The Fifty-third Republic - Ides of March Part 2

[StaffRepFeistyClub]

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.

Do not give the staffroom password to non-staff as it attracts the wrong sort of crowd.

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 booze is stashed - Thirsty Tuesdays, Fizz Fridays now in operation. Do not sit on the chairs and do wear a mask

I cried at school again.
One sob was very public.
Very autistic not Bob saw me and went to tell his LSA because I was sad and he was worried.
2021 is shit.

@HSHorror

Dc1 has a sore throat. Ffs! 10 school days.

Tbh even without covid what are we all doing to our health that 10d is all it takes to catch something. Even with all these restrictions.

I think having all cold symptoms as stay off and test would make a lot of difference. It is so unfortunate for kids prone to coughs after colds.

I was sure what I had was a cold. It felt just like a regular cold. DH made me test and it was Covid.

I don't understand why there aren't. My tweet was well liked but not enough voices adding to the general shit of the whole situation.

You may be right re being too tired and brave faced.

Cross Post MrsH. Sorry. Good that Bob gives a shit. You taught him humanity if nothing else. Sending gin.

I'm sorry you're feeling this way, MrsH.
& for you.

Hugs, MrsH. I’m so sorry

It's all just so crap MrsH - GCSE and A-level teachers have been completely shafted here. I don't think the wider public has the faintest idea what's happening.

Buckets of for you and all secondary colleagues going through this nightmare.

Harriet did you get your PPA situation sorted?

@HercwasanEnemyofEducation

Harriet did you get your PPA situation sorted?

I brought it up with SLT again. It should be reinstated fully next week. Phase lead admits that we have all been badly short changed (!) recently and did offer to take the class outside today to give me a break. It's problematic with staff mixing across bubbles though.

They really need a longer term solution as every time a bubble goes out the PE teacher (who provides the bulk of PPA cover for everyone) gets sent home as a close contact, even though he keeps his distance, wears a mask and mostly teaches outside.

@noblegiraffe

Yep exam boards are not setting exams, marking exams or grading exams and yet we are paying them and doing the work ourselves.

It’s outrageous.

Morning!

Back when I taught either a vocational qualification that was 100% coursework or A Levels and GCSEs that were up to 60% coursework, I thought this then too. For over 10 years I never had an Easter break, as I had to mark hundreds of pieces of coursework (some were 400 + pages long-more than my dissertation!) and then moderate many more others.
Of course, we never got paid extra for that ‘service’ or acknowledged then either.

I was actually at the start of Gove’s coursework war, a little bit grateful I might get some of my Easter back until all it meant was having to be in for Easter revision sessions

As it is currently, all that will happen now is that we will work are butts off producing assessments, marking them, moderating them and having endless discussions on grades, only for the govt and general public to forget all of that hard work and just accuse teachers of being too generous again.

Personally, I don’t think being too generous is the issue here. Normally with exams you have the ones who forget to turn up, the ones who miss the back page, the ones who are late, the ones who are ill but power through on the day, the ones who have back to back exams all day and have to stay overnight at someone’s house and carry on the next day exhausted. You also have the exam boards who want to standardise and want to keep grades at a certain amount, no matter how well/not well a student does.

We are removing all that now and going to get grades that would have been lost that way.

Absolutely nothing to do with teachers being overly generous in the main (maybe bar one or two exceptions sometimes).

Morning.

Thanks for kind thoughts for one woman departments!

I am one woman at GCSE and two for both A Levels. My two teacher dept causes even more stress as one of my colleagues is great but a perfectionist and a panicker.

English is causing advance stress because there will be extensive moderation and fussing and people interfering and arguing including me Too many cooks!

It is absolutely shit and I agree about the tweets. What is even more crap is that the unions have been almost silent on workload and it feels like exam boards are doing jack shit. I was genuinely shocked when I discovered my board ahs no intention of producing extra materials for us. And everyone on FB keeps being so nice about it, telling the subject officer how dreadfully stressful it must be for the exam board!

Small exam boards with small subjects were identified as an issue by Ofqual as was lack of materials and difficulty moderating. But they haven't come up with solutions!

And my SLT as we know is full of maths and science specialists so a) they ahve no appreciation of the complexity of the issues for a range of subjects and b) they spend whole meetings discussing bell curves because they are data obsessed and never have answers about queries about practical things like persistent absentees.

gravity : solidarity sister. We can do this !

Chloe, my experience too. I can still see in my mind’s eye the huge pile of A level ICT/Computing projects at the beginning of the Easter break and remember the sigh of relief when I picked up the last one. The consolation was that in the majority of cases the students had done terrific work, some was of near-professional standard.
I’m old enough to remember the days of GCSE Maths coursework and though it’s not a popular view, I thought it valuable and useful for many and used to enjoy setting, supervising and marking it. Again, I was impressed by what many students could do when given the time and space to think independently.

Oh, and don't forget the fact that HODs in my school get one free a fortnight! One.

And as for the unions. They seem utterly uninterested in the whole thing. I think it is a long time since they have been in classrooms and perhaps they don't appreciate the enormity of the workload.

In my school b, because of a stupid outmoded rollover timetable, we don't even get gained time to any real degree.

