... you start crying when your professional mentor says "That's not a lesson plan." Well, she was right. I was getting feedback from my professional mentor for the year 7 lesson she'd observed two days previously, and after I'd remembered what I'd actually taught that lesson, she attacked, in the friendliest way possible, the fact that I'd just used the lesson plan from the scheme, despite the fact that I didn't really do part of it properly. Oops.
Anyway, feedback over I had two hours before my first lesson of the day, and so spent that time putting together a super lesson plan/context sheet for each class I teach, as I was supposed to have done ages ago. Plans sorted, I finished up some ideas for my year 10 lessons and got to it.
My year 10s were in a buoyant mood, and I joined in with it. This mood started when a couple of girls asked if I was going out with my colleague, which made me laugh out loud. Anyway, the lesson was a little bitty, but ok, and I went off an a tangent about the crusades, and they were actually listening in, intently. Hilarious. They also said I was like my colleague who taught them last year, as he also used to talk about "tangents". They asked me if I always wanted to be a teacher, and I answered honestly that I wanted to be a writer, but I've wanted to be a teacher for the past few years. They asked if I'd written anything, and I said not yet, then one of my little madams said something along the lines of "Aw, Miss, if you wrote about me I would laaaaaaaarf!" which was funnier at the time.
After lunch I had a free, and I spent it revising my year 9 lesson with my colleague and mooching about the place, as my classroom was in use. I overheard the head of year 11, and fellow English teacher, telling off a particularly unpleasant girl in the corridor - year 8, naturally. One of my favourite of his lines - "If you kiss your teeth again you'll be kissing them in another school." The whole teeth kissing thing is rather amusing to me. Culturally, it means nothing to me. It reminds me of irritable women on buses in Camberwell, or my old colleague at my last job whenever someone upset her, so when the kids do it to me I don't really register, but apparently I should be really offended. I hardly even notice it to be honest.
Year 9 came in, and again there were hardly any of them. One of the kids, D, tried to hug me when he turned up, and I laughed it off at the time. The lesson was a little dry, although I tried to give them an active activity but it didn't really work, and reading the play was dry. It was rather disturbing that, by the end of the lesson, I wrote up D's red report (which is the report card they get after an exclusion - basically means they have to have every teacher sign it off and have it checked three times a day by their head of year) and I was just giving him a good report and congratulating him on working so hard, although calling out, when my colleague who team teaches with me asked him to stay behind. I wasn't sure what I missed, so was a little confused, but it turns out that D has made a rather inappropriate and, frankly obscene comment to the TA who I had sat him near. I was pretty disgusted by it, and I suppose that, seeing as he was excluded for making inappropriate remarks to staff, he hasn't really got a grasp of boundaries. I'm not sure what to make of it all, but it's out of my hands now really.
After that little bombshell, we had a departmental training session for the second exam in the English language paper, with someone from "Education London" which was quite interesting, and hopefully will be useful. The one thing I will be taking from the session was the portmanteau "Blinguistic" - that is, the use of attractive and elaborate linguistic devices. Cool, eh?
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