people have been off sick. Luckily the team is good and we have pulled together. I am not allowed to write down what grade we got from Ofsted as the grading is still subject to moderation, but we were quite pleased.

Date posted: 17 Mar 2013

A Day in the life

With so much talk recently about teachers and what an easy life they have I thought I might tell you about what was, for me, a fairly typical Thursday.

I start teaching at 9am. I arrive at work somewhere around 8:20, depending on traffic. Yesterday the traffic was bad and I was "late" and only arrived at 8:35. After that everything went downhill.

Before first lesson: turn computer on, wait for updates, fill in time by checking calendar for upcoming events like Open Day (8pm finish on that one), discuss upcoming student trip to Bletchley Park and need for somebody to be able to drive the College minibus because even small coaches are very expensive. Apparently if you want to do the driving test to be insured for driving the bus you have to pay for it yourself. That's not going to happen any time soon. Check email and find several from students who want me to do things and also several from the Functional Skills co-ordinator with results and instructions. I should not have been sent the results as they are not for my students, but he's sent all of them to everybody. I have to read all the instructions and results before I can work out that none of them apply to me.

First lesson: Introduction to HTML for level 1 students. Not all of the class is there but we start anyway. They need to be able to use Notepad on their computers. All College computers have Notepad installed. No they don't, not in this room they don't. So my carefully planned lesson immediately goes out of the window. We spend 20 minutes or so going round checking the computers in the room. 2 have the right software and 3 don't work at all. 17 computers, and 21 students in a full class. That's going to work well then. Yell for help with the lack of the correct Software. Tech support is "busy" but will send somebody along as soon as possible. Do different lesson to the one planned but end up in the same place as planned because the next person with that group has planned their lesson based on what I said I was going to do in mine. Students do not find this lesson nearly as much fun as the one they should have done as there is a lot more of me telling them things and a lot less of them doing things.

10:30 is break time. Warn the person following me with the group I just had that the software doesn't work. I catch up with a part-time colleague about what we are doing today with our groups, check that the speaker on Sexual health who is booked for the afternoon tutorial slots is still coming (she is). Deal with more email. Just at the end of break somebody from Tech Support comes in to ask what the problem with the software is and which room it is in.

Next lesson is planned round access to a particular web site which the students are supposed to use for research. I checked the site was still there and that everything the students would need was available. 15 minutes into the lesson we got to the bit where they had to visit the web site and carry out a specific set of activities. They can't access the web site. It is blocked by the web software. I knew this. Last term I asked the tech support people to unblock it, which they allegedly did. Or didn't. Anyway lesson number 2 down the drain. Much disgruntlement and an emergency request to tech support to unblock. Which they did - but not until after lunch, which wasn't a lot of use to me. I replaced the lesson with one I prepared for the next session with that group and soldiered on. I got a lot of complaints about marking not being done when work has been handed in. The rule is 2 weeks maximum from due date, but late work can take longer. Several student had work that was more than 2 weeks past due date and not marked yet. I have to speak to my colleagues about that.

Lunchtime. I ate my lunch with one hand on my mouse while I checked attendance for some of my students. I discussed some disciplinary issues with a colleague. Another colleague sent me a bad behaviour report for a student in one of my tutor groups (I have 2 tutor groups - lucky me) so I processed the paperwork to send him to head of faculty because he's on his third misbehaviour report. A student came to see me with problems with their work so I sorted that out. I even managed a cup of coffee.

Free period: Yeah right. I am mentoring a student who has fallen behind with his work. I have known him (taught him) for 4 years. He works for me, but apparently not for anybody else. I spent an hour with him steering him through some work that he was being taught by somebody else. Then my head of section comes along and asks me to support a new-to-teaching colleague with their marking and check that it is being done correctly. I have already done some of that but there is now a significant amount that needs to be checked. I also hear that there is a chance that the layout for the annual course review has changed and that the updates that I completed in March will have to be typed in again on a different form and printed out instead of the electronic submission we had just started using. Apparently it is Ofsted's fault! What this means is that Ofsted said that a lot of the procedures we were using were too cumbersome and not fit for purpose, so management decided to change them. Right now, in the middle of the academic year when half of the stuff is under the old system.

After that it was a relief to get into class. That lesson at least worked out OK and the students did what they wanted to do and not everybody had problems with the software, though several did.

