Hurrah

Finally, a decent day! Today I don't feel like such an atrocious teacher (though in reality, it had nothing to do with the quality teaching, and everything to do with kids actually behaving themselves), which makes a nice change.

Still, I endeavour to not discuss teaching at all tonight, and instead to enjoy roller disco. It's been a while since I've seen Pink Grease, so it should be funny. I can bet that if I do hire skates I'll be sick of them within minutes . . . the question is: to wear ye olde fashionede skates or to wear rollerblades?

Self-help

There's only 30 teaching days to go until the end of my placement, but I've finally ordered myself a copt of "Getting the Buggers to Behave". Why couldn't we have had an informative session on this at university?

Football

I'm knackered. I was so tired yesterday that I more or less slumped in front of the TV from the moment I got in, and then when I should have been planning, I became involved in the Man U/Milan game. It was a great game and I was totally gripped, but while I was rooting for Man United, I didn't overly care about the outcome. Tonight is a different matter: I really don't want Chelsea to beat Liverpool, and this means that unless Liverpool hammer them from kick-off, then I won't actually enjoy the game. I think football's often best observed from a more neutral, objective perspective.

On a football-related note, the death of Alan Ball is really sad, and listening to his son talking about him on the radio almost made me cry on the way to school.


Free Alan Johnston

I put the Alan Johnston image on my page because I don't feel that his situation is getting as much attention as it warrants. There has been massive coverage of other hostage situations, and this case seems to barely make it into the first few pages of a newspaper. Some serious investigation and interference needs to take place to actually bring his family some proper news.

Misc

I endeavour to get some Paris pictures up soon . . . watch this space.

Today

I survived today (despite having tiny cried-out eyes this morning), so I'm feeling better at present. I won't mention school except to say that this morning I was late (for briefing) because I got very distracted while eating my breakfast.

As readers will know, I discovered mouse droppings and a horrible smell of animal urine when we moved into our flat. We put down poison, and while the urine smell remained, sometimes vague and sometimes very strong, we found no further droppings. So we thought maybe we'd been mistaken about the smell and there was something wrong with the sewer (I say "we", but in actual fact I never deviated from thinking the mice were behind it).

So, I stood in the kitchen this morning, eating my rice crispies, when there was a sudden "eeek!" and a scurrying-thump underneath the floor. Then silence. Ian insists that the poison only thins the blood rather than killing the mice in an excruciating manner, but I'm doubtful.

Anyway, it just goes to show that the poison hasn't worked at all, and our kitchen will stink of wee for the forseeable future. What can be done? I think I'll ring the estate agents tomorrow and put my foot down . . .

How could I kill a thing like this? Because it stinks! Plus humane traps are useless because a house mouse wouldn't survive in the wild even if you were to release it far far away . . .

Unsuccessful

And my mental preparation hasn't stopped me from feeling utterly worthless and crap.

Why do we do these things to ourselves? Stepping out of your comfort zone is one thing, but being under this much stress is ridiculous.

If anyone can think of alternative futures for me, please please share them. I'm off to drown in my self-pity.

Gardeners' World

While I was sat around at the school, Ian sent me a text that made me laugh out loud. We'd watched Gardener's World on Friday, which is really badly put together and pretty uninformative. For some reason, when one of the presenters took off her red coat and threw it to the ground, the camera zoomed in on it and stayed fixed on the coat for what seemed like an age! It was so funny. Anyway, the gist of Ian's text was that on the BBC forums there's a thread devoted to the discussion of this. Unfortunately, I can't find it, but it amuses me nonetheless.

45 mins until 5 o'clock. I still feel peculiar. I'm thinking that perhaps what I thought was nerves is actually illness.

I think the reason I'm dreading the call so much is because I'm waiting for the awkwardness of being told I don't have it, and the feeling that I was completely unworthy and/or an embarassment which accompany that.

On that note, I think I'll check the TES website for other jobs . . .

Interviews...

I've come back from an interview at a school in Barnsley, and I shall hear the result before 5pm apparently. I was massively nervous, and people kept talking to me as though I was displaying huge signs of anxiety, though I wasn't aware myself that I was acting in any strange way. I found that pretty strange. In the final interview though, I must've come across as completely overwhelmed by nerves, and I just wasn't able to take a grip and make myself less nervous. That said, I think I came out with some okay responses, and I managed to absorb a lot of the ethics of the department during the day that I hopefully spouted back at them effectively.

I'm preparing myself for the worst though. Just so I'm not an emotional wreck by 6 o'clock. Of the two other people that were there for the English interview (there was a Maths interview
too), I don't think one was what they were looking for, but I can imagine that the other would fit in fine. He seemed to be a capable, self-assured and amiable fellow, and I always feel that older men have the advantage in this situation, because of the dominance of young women in English teaching. That's not to say that men getting English teaching jobs haven't been very good teachers--I'm sure they are!--but it all goes to make a really good package. And I don't think my nervousness would have made an attractive alternative. Oh well. (Do I sound like I've convinced myself that I haven't got it yet? That's my intention . . .)

