Old Mr Grump!

Today is one of those oddly desolate days when you simply do not want to be in school.  Most days you tolerate it, but today takes a special effort to get through.  The weather continues fine, but the thermometer is clearly on a downward trajectory and I think that over the next few weeks will have slid, gracefully and not unreasonably into autumn.

Today we have yet another examination.  This one, for 3ESO however is enlivened by the fact that I have absolutely no idea what is in it.  Usually we have been able to tell the pupils what aspects of the work they have done is going to be examined but this time, for a variety of reasons I have not seen the paper or had an authoritative outline of what it might contain.  We know that the work is going to be drawn from the first two units in the textbooks that the hapless students follow but what precise aspects and what vocabulary we know not.

Last year such a lack of information for the needy little group of inadequates that made up the 3ESO would have produced howls of outrage and demands that the whole situation be taken to the International Court of Human Rights.  This year’s 3ESO is a little more quiescent but I foresee trouble ahead!  And there is the marking!

The papers are now marked and only five kids actually passed the exam, with 10 failing and one taking a small part of it as she has only recently returned from a visit to a school in Canada.  This is a disaster which I ascribe entirely to my teaching.  Please sack me!  Unfortunately this will not happen.  In our school such an examinational disaster will not be allowed to stand.  Something will be done to make the reality a little less awful.  Perhaps mine is the only class to do so badly.  Who really cares?  Certainly not I.  Those who live by the Examination (like our school) will surely perish by the same!

Today has been a more than bloody day with some of the kids behaving like animals.  I teach six periods today with the last two together with Year 9.  Every week I say the same: bloody awful wages and still at 2009 levels.  Why do I bother!

On a lighter note (ha!) Radio 4 (to which all praise) has just informed me that with rates of inflation at the viciously high rate that they are, all savings will be halved in twelve years!  Bad news (again) for savers in which group, for once in my life I find myself.  Good news for pensioners whose increase next year in April will be in line with the inflation rate of this month.  Swings and roundabouts!  Though the swings of inflation are substantially more than the roundabouts of money coming in!

Tomorrow off to Terrassa for Laura’s Name Day and we haven’t got the slightest idea what to get her – I just hope that the shops on the way up to Terrassa do us proud!

Toni is semi permanently linked to the TEMS dynamo and that is fine if it is doing him some good.  I do fear that he might become a voltage junkie!