After my last class (only 4.5 hours of teaching today) I did some marking, tried to print the annual course review and found that every time I tried it crashed the system with an exception. Worked with a colleague to get paperwork completed for a suspension hearing (the student, not us) before senior management and finally left just on 6pm.

By the time I got home and cooked dinner I was too tired to do much of anything, though I did do some preparation.

Today I discovered that not only am I going to have to re-write the annual course review but I am also expected to get my students through a new short qualification, in addition to their main qualification and their Functional Skills and another qualification we are running alongside the main course to make up their taught hours to 16 per week. I did manage to deliver the second of my ruined lessons from yesterday because the web site had actually been unblocked. I also managed to leave "early" at 5:20, having spent the time after the end of my classes doing some marking and preparation for next week. I am so glad it's the weekend.

Date posted: 20 Apr 2012

Is it that time already?

Suddenly it's April. I have no idea where the first 3 months of the year went, but they went! Actually I do know. We had an Ofsted inspection in January so we spent a lot of time preparing for it, and then some more time recovering from it. Then there was the usual dashing about like mad things trying to keep on top of the work, and I had an interview for what is essentially the same job I am doing now. The significant difference is that I have gone from a fixed term contract to a "permanent" one. Same contract and pay. Same government trying to make me pay more for less. Same 0.5 percent pay rise.

There was some bozo trainee reporter writing in the paper the other day saying that teachers have a dead cushy life and shouldn't complain about their pensions because it's better than most people get. So what? That pension is part of my contract of employment. She bleated on about the long holidays teacher get (see my previous post about teacher arithmetic) I don't know how she thinks that will help pay the mortgage since I am contractually obliged not to take additional work outside teaching, even in the holidays. I bet she'd be moaning fast enough if all teachers decided, without consultation or negotiation to reduce their class contact hours by 3%. Sauce for the goose?

Date posted: 17 Apr 2012

Teachers Arithmetic

You know it's getting towards the summer when people start whingeing about the long holidays teachers get. As people start coming back from their cheap off-peak, out of season holidays they took their kids on because they, after all, have a "right" to take their kids away on holiday, even if it is disruptive. Why complain now? Because this is the time of year when some people realise that the free baby sitting service called school isn't available in the summer.

Let's look at a little teaching arithemetic shall we? Teachers are required to teach a certain number of hours in a year. In my case that's 865. Spread out over an academic year of 36 weeks that works out at just on 24 hours per week. That means actual teaching time, when I am in a classroom with other people's children. Generally speaking, every hour taught generates an hour of preparation, and another hour of marking. So every teaching hour gets multiplied by 3. That gives 2595 hours a year teaching and related duties. Now, add to that staff meetings; if it's only an hour per week then that's an extra 36 hours (I doubt it is as little as an hour per week but it'll do as a ball park figure). That gives 2631 hours. Now add on communication with parents, carers, social workers. On a day to day basis that's probably another hour a week - on a quiet week. So another 36 hours gives 2664 hours. Now add formal parents evenings, say 3 per term and 3 hours each (usually 6pm to 9pm but not always) that's another 27 hours, giving 2694. Add to that report writing; a class of 20 kids (and it's usually 30 or more), done properly, can take 2 hours. An average teacher might have to do that for 10 classes over the course of the year. That's another 20 hours, making 2,714. I'm not adding in things like school concerts, trips, sports days, and all the other things teachers do for the "love" of it. Assume then a 40 hour week. To work that number of hours the average teacher would have to work for 67.75 weeks per year. It isn't until a teacher works 60 hour weeks that the number of working weeks drops to just over 45, which gives 7 weeks holiday.

Put it another way, if a teacher is at the top of the pay scale they will be paid 31,552 GBP per year. That is working outside London and not getting extra allowances for additional duties. This gives an hourly pay rate of less than 12 GBP. For somebody who has trained for a minimum of 4 years (degree and teaching qualification), who frequently has a higher degree and who does a lot of professional updating in the course of their work.

Teachers are judged every time they step into a classroom, by 30 very observant pairs of eyes. Those eyes often belong to children of parents who don't value education, who say frequently, and loudly, that teachers have an easy life and are over paid. Those children often seem to think that they have the right to disrupt a class and fail to do their work. There is no hiding place. Teachers can't have "off" days when they aren't quite on top form, because somebody's child will be looking to take advantage of the slightest apparent weakness.