The one very interesting aspect of this experience was that we all had an additional interview by a pupil panel of four year eights. Amongst their questions, they actually asked the most taxing question of the whole day: if you were a biscuit, which one would you be and why? I said I would be a jaffa cake, and burbled some laboured metaphor about being multi-layered and multi-faceted, or some such garbage. If anyone wants to share with me what they would have said, I'd be delighted!

Anyway, I think I'll go and occupy myself and work harder on visualising the phone call that tells me I've been unsuccessful and that I was far too nervous. Given that I've only had one such phone call I don't know why I feel like I've received a succession of bad responses, but there you go. That's my positive outlook for you.

Revolting Rhymes

Some parents are complete idiots. I'd hate to teach their children.

Waterstones in town doesn't have a copy of Roald Dahl's 'Revolting Rhymes' so I was looking it up on Amazon. Check out some of these reviews:

"I bought this from amazon a few weeks ago, and was alarmed when I read the first rhyme, and found Prince Charming calling Cinderella a "sl*t". Returned the book immediately.Have rated it with stars for the quality of writing. Dahl is funny, but this one isn't for younger children, and has no business being in this section."

"Although I thought this book was humorous in parts, I found some part to be a little inappropriate for the younger reader. I found some of the storys to be a little voilent [sic] and unsuitable for children. More suited to the young adult market."

Imbeciles! They don't know their children at all!

Is anyone else horrified by this?

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When being a trainee teacher, are you really supposed to lose the will to live on a thrice-weekly basis?

The interview is on Monday, and it's just going to be full of bullshit, because I genuinely feel like a crap teacher.

The idiotic thing is why? I know loads of stuff about English and literature, I'm passionate about them, and I enjoy working with kids.

I think the problem is that teaching is taught to us as if we should extract information out of the kids and help them find out themselves, rather than actually give them information. On the contrary, the best lessons I've done have been when I've actually taught the kids the information that they're meant to have. This is the fault of a number of things in education: the National Literacy Strategy, SATS & league tables, the emphasis on the skill of literacy, the lack of use of whole-book reading etc etc.

My discipline management skills have fallen apart the last two days. I need to find my grid, colour in the boxes and count the hours I hae left.

On a positive note, it's the weekend! Thank fucking God.

Idiot kids, Bryan Ferry and Nazi architecture

Crap day, pretty much. I was "teacher in role" for a Year 7 drama lesson. I was the abbot of the monastery and they were the monks. Fairly amusing, but the kids were rowdy. Immediately after I had the same problem with Year 8, who had been great with me up until they realised they could be shit. Only about eight of them, but it's enough to make life difficult. Then, joy of joys, one of the weird Year 9 groups last thing. One of them told me I shouldn't be a teacher because my lessons are rubbish. I would agree, except that I had been asked to do some boring P.E.E. (point, evidence, explanation) work with them by the head of department. Tomorrow's lesson should be more fun.

Anyway, I've been reading Monday's Guardian, in which I was completing the sudoku puzzle (only on Medium and it still puzzled me). I can't believe Bryan Ferry calls his studio the Fuhrerbunker: he's a complete cretin. On that basis, it doesn't surprise me that he made favourable comments about the Nazi's design ethic. There are so many better ways of expressing such things: in fact, the Nazi posters aren't radical, they're completely of their time. Some of the British and Soviet posters are amazing from that period in time, which leads me to think that Ferry does actually have a soft spot for fascism.

I have a particular dislike of Nazi architecture. The former Luftwaffe headquarters in Berlin has an eery quality to it: it's so blocky and regular. It encapsulates a lot of what makes me shudder about the Nazis.

The plans for the insanely large Volkshalle would be hilarious if they weren't so grotesque: elements of classical architecture are stretched and enlarged to the point where the features can't possibly work on any scale. It was a hideous conception, and one of the ideas that clearly shows Hitler for the madman he was.

Bryan Ferry. What an idiot. Listening to Love is the Drug and Virginia Plain will never be the same again.

Good day today. I only had two teaching groups but I stepped up the pace in their lessons and they were responsive and such so I'm happy with that, especially as I felt all woozy at the start of the day.

Our washing machine has finally been fixed too. Woo hoo! Though I did quite like going to the laundrette on Sharrow Vale Road a couple of weeks ago. It felt quite retro and/or American. I can't believe how few laundrettes exist these days . . .