Have woken up with interview worries, even though it's not until next week. I need to sort my lesson.
@HarrietDVane I have sent you a message as I think you're Y3?

Need a 20 -30 min guided reading activity for Y3/4 . Have never taught LKS2 before so a bit nervous.

I agree there was often some stellar work there borntobequiet! I’ve had a few ex students over the years tell me that their A Level Computing programming project was far longer and more in depth than their final year dissertation (and some have even cheekily used their A Level projects and for firsts for them) and that always makes me smile when I hear that!

Did you ever get SLT not appreciating that though, for the few students who didn’t work very hard and wouldn’t finish and SLT or HOL learning being shocked that it could be fixed by sitting down for a day off timetable to get it done, as there was too much to be done for that and the odd/convoluted Mark Scheme would mean that they probably wouldn’t generate many more marks either?!

@Piggywaspushed

Oh, and don't forget the fact that HODs in my school get one free a fortnight! One.

That’s verging on abuse.

I feel really sorry for English and History teachers. The marking workload must be huge, I can only imagine the pressure for GCSE grades.

@namechangedyetagain

Have woken up with interview worries, even though it's not until next week. I need to sort my lesson. *@HarrietDVane* I have sent you a message as I think you're Y3?

Need a 20 -30 min guided reading activity for Y3/4 . Have never taught LKS2 before so a bit nervous.

Morning all! Why is it that you can never sleep in when you need to? Why do my eyes ping open in a Saturday morning when all through the week it's been a massive struggle to wake up?

Hope you're ok Name. I am just trying to work out how to get to PMs so I can read your message. I haven't used PMs before and it's not immediately obvious where they are (I'm on the phone app). Bear with me!

Chloe yes, they hadn’t a clue! And neither did anyone else about the sheer time consuming slog that was the coursework. But ICT/Computing was never properly appreciated. I remember being observed by the Head (Science background) when I was teaching Y9 and he remarked that if they had “mastered” databases in Y8 he couldn’t see why they had to do them in Y9 as well...I was for once lost for words. Especially as we had been doing an introduction to relational databases because I believe in getting in a taster for “difficult” topics (that aren’t really difficult if presented in the right way) in early. (As a result many of my GCSE student built little relational databases and made the progression to A level very naturally with minimum confusion and fuss.)

This situation has just been so rubbish for all those in secondary and colleges. Dh has so many years experience and is part time but has been so stressed this year. It hadn't occurred to me that you are paying the exam boards but then doing their job for free. Very naive of me.

I was lucky not to have an exam class last year, so this is my first experience of CAG. I would like to send the one-and-two woman departments out there a shedload of 🍫 and 🍷.

I knew you were doing their job obviously but I hadn't thought of the money side. They absolutely should be doing more or at least giving you some of the cash. They will be saving a fortune by not having to pay markers.

@HarrietDVane the app doesn't let you access PMs, you'll need to go onto the site.
I hadn't twigged about the paying exam boards for zilch either! How cheeky!

@borntobequiet

Chloe yes, they hadn’t a clue! And neither did anyone else about the sheer time consuming slog that was the coursework. But ICT/Computing was never properly appreciated. I remember being observed by the Head (Science background) when I was teaching Y9 and he remarked that if they had “mastered” databases in Y8 he couldn’t see why they had to do them in Y9 as well...I was for once lost for words. Especially as we had been doing an introduction to relational databases because I believe in getting in a taster for “difficult” topics (that aren’t really difficult if presented in the right way) in early. (As a result many of my GCSE student built little relational databases and made the progression to A level very naturally with minimum confusion and fuss.)

And that’s just a crazy comment from that SLT. If only all it took to learn everything about databases is just one module needed in Year 8!

The huge foundation on which any piece of software/program in the entire world is built on but sod any IT professional-all you need is an expert Year 8!

Yep-I actually learnt a lot from teaching maths as part of my timetable about 10 years ago when I saw that each year, they built on what had been done the year before and the repetition and understanding as a result made for pretty good GCSE results. Revamped my Key Stage 3 at that point and I honestly feel that this is part of the reason with my brilliant A Level mock results this week that I mentioned yesterday. The kids were the first Year 7s to do my new scheme of work all the way through, GCSEs included and has also resulted in three offers from Cambridge colleges.

Although, as an aside, anyone with experience of Bristol Uni this year? Have had 4 students with A* and A predictions (more than the Computer Science course requires) and they have been instead been offered a place on their brand new ‘Data Science’ course instead. Something odd going on there!

Morning all, sending lots of hugs to those of you struggling. It is rubbish what has been dumped on you Secondary teachers.

I keep waking really early with school in my head; this morning trying to reorganise my seating plan. Sitting in rows is just crap because I can't work with a group of children and due to the size of my room can only just squeeze between rows to help anyone. I need to work out how I am going to sort out a few behaviour issues and position my one TA who is single handedly a 1 to 1 for 2 EHCP children with diverse needs who should each have their own. A large bunch of lower ability kids who are needing support need to be at the front and I've got a new child arriving next week with no English.

I'm so tired; at least my anti anxiety pills seem to have stopped the crying in school for the moment.