If you are a parent of a child, of any age, ask yourself this; can you make your child do something they don't really want to do (like sit still, read something, write something, leave the mobile alone, don't surf the Internet, don't talk) for an hour? For 6 hours? While your child is in the same room with 30 of his or her friends, who also don't really want to do it?

Still think teachers have an easy life?

Date posted: 16 May 2011

As good a time to start as any

The new year started with a bang in the Madwoman's household. Onfortunately it wasn't celebratory fireworks.

Himself, having been living with a dormant malignant melanoma in his eye for a few years was told that the melanoma had somehow managed to reattach itself to a blood supply and was growing. The only option really was to remove the whole eye and the cancer with it. He was in and out of hospital within 3 days. The surgeon says they got the whole tumour out and there was no evidence that it had spread elsewhere. At the moment we are waiting for an appointment for a prosthetic eye that isn't blank. Himself has to wear an eye patch when he goes out so as to avoid scaring small children and making people feel a bit icky. We are used to it now, but it's going to be Easter before the new "eye" is ready.

All this was going on in late January, some time after the Madwonan's mother fell and cracked her head open on a door. It was on the first day we had really heavy snow round here, but this was an indoor accident. The police had to use their big red key to get in. Luckily the worst damage was to the doors. A few days in hospital and 7 stitches later and mother was returned home, somewhat shaky still, but definitely on the mend. As to how she managed to pass out in the first place, the jury is still out. It wasn't a stroke, that much is certain as they have tested and scanned and poked everything that might tell them. The current theory is that it was a stress reaction, so now she's on tranquilisers and sedatives and whatnot. If nothing else Mum is sleeping better than she was, which has to be a good thing.

On the home front No. 1 son trundled happily through his GCSE mock exams and decided which A levels he wants to do and where he wants to do them. The current selection is Drama, Spanish, French and English with Critical Thinking as the top-up. He is worried that the school won't want him to go back if his results aren't good enough so is now doing some work. The other option was to do Music, but all the slacking off has taken its toll and his Music teacher won't have him until he's at Grade 5 in at least one instrument. Even then she won't be very happy.

No. 2 son did his SATs. On the basis of no visible work and no revision he came 11th out of all the kids in his year in Science and achieved level 7 in Maths. Brat. Feedback from Parent's Evening is that he's bright but lazy and disorganised. No change there then. He has chosen his GCSE subjects now, I dread to think what he is going to do about his coursework.

The Madwoman herself has just moved buildings at the place she works. It's an educational establishment so of course moving offices and classrooms and equipment across from one building to another during term time and half way through the academic year is a brilliant idea (not). I have no idea which moron came up with that plan, but you may be surprised to learn that all did not go according to plan and chaos reigns. It wouldn't be so bad but exactly the same thing happened last academic year.Some people never learn. Oh well, the washing and ironing are still with us, not that I do a great deal of the latter, just look at the ironing basket and think I might get round to it one day, but not today.

Date posted: 28 Feb 2010

When is an assault not an assault?

When it's a boy groping a girl's tits in class and then saying "she doesn't mind". The girl looked quite upset but when I spoke to her said she didn't want me to report it as an assault. So I reported it and her being disrupted and her learning harmed by this intrusion on her personal space. When the same boy tried to snatch the report from my hand as I was writing it, and then try to prise my fingers from the card and tell me that I should give him good grades for the lesson (even though he had done no work, failed to follow instructions and disturbed the rest of the class) I wrote that incident report up as an assault.

Do I expect anything to come from this? No.

Why not? Because the boy is from Afghanistan and the whole school bows down to the need to go gently on those kids. So they get away with whatever they feel like doing and think they can continue to do so. One day they will do something outside school and get their head kicked in by some aggrieved boyfriend or husband, who will no doubt be accused of making a racially motivated attack. We are doing these kids no favours by continually making allowances. It's a tough old world outside the school walls and they have to learn how to deal with it without getting slaughtered, and that means a bit more integration and a lot fewer kid gloves.

Date posted: 31 Mar 2009

On the subject of elites

In Kent the LEA still operates Grammar Schools. I strongly believe that all children have the right to learn and develop in an atmosphere and at a speed that best suits them and their individual needs. I was banging the gong about individual and flexible learning years ago. If all schools could provide the kind of education that met the academic and development needs of all their pupils then the grammar school argument would have died a death years ago. However, most comprehensive schools don't/can't/won't do that. Academically able children get left out of the equation almost every time.