I'm not well. I feel very strange indeed, which is always accompanied by great feelings of guilt. As in, if I'm well enough to sit at a computer or do other stuff, how come I'm not well enough to go to school. I start to think I'm making it all up, or that I'm exaggerating how I feel to form an excuse. But the fact is, I'm not physically up to the drive to school, let alone the hustle, bustle and general stress of the school day.

To aid my stressed-out brain, I've marked out the days left at school on my big free NUT planner that's stuck on the wall above this desk. I started from the final day, marking every weekend with the number of days until The End. This will stop me from wasting precious minutes counting the days on a daily basis (which, believe me, I would do). So I know that there are 36 teaching days until the end of the course. That may sound like precious little to people with proper jobs, but it actually sounds like heaps to me. In terms of hours of teaching it's 102. What I might do is print off a page with 102 little squares on that I can colour in at the end of each day.

102 hours. That's only four and a quarter days.

It's like the trip to Paris never happened, except we have a fridge magnet and some ticket stubs to prove it (the ticket you get for the Pompidou Centre are pretty cool: I recommend anyone to visit. I do not recommend you visit the Eiffel Tower. It's surreal to look at it at night from far away and think you've been up it, but after waiting for ages in the heat to ascend it, it's a bit of an anticlimax.) I'll upload some pictures soon, if my computer can handle the weight of them . . .

Back to it, slacker.

Bored

I've been holding on for the holidays for more weeks than is mentally healthy, and here I am, two days in, bored stupid. I still don't feel that I can start a project because I should be getting evil school stuff out of the way. I hate that feeling. It's like swatting away a persistent bluebottle.

I've run out of ideas for music I want to download too. Please give me your musical suggestions, particularly if it's new music. I was listening to a bit of !!! (Chk chk chk) before, which is okay, but they seem to have jumped on the indie disco bandwagon. However, that's where it's at currently. I was also disappointed by the other Klaxons songs. I can't get "Golden Skans" out of my head and think it's amazingly written and arranged, but the others are all so mediocre.

On a musical note, I was going to get a drum lesson tomorrow, but Ian's refused, even after he said he'd teach me how to play some stuttered rhythms. So I'm in a bit of a huff on that front. His bass is never around either, because Dan (bassist in The Yell) uses it for practices. Instead, we have a ridiculous number of guitars around the house: electric, electro-acoustic, acoustic, child-sized, steel, fretless . . . I could go on.

I am desperate to play loud music with someone, and now, when I finally have time, no one seems available. It stinks.

I'd also like to know what anyone made of Factory Girl, as I was intending to see it this week, but apparently it's bombed so badly that no where in Sheffield is showing it. Unsurprisingly, you can't see Inland Empire in Sheffield either.

I'm so bored. I don't want to watch a Channel 4 documentary about men who've had their dicks chopped off, but there is seriously nothing on TV.

Would you believe it? After almost a month in the new house, Tiscali have finally deigned to supply the broadband we pay for. I say that with a certain amount of guilt that something which does not matter in the slightest in the great scheme of things, matters overwhelmingly in the unimportant present.

Anyway, it's the Easter holidays, and I'm already wasting my precious free hours by doing nothing except hanging around in my dressing gown, watching crap children's TV with a cup of tea and generally thinking. That said, yesterday I repotted a load of houseplants and made a cool fabric noticeboard which uses elastic strips to hold stuff.

The mice are still problematic. The poison's been down for a week, and there are no signs of further droppings, but sometimes I walk into the kitchen and the stench of ammonia is horrific. But sometimes the smell isn't there at all. I sprayed the areas I assumed were smelly with bleach to neutralise the odour, but it seems to have returned. What else can we do?

In other news, we've made good progress on the allotment, which looked like this a few weeks ago:



Yes, a veritable woodland animal haven. We've already seen a gigantic wild rabbit, though according to other plot-holders, there's also a big fox that keeps the rabbit-population in check. We've cleared much of it already, just by chopping down all the brambles, an activity that has already caused some not insignificant muscles to develop in my arms.

Daytime television calls, however, and I will resume blogging later.

I haven't blogged for quite some time. This isn't just due to having as massive a workload as normal, but because Tiscali are w@nk (hilarious that "w+nk" has come up as a hyperlink) and we haven't had broadband now since the 5th of this month. How appalling it is that losing the internet feels so seriously debilitating.

I was scared to check my mail just then, after I emailed the Senior Liaison Tutor (SLT) a complaint about my mentor.

It was very difficult talking about her in objective, diplomat terms, but I think I managed it, but I'm still nervous about the response (his response was "Thanks for this."). She's nothing short of a bully who delights in making me upset and behaves aggressively when I raise any question about the arrangements in place for me.

In brief, she's a bitch! I think she's punishing me because it's probably obvious to her that I think she's a shit teacher. Every lesson of hers that I've observed is heavy on resources downloaded from Teachit, and she can't cope with any remotely difficult kids.

