The Twenty-Sixth Republic -Half Term Horror?

[StaffAssociationRepresentative]

You are most welcome to this school staff support thread to get us through stressful times. It is meant for school staff only – a sort of room of requirement. Baiters, haters, goaders and bashers can jog on somewhere else.

If you are NOT staff and just have a general education query please start your own thread.

You can play here if you are a member of one the following groups-

-ABBA - anti bashers and baiting association
-SWAB - school workers against bashers
-SWOT - school workers opposing teacherbashers
-STARS - schoolworkers together against ranting + slurs

Do not give ‘The Every twat for Themselves mob’ the staffroom password as a number of them are operating in an alternative reality.

No DfE muppets allowed

Other requirements for staff room entry include the ability to find the staff room, the ability to find a clean mug in the staff room, knowledge of the photocopier codes, and the ability to sniff out where the toffee vodka is hidden.

If you are fed up with cakes and biscuits there is now a cheeseboard on offer

If you come with a stick to goad us then that is not allowed in the staffroom and you will receive a detention

I once had a trainee very confidently tell me that research showed that I was wrong about the quality of the marking being more important than the colour of the pen, and that research told us that we must mark in purple or else dire things would befall us
I tried not to roll my eyes but they roll by themselves.

I used to have lovely sparkly gel pens for marking in, in a variety of colours, just because it brought a ittle joy to having to mark.
Then they said we had to have 3 colours for particular things, plus 3 different coloured highlighters for what I can't remember, and all the joy was gone. Replaced with frustration about trying to remember which bloody pen was for what.
I left shortly after that and did supply they were grateful if I did live marking in any pen I chose

You've reminded me of when I could use any colour and I had scented gel pens. They were great until using different ones at different times combined to make the books smell vile.
Now I use hot pink or purple. School rule is red. So sue me.

I don't know what dual coding is. Am I supposed to? Am I missing out? Am I doing it already and just don't know?

I teach using my whiteboard. I don't do anything fancy very often. I have some standard games I play as a plenary (bingo, or noughts and crosses where the whole team have to get the answer right to win the square) but they are very, very easy to put together. I don't do fancy, at all, ever. I used to, but the kids learned less than they do now I have boring lessons.

You rebel you!

You can keep the scented pens though - my youngest daughter has some of those, and yes they combine to make something awful in my opinion.

Probably doing it already. It's essentially using diagrams when modelling (using the brains visual and audio channels). But making the diagrams stripped back and not full or superfluous information. Most people I've seen teach well do it naturally.

Riga has the extra lesson chunk of running round the room trying to get practicals underway whilst working out why various bits of out of date kit aren't working and reminding kids that test tube holders are there for a reason as she catches a test tube rolling off of a desk it's been laid on.

Though she is probably way more effective at managing practicals than I was in science

I've noticed that all of the 'new' ideas are just what most experienced teachers already do but with fancy new names to give the appearance of freshness.

Still reeling from the fundamentals of teaching eg. questioning being referred to as 'low stakes assessment' - err I think you mean teaching. As if anyone either just threw information at kids and didn't know if it had stuck until they did a test.

Ever not either.

From what I understood about dual coding friendly teaching (and I may be wrong, because to be honest the way it was presented just struck me as yet another way of making a "thing" about something we all do already) you almost certainly already "use" dual coding without realising - do you talk while drawing diagrams and building the complexity or add labels to pictures while talking? Have a visual and audio complementary input at the same time? Then you already utilise the brain's ability to dual code to grasp and remember things better.

As if anyone either just threw information at kids and didn't know if it had stuck until they did a test.

I'll stick up for anyone who trained in the edutainment days. This is literally what we had to do. Then we were surprised kids hadn't learnt/retained anything. Progress in the lesson was the be all and end all. Thank goodness for the switch to progress over time.

Oooh yes.... A Wagol.
A what?
What a good one looks like.
So a model answer then?

HoneyBadger - like throwing spaghetti at a wall to see if it was cooked

Is that really a thing? Wagol? My eyes would be impossible to keep from rolling.

Our head of sixth form is obsessed with WAGOL.

We keep telling him it's pointless for maths beyond the physical layout of the work and it being easy to follow.

Yes but it's better if you throw the spaghetti whilst drawing a diagram and singing a tune.

Oh god. wagols. With the different bits in different bloody colours. I'd almost fully blanked them from memory...

It's a thing. A trainee told me and my eyes did that thing again that's it's a new thing. I have been doing model answers since 2000 so I think not.
I'm not blaming trainees for any of this nonsense. The training providers claim their £9k and have to make it sound like something innovative is going on. But WAGOL is wank as We All Now Know

I do do my models in different colours so I they can see where the different AOs come into play and it makes the books look pretty but they're definitely not wagols.

I used to be a scuba diving instructor and the PADI method was basically that you:
tell them what you're gonna tell them,
tell them,
then tell them what you told them.

Basically the NASA training model.

Also all teaching started with a 'contact' eg. if you were talking about pressure you ask them what would happen if you shook a can of coke then opened it. That probably has stuck with me - I'm always look for metaphors that kids will get and get experiences they have that new learning can easily connect with and hook onto. Dare say that has a fancy name too.

Give it one Honey then tweet about it and write a book and you'll be rich!

Our training provider has become super navel gazery this year. The forms are full of "how are you feeling" and 'how are the students". Very little mention of actual learning by students or trainees. All very odd.

Ah, excellent! I DO use dual coding all the time then. I'm constantly drawing diagrams on the board while talking through things. Look at me!! I'm up to date!!!

And I'm still allowed to use whatever colour pen I want 😁 I have sparkly gel pens in a dedicated marking pencil case (my dd was given 2 huge sets of hell pens one Christmas and she already had some). I think some of them are glow in the dark, or metallic, but I'm not sure. I learned the smelly way not to use the scented gel pens. My classroom smelled vile for a few weeks until they all needed new books and we could send the smelly ones home with them for good.

On another note I can't remember who but someone was asking whether it's worth getting a gym membership.

Big yes from me. I started in September and it has been saving my sanity this term to go to the gym and/or a swim. Went to the gym today and will go again tomorrow. On Thursday I am booked in for a yoga class and a swim and Friday probably just gym again.

It really puts work and stress out of my head and gives me a tangible goal or 'win'.

Oh we're not allowed to send books home when they're full. HOD goes ape if we do. No one knows why we have to keep them from y7 to 9 but it's Very Important.

We don't keep anything any more. If I kept the books from year 7-9 I'd have about 15 books per child by the end of it. We do lots of work, but once it's done I don't know why anyone would ever want to see it again. We also have separate note books that they write revision notes in (copy my examples from the board) so they don't have to trawl through pages of their own work to get to the stuff that's useful for helping with their homework or revising before a test.

We don't even keep tests any more. Once they're done and marked we keep a record of the results then give the paper to the child to do with as they will. That was decided when gdpr came in, so the kids are in charge of their own data, and we only have a single page of results to shed rather than a pile of test papers to go through.