There's an assumption that bright kids can somehow fend for themselves, that they don't need to be specially catered for in the way that children with learning difficulties need to be specially catered for. That's wrong. All children have special needs, but only some children have them met in a comprehensive education system.

Secondary schools round here are just now having open days for they year 7 intake in the next academic year. The same old arguments about grammar schools and whether they are a bad thing or not are being rehashed. The usual tired old thing about "children shouldn't be classed as failures at 11" gets trotted out. Well sorry, but if I, as a parent, gave my child the impression that they were a failure because they didn't pass the 11+ then it's me who is the failure, not my child. The same is true for those teachers and (even worse) Head Teachers who say that - they should be sacked immediately. The thing about the 11+ is that it is supposed to indicate the children who will do well with a fast-paced academic learning style. Just because a child doesn't do well on the test doesn't make that child a failure, it just means that their learning style is different from that. That's all it means, it doesn't mean that they are stupid, it doesn't mean that they aren't a decent person and it certainly doesn't mean that they are a failure.

Part of the issue of course is envy and the assumption (which is demonstrably not true) that Grammar Schools get more money per child than other schools, the majority of them (for various reasons) seem to get less, though their running expenses (like exam entry fees) are often higher. Another part of the issue is that Grammar Schools are perceived as being the preserve of the middle classes. Maybe there are more middle class kids in Grammar schools than working class kids, but I'm darn sure that more working class kids went to University when everybody had Grammar schools than do so now. That's because with a Grammar School the expectation is that every student, regardless of family background, is there on merit and is capable of going to University if they want to.

Mixed-ability teaching is the in thing at the moment. It used to be all about streaming, now it's about mixed ability. Well, as a teacher, how much easier is it to cater to everybody's needs in a class where you have maybe 25% of the academic ability range compared to a class which covers the whole ability range? The weakest students will often have an aide of some sort or special provision to help them cope. The rest of the group will get attention based on how hard they are finding the work. The strugglers will get more attention than the high flyers. Each level of ability will get their own set of tasks and aims but when the pressure is on for grades the aim isn't to get everybody who can up to an A or an A*, but to make sure nobody falls below a C. That's how they measure schools these days, so of course the midrange learners will take precedence so that the school hits its targets.

One thing that nobody seems to take into account is the social effect of having wide ability ranges in a school. If you look at the social arrangement of a school, things like a House system or the appointment of Form and House and School officials from the student body, who is it gets appointed? In a comprehensive system it's the more academically able kids, that's who. The ones who have a bit of spare capacity, who don't have to spend every hour working just to keep up, the ones who can cope with additional demands. How does that make the rest of their class/house/school feel about themselves? Every day they have to face people who are deemed to be "better" than they are, because they hold positions of trust and responsibility. Take the academically able kids out of the school, remove them from daily view and the other students will take on those roles and responsibilities, and they will do them well and it will do wonders for their confidence and self-belief. The important thing is that they get to have the chance.

People are suspicious of Grammar Schools for all sorts of reasons, they hide their reasons under the "Grammar Schools are Elitist" banner because they don't want too many people asking too many awkward questions and actually comparing Grammar and Comprehensive systems. I went to a pretty good comprehensive school, the needs of the most academically able (and I'm not including myself in that group) were not met in that environment, despite the best efforts of the school. We need to encourage academically able learners from all backgrounds because the country, the economy, needs them. We need doctors and lawyers and teachers and researchers and all sorts of academic skills just as much as we need plumbers and carpenters and builders and checkout operators and road sweepers and people with practical skills.

I say this so many times, here and elsewhere, but it bears repeating "there's nothing wrong with elites".

Date posted: 10 Nov 2008

A Day in the life of a Supply Teacher

This is how it goes, drought to plenty. Remind me to get a "proper" job. Soon!

Yesterday I had no work to go to when term starts. Term starts tomorrow. I had contacted several people and they were all in the "we'll let you know" mode. Well, OK I could do with another few days off to clear the debris from the holidays. Maybe. I wasn't expecting anything this week. The rules say that a teacher can be off from school for 3 days before the school has to bring in a supply teacher so probably nobody will need cover until next week at the earliest.