Her whiteboard has many deep indentations which puzzled me for ages, until a teaching assistant told me it was where she slams the marker into the board in her fits of rage. In a Year 11 lesson she shouted so loudly (it was almost a scream) that I winced terribly and had to stop myself from covering my ears. The class just laughed! She's told me before that she can't handle this group at all, and left them with me yesterday while she did some photocopying. They were fine with me, and when she came back we were discussing why the ending of the film version of Of Mice and Men is different from the book. (I also got all the girls in that class paranoid about chewing gum by telling them that they could get a masculine jaw. Very funny.) I think she was hoping that they'd be total shits with me.

I don't know why. I always talk about the classes I'm finding difficult to handle, so it's not like I come across as arrogant about managing pupil behaviour. Mind you, her Year 8 and Year 9 classes that I've taken on seem to be much more engaged with me than they were with her . . .

Everything all at once

Whilst bending down scrutinising the washing machine that isn't working, I realised I could smell wee. Animal wee.

I searched the cupboards and could find no droppings.

Then, this afternoon, I spotted the tiny little poos on the opposite side of the kitchen. I crouched down and was intoxicated by the stench of animal output from under the cupboards.

Why oh why oh why?

The council don't charge for rats, but they do charge for mice (£50). If anyone knows of a cheaper, preferably humane way to rid one's abode of rodents, please share.

snore

The lack of blogging goes to show how very little time I've had, and frankly, it's doing my head in. If I manage to cling on long enough to finish this course, it'll be a miracle. I really feel that teaching is as boring as a sit-down office job. I feel challenged in many ways, but not in any stimulating way . . . It doesn't make me nervous, excited or scared; just bored and very, very tired.

I had the day off today as I needed to have some blood samples taken, and my car went in for a full service and MOT. Because the test centre is much nearer my old house, I took the opportunity to do all the cleaning there, and I think I've finished. I first got a call from the test centre saying a few things were up and it would cost me around £120ish plus VAT. Fine, go ahead, I said. Then another call: "I also found ...." Then after ages, when I was expecting them to have finished: "I've just found something else . . ."

Thus, my car won't be fit for purpose until tomorrow afternoon, which means I somehow have to work out how to get the bus, train and bus to the school in Chesterfield.

What a wonder it would be if I actually got a job somewhere, nearby, in Sheffield.

I'm annoyed.

As per usual.

But at least I'm not as upset as last week, and tomorrow is half-way through. Still, with that kind of day-by-day attitude, I really don't know if I can make it.

Someone, please please please, tell me what to do with my life.

New home

After school tomorrow I have to pick up the keys for our new rented house. I'm really looking forward to reorganising my life into a new place. While it's stressful, I really love moving house. I suppose it's only because the houses I live in aren't places I'd ever buy, and if I did buy a house, I'd invest so much time and money making it perfect that I hopefully wouldn't want to move. In rented accommodation I don't think you ever forget that you don't have free reign to do as you want: the random pieces of horrible furniture and bad kitchen layout are a constant reminder. Hey ho, onwards and upwards, and more cliches to boot.

Ian is illegally downloading new episodes of Lost and so the internet seems painfully slow . . .

I randomly / in an annoyed state of mind typed into Google, "how the fuck do I plan a decent lesson [no question mark]", and a link came up to "Celebrity Atheists" site, which was quite interesting. Who'd have thought that Keanu Reeves was an atheist? I found the section on Douglas Adams (here) thought-provoking, as he described the reasons for calling himself a "radical atheist" rather than simply an atheist, because it carries the meaning of serious, thoughtful atheism. It made me feel quite warm inside, which I know religious people would find quite strange (by religious I only mean people who believe in a god).

If I'm honest though, I find people who describe themselves as "agnostic" harder to understand than anyone of a religious persuasion. Belief is such an absolute: you either have a certain belief or you don't. I don't see that someone can half-believe in a god, though I can see how they may not have thought through the matter enough to have made an opinion.

But this is all by the by. I would never have expected that Douglas Adams and Richard Dawkins were best mates, but then, why not?

On another completely unrelated topic, I have just replaced my horrible (itself a replacement) unofficial Mac keyboard with a brand new OFFICIAL version (only £19), and it's absolutely lovely. I was getting very tired of copying and pasting Xs and not being able to use Caps Lock. Happy days.

I've also realised that I haven't mentioned anything about my visit to Brighton, featuring Rolo Tomassi, and I haven't reviewed Patrick Wolf, who was excellent.

Will there ever be time? Judging by recent weeks, probably not. (At my first placement school I mentioned that I kept a blog, and the head of department asked how I had time. I shrugged off the question, but it's not that I make time to blog; more that I sometimes have to blog. Perhaps she imagined me scribbling a diary-type entry filled with all the day's details. I wish.)