Roll on the summer!

No day on which I have been able to sit outside on the terrace of the Third Floor and feel the sun on my face can be described as all bad!

I’ve even done a piece of school work.  Though as this was writing a short screed on eight selected art movements that wasn’t exactly a burden.  Just for a change I used books to provide the basis for my writing keeping well clear, you understand, of Wikipedia which will be used by all (and I mean all) the students that we take.

It was quite like old times finding my desk becoming covered with different sized volumes and trying to keep control of where I wanted to be consulting three books almost simultaneously!

The only time that I regretted not having access to the Internet (it is temperamental, to put it mildly, on the Third Floor) was when I realized that I would have to add first names to some of the artists to avoid confusion in our pupils’ minds. 

Though it might be interesting to see a pupil confuse the Pop artist Peter Blake with the older and madder William Blake because if you put “Blake” into Google I am sure that it will bring up the older Blake rather than the newer. 

Though, again, thinking about it, I expect that I could make a case somehow or other for Bill being considered a precursor of the Pop Artists!  After all “Good and Evil Angels Struggling for the Possession of the Soul of a Child” could have come straight out of a Marvel Comic!

I am still recovering from all the edu-talk that Suzanne subjected me to.  It did all make sense, but it also brought back bad memories of the wording of some of the plethora of educational “initiatives” that plagued your life if you entered education at the time that I did!

And now in the last period before home time in my career, so to speak, initiatives rear their heads in my erstwhile little troubled academic life.  Suzanne is a born-again believer in Project Based Learning and she has started a crusade to get PBL accepted in our school.  Just before the Easter holidays she will be going to the US of A to visit a selection of schools specifically to learn more about PBL in action!  This is serious stuff! 

And our little course on Making Sense of Modern Art is an integral part of her approach.  We have planned and evaluated like true professionals – I didn’t know that I had it in me!

The descriptions of art movements will be part of the new booklet for which Suzanne is doing a mock-up.  I have designed the cover (all part of the Praetorious Design Service of old) and the finished article will be a marked contrast to the more ordinary booklet that I am preparing for the last course of Media Studies!  But it will take less time too!

Next week is the week before the Fiasco Week and just to get us into the mood Friday is Carnival.  Admittedly Carnival is our school is less of a celebration than a duty, but the kids seem to enjoy it with some mild dressing up and excitingly educational paper puzzles to do.  To, if I remember rightly, the sound of raucous music.

Then a long weekend and a three day week into which virtually everything that we have not had time to do before will suddenly be done.

Then another long weekend and the long slog to Easter!

Every day, I must keep telling myself, is a day nearer to the end of June!