. . . and early to rise - is a bloody mistake!

In this worst of all possible worlds I got up at 6 am to make it to school for an 8.15 am start and discovered that this one was of the two days when I could have come in at the normal time.



In the way that one does, I tried to make the most of it and managed to prepare all the materials for my lessons in the new space available and even gave myself a congratulatory cup of tea in the time before my first lesson began.


I am gradually meeting my groups and trying to extrapolate what it is going to be like teaching them for the next year. One group has been oddly split to allow a group of talented English students to translate a Spanish children’s book into English. This will be published in the same format of the original and will be on sale in aid of the disaster fund for Haiti. This is an amazing opportunity for a small group of kids to be able to cite a published work in their CV’s for university and beyond! The chosen few have taken to the task with gusto and are pleased and excited.


The sad thing is that this task will only occupy them for a limited period and then we will have to think about how to teach the split group for the remaining two and a half terms.


My group of Current Affairs students looks as though it is going to be strangled at birth and I shudder to think about what might take its place.


No one, at the moment, is taking anything for granted with timetables and class lists and any free time is being regarded as something which can easily disappear at the touch of a computer key. At the moment, for example, I have neither a lunchtime duty nor a playground duty. What I do have is a library duty on a Tuesday, but this is regarded as such a light, insubstantial thing that it is in imminent danger of being added to with something much more irksome.


In my first year class hordes of pupils descended and we ran out of desks. I sincerely trust that this is an aberration and some re-jigging of student personnel can be accomplished without delay – and certainly before I give them any substantial marked work!


In spite of the fact that my early leaving on a Wednesday is because of my early start on a Monday (which this week was a teacher only day and at the normal time) I still too the time off because I arrived early this morning and worked. So there.


I had my customary swim and the water was a little warmer than it has been in the last few days: inscrutable are the ways of pool water and their retention or otherwise of heat from what remains of the sun in the tail end of the summer!


Two more days to the weekend. And it can’t come a day too soon!