Time ticks on

¡Carnival! is over in our school and the parade and judging are closed for another year.

The range of costumes was wide with the Challenger space vehicle vying with an astonishing cross dressing Amy Winehouse for the prize for the most outstanding fancy dress!

Unlike most schools the outlandish dress and high spirits of many of the students did not mean that teaching was impossible.

The fact that I had a Year 9 class last thing in the afternoon was not the sort of group of pupils with whom most teachers would have chosen to end their day during Carnival, but in the event they were generally tractable and anyway we did folding, cutting and pasting which always has a calming effect on most pupils in my experience.

It is a strange fact that, however mundane the practical task involving a few sheets of A4 paper is, pupils take an inordinate pride in the finished article. In this case we were constructing the board, envelope and cards for a game of chance based on The Victorian Workhouse with the ‘chance’ cards emblazoned with the image of a bowl of gruel and a question mark. There are indeed no limits to which I will not stoop to keep a hyper class quiet!

I have already constructed one game with Year 8 connected with the English Civil War for which I have designed a ‘wallpaper’ design for the back of the cards using a woodcut from the period. I can feel a hankering for cutting and pasting myself to produce a version of the game to ‘encourage’ the kids to do likewise! You could also see it as a giving in to the desire to ‘make’ something which can be loosely bundled under the heading of ‘creative’ to compensate for all the dull photocopying that I have done for the past two weeks.

I am looking forward to My Day in Court and I only hope that it is not too much of an anti-climax. I am hoping that the inexorable wheels of justice will crush beneath its iron rims the presumptuous audacity of The Owner of The School That Sacked Me. I suppose that it is an engaging aspect of my essential bright eyed naivety that I still retain a child-like faith in the essential ever undefeated power of justice.

As I often say, “We shall see.”