Then this morning I got an email - can I do Friday at X College? I did the same thing last year, one day per week. This will be the same units as last year, but with a slight change to the syllabus due to an update and there's possibly an Introduction to Programming unit as well if there are enough students to make it viable. So yes, I'll do that. No problem.

About an hour after that I got another email, can I do Friday morning at Y College? Nope. Then it was can I do Thursday morning at Y? Well, I'd rather not because it's only a half day they are offering me and relatively low rates at that, so I suggest maybe late afternoon sessions on other days. At 6pm I get a call from a different department at Y College, can I do the Monday-Wednesday course I was doing last year, for the whole year? Yep. We'll haggle over pay later. I start tomorrow. I need to be there by about 8am to find out what I am teaching and to organise the room and resources and make sure I have supplies and equipment for the new students. I also have to get the Health and Safety stuff for the first session on what you can and can't do and when. I taught this course for about 6 weeks last year so I have at least a rough idea what to expect.

Then, about 90 minutes ago I got an email from the organising tutor at Z University where I do some assessment and tutoring, can I do some more tutoring and schools visits for them? Yep. They will let me know who and where next week.

I just applied for a part time (1 day per week permanent) at X College in a different department from the one I work for on Fridays (Teacher Education as opposed to Engineering) so if that comes off I will be working 4 different jobs (at least). Given the economic situation and all the doom and gloom going round about recessions and whatnot, the more work the better.

This isn't a great deal different from last year, so hopefully it will all mesh together. It keeps me on my toes if nothing else and the variety is good. It looks like the boys will be picking up more of their own stuff and not leaving it all to Mum. Time to institute a new version of "Mum's Rules".

Date posted: 02 Sep 2008

SATS and "Education"

Well, "I told you" so seems to sum it up really. Not just me, but thousands of teachers (and maybe some parents too) protested against the introduction of national curriculum tests in school (the dreaded SATs) and finally, somebody has agreed. Too much testing is bad for kids. It takes time out of the curriculum, it puts extra pressure on kids, on teachers and on schools and it seriously doesn't tell teachers anything more than they already knew. Finally.

However, what the national testing does do is allow government to compare one school with another on what they claim is a level playing field. Oh right. Apparently parents and pupils need to know how they and their school are doing compared with other pupils and other schools in the area and nationally. Why?

I come across lots of parents in my "day job" I have never (in more than 20 years) been asked how little Timmy's performance compares with little Jane's performance in another class, let alone in another school. Some parents want to know how little Timmy is doing compared to the other pupils in his class (is he the middle, top or bottom); but they are in the minority. What most parents want to know is that little Timmy is doing the best he possibly can, that he's enjoying school and he's behaving himself. That's all. You don't get that information from national tests like SATs, which only give a snapshot of how one child performs compared to another on a given day at a given task that they have been working at for weeks. Those results are affected as much by the amount of time a school has been prepared to spend on preparation for SATs as on the ability of the children involved.

That shouldn't come as any surprise. If the funding for your school is based even in part on student numbers, then you want to attract as many students as you can. Being able to point to good SATs results is one way of doing that. So who cares that the pupils spend almost all of year 6 working on SATs sometimes to the exclusion of almost everything else? Who cares if students don't carry out some of the longer, more challenging, more interesting, more time-consuming tasks because they won't help the results.

If, as a teacher, your salary is based on pupil performance (and with the teachers' salary Threshold it most certainly is) then are you going to go for the more interesting stuff or take the safer but more boring option to make sure that your personal results look good. Teachers aren't saints and they have their own families to consider. By linking results of SATs to their pay (even indirectly) then you are asking them to choose between providing for their own children and inspiring somebody else's.

I recently spent a day working with a class of year 6 learners who were preparing for their SATs. Their planned activities included two hours of practice question papers. Apparently they had been doing one practice paper of an hour every day for six weeks. During the week before the SATs that went up to two practice papers per day. That's 36 hours of practice tests. In year 6 that's the equivalent of eight days of schooling just practising for the tests and then of course there are six hours or so of tests in a week where very little other work is done because the children find the testing tiring and stressful. So every 11 year old child is losing roughly two and a half weeks of education due to SATs. That is a significant amount of their education time. Parent aren't allowed to take their children away from school on holiday for that long, but schools can waste that time preparing for tests that don't appear to have any educational benefit.

Date posted: 12 May 2008