I see the promised land!

The penultimate day!

There are few phrases more heartening to the ears than that.  Obviously “The last day!” or even better “The last day was yesterday” have an even better ring to them.  But at this stage . . . 

I am prepared to wait.

Another vaguely unsatisfying day characterized by a meeting in which we were told that nothing had really been decided.  I love occasions like that – and thank god that my Spanish is insufficient to understand the detail of what is going on!  Sometimes even the most general of outlines evades me; it’s how I survive.

Our school is beginning to pay a little more than lip service to the concept of Project Based Learning – three little words that can strike terror and confusion into the hearts of most seemingly secure teachers in the profession!

As I am friendly with the Evangelist for this approach (indeed I team teach with her) I have been dragged into the maelstrom of approaches which characterize this approach.

Under her fanatical guidance and rabid inspiration I have even been encouraged to do some “planning”; to write rubrics; to consider outcomes and other things which are entirely (or used to be entirely) foreign to my nature.

Of course, our school being our school, I don’t know my timetable for next year; we do not have class lists; I don’t know what courses I will be teaching; I don’t know the dates of the terms.  Still, we will have a week of half days in September before the kids arrive, so it can all be sorted then.  Probably.

With the absence of this somewhat vital information, I have done what I can as far as my new found enthusiasm for planning is concerned and created the folders which are going to contain the information that I don’t know.

More astonishingly, I have registered with the Buck Institute for Education – a known hotbed of Project Based Learning, and have downloaded some of their forms to organize the subjects for next year.  This can’t last, of course – but it’s good fun while it is unreal and not actually in practice.

I have weakened and bought some books and lids.

The lids are probably part of a good idea.  As space in the house is limited I have invested in a set of Tefal saucepans and frying pans with detachable handles.  They are like those Russian matrioska dolls and all fit inside each other; so three frying pans and four saucepans only have the “footprint” of the largest frying pan and the height of their collective bases and one saucepan.  The glass lids are flat with a removable knob.  It’s all very sensible.

Which is more than can be said for the book purchases which are mostly self-indulgent art books bought with the facile justification that I might need some of them for my course of “Making Sense of Modern Art”.  It is a good thing that nobody who knows me has the opportunity to hear me pontificating about paintings – though, there again, who would be surprised!

The other book has been purchased on the half-understood but seemigly enthusiastic endorsement of a friendly Catalan teacher who saw some of my kids’ work on logos for my Media Studies course.

All of the books have been bought virtually sight-unseen from Amazon (post free) with only a picture of the front cover for guidance.  

Buying from Amazon, especially with the one-click option, is such a beguiling way of throwing your money into the gaping maw of a vast organization that I can rarely resist once I get on to the site!  

I think the devil was a bit unimaginative in his temptation of you-know-who with his reliance on the old-fashioned "whole world" technique.  Now if he had offered "one-click purchasing" on Amazon the whole history of theology might have been different.  Or has it all worked out in exactly the same way anyway?

Tomorrow we start the last day with moving our departmental book store to a new location in a different building and end the day with a two-hour meeting.  I hope to god we are let out early for good behaviour!

The end is in sight!