Day 23: Snowed Under

Today I've come to the realisation that I am disorganised. Seriously so. My desk is covered in a pile of paperwork, my folders are a mess, and my journal is way behind. I am stressed.

So what am I doing about it? Well, not a lot actually. Something's got to give, and I have a feeling this blog might be the first thing to go, which would be a shame. I need to take some serious time out this weekend to get myself organised.

I still have to prepare my lesson for tomorrow, so I'll breeze through the day:

Lesson 1: Year 9. Was a little stressful as the computers went down in the morning and I hadn't printed off my worksheets the night before. Luckily I had enough time to sort it, and the lesson was ok. We went off on a tangent about slave ships and slavery, and it was interesting to hear how little some of the kids know about it. "How much did they get paid?" "Why didn't they just run away?" "Where did they poo?" (re: transport ships)

Lesson 2 was year 11. They were also ok, we completed the character sheets that I hadn't gotten around to in the last lesson, and watched the end of the play, and managed to try a speaking and listening activity. The boys seemed to do it pretty well, which was nice to see. I'll be doing an assessed one with them next week, so it was good to see them getting into it.

I was then free until last lesson, and busied myself preparing that lesson and trying to mark my year 9 assessments. They day went quickly, and the year 10 lesson was ok. Some of the kids are still not really getting what we're doing, which is frustrating, and I stayed behind with a couple to help them out. One of them said "I really want an A*" which was nice to hear, although I'm worried I may have encouraged them to the point that they'll be really disappointed if they don't get it.

After that we had a departmental meeting, during which we moderated the year 9 assessments. I hadn't managed to mark all of mine, but was pleased as punch that my star pupil in my year 9 group is being moved up. She deserves to be saved from my "shit group" (as someone called it. Ouch.)

I tried to plan for tomorrow but it was late, I was tired, and I decided to have a go at home. I'm not convinced that my year 9 lesson will be much good but I'll have a go at it anyway and we'll see. I just hope I can get through the rest of the paperwork.