It's 9:15pm. If I want to get my 8 hours sleep, I have to be in dreamland in approximately 15 minutes. Having slept a fair amount yesterday day-time after getting home from Oxford, I am wide-eyed and bushy-tailed (yes, like a squirrel...yum, nuts). This is great for now, but will feel rubbbbbbish tomorrow morning.
Why so early you ask? Well, I have a professional development trip for TF maths teachers to Telford School in, well, Telford (near Birmingham). They've created a wonderful online maths curriculum so that kids can have everything they need to teach themselves the syllabus in the absence of a teacher (competent or otherwise). I look forward to hearing what they've got to say, and also entirely ignoring HSBC, who sponsor the curriculum and the trip, and will no doubt try and convince us to work for them in the 6 hours of journeying back and forth from London.
I may well direct my kids to the site after one of them complained to her friend today that "she's not a real teacher, she doesn't even teach us anything", after I tried to get them to use their initiative to try and answer some GCSE questions. Bear in mind it's about three and half months to the exam and we've covered the whole syllabus, so you'd think by now they'd have some idea of what a rotation was. Humph. Good luck to them is all I say, cos despite rapidly losing my patience with them, this is about the worst I can do. The real working world will be a complete shocker to them no doubt. I can see why they say that kids come out of schools with no skills nowadays...they've been spoon-fed and allowed to sit on their arses for years, what does society expect?
Despite my crossness at them, I am still disappointed with my own professionalism, in that I told them that they might as well leave my lesson then, since there's no point sitting there wasting my time and their time. When they started raging, I just said I wasn't interested and ignored them, which only wound them up more. Good work. I try so hard to be mature, but when I'm dealing with 15 year olds, I find it hard not to resort to acting like one myself. I blame the hangover.
Anyway, I am over it and am going to bed to think about scales (both of the musical and the aquatic variety) and curving my fingers and stopping my left hand going mad on the keys (apologies for allowing you to witness my insanity Jade, again I blame the hangover). Happy thoughts, oh yes..surely a 5:30am wake-up call can only be a happy one?
Why so early you ask? Well, I have a professional development trip for TF maths teachers to Telford School in, well, Telford (near Birmingham). They've created a wonderful online maths curriculum so that kids can have everything they need to teach themselves the syllabus in the absence of a teacher (competent or otherwise). I look forward to hearing what they've got to say, and also entirely ignoring HSBC, who sponsor the curriculum and the trip, and will no doubt try and convince us to work for them in the 6 hours of journeying back and forth from London.
I may well direct my kids to the site after one of them complained to her friend today that "she's not a real teacher, she doesn't even teach us anything", after I tried to get them to use their initiative to try and answer some GCSE questions. Bear in mind it's about three and half months to the exam and we've covered the whole syllabus, so you'd think by now they'd have some idea of what a rotation was. Humph. Good luck to them is all I say, cos despite rapidly losing my patience with them, this is about the worst I can do. The real working world will be a complete shocker to them no doubt. I can see why they say that kids come out of schools with no skills nowadays...they've been spoon-fed and allowed to sit on their arses for years, what does society expect?
Despite my crossness at them, I am still disappointed with my own professionalism, in that I told them that they might as well leave my lesson then, since there's no point sitting there wasting my time and their time. When they started raging, I just said I wasn't interested and ignored them, which only wound them up more. Good work. I try so hard to be mature, but when I'm dealing with 15 year olds, I find it hard not to resort to acting like one myself. I blame the hangover.
Anyway, I am over it and am going to bed to think about scales (both of the musical and the aquatic variety) and curving my fingers and stopping my left hand going mad on the keys (apologies for allowing you to witness my insanity Jade, again I blame the hangover). Happy thoughts, oh yes..surely a 5:30am wake-up call can only be a happy one?
