Day 41: Back to the Grindstone

What happened to the rest of last week? Good question. Long story short, the rest of the week went really quickly, with buckets of stress, tears, and irritation. The weekend was spent lazing around the not doing *any* work, which brings me to today.

I went to school with one lesson prepared, as it was being observed, and one lesson to prepare for, as well as a bunch of marking to finish off. The morning was a little irritating, as I found out that half of my kids were going to be on a trip (actually, it was only 6 out of 22, but that's almost a third) so I rearranged my observation and thought up a hasty lesson plan for them (poetry) and got on with the lesson. My year 7s have been a little cocky lately, so I rearranged their seating plan and started with the warnings. The lesson went quite well, although the kids needing support didn't really get enough from me, so I need to think of how to support them during the lesson. I got a poem out of everyone, including one from the crying boy whose poem was on the subject of school, and was something along the lines of "don't go to school, school is the worst, all the teachers want is money money money." I passed it to his form tutor who found it rather amusing.

After year 7 I was free until last lesson, so I set about preparing for them. I was going to do a poem with them today, so managed to spent a huuuge amount of time sorting out the lesson. I was quite pleased with the plan I put together, with the help of a colleague, and the discover of "wordle.net". I was going through my Canterbury resources and remembered I'd attended a poetry workshop, ironically run by my colleague, and wanted to look up a word cloud. I managed to make one for the poem - it's basically a way of putting the words from a poem or any text into a picture - hard to explain so here's an example of Journey's Don't Stop Believin'.



I found out about this time that I was supposed to have an occupational health appointment tomorrow - oops. I had to sort out cover for my first two lessons, and spent a good while running around like a headless chicken.

Eventually year 11 turned up, and they were in pretty good spirits. I realised that I haven't actually taught poetry yet, so was pretty nervous about it, but I think it went well enough - they seemed to get what the poem was about anyway.

After school I had to go to a very long meeting about lesson objectives/outcomes, and ended up staying at school till 7. Which sucked.

I think I'm just so so tired at the moment, and fed up. I have to prepare two lessons for tomorrow and mark the rest of my coursework, but at least I get a lie in. Thank you occupational health!