The Fifty-fourth Republic - Easter holidays anyone?

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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.

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phleb I'm glad you haven't got work on top of everything else right now. No advice but just keep swimming.

Lovely day here yesterday. Then last night a relatives partner had a mental breakdown so trying to support relative remotely. Lockdown has hit so many

@phlebasconsidered 💐💐

DS is home so going for a bike ride later (he has an adapted bike). Sun is coming out and the day is going to last just that bit longer ❤️

phleb that sounds incredibly hard. Agree with everyone else, ask for and take any help offered.

Sorry you are so tired Medra just 4 more days.

@Monkeytennis97 That sounds like an awesome day! It is absolutely peeing it down here but the sun was out yesterday and had a lovely few hours in the garden pottering around. Back to being under a blanket today!

@Monkeytennis97 Enjoy your lovely day with DS.
@phlebasconsidered As someone who helped care for a parent, make sure you keep asking for help, often it seems like its too much of a battle but keep fighting. Glad you're not having to worry about work on top.

4 more days here, keeping everything crossed that i wont have to isolate especially as DH has time off too. Knowing my luck it'll be over Easter our bubble pops (it hasnt yet).

respiteassociation.org/index.php/how-to-apply/

Phleb have you ever applied to people like this? They only do short term but I imagine it would be wonderful for you and dc to have a weekend away come summer without worrying about your mum. With the GP don't hold back on how hard it is for you and for you and your dc as family.

I'm watch Deutschland '89. Love this show. We're switching to teaching a Cold War in Europe unit as part of GCSE replacing one on the early American West which the kids found really boring so I guess I can call this research

I think the Cold War is an important period to be teaching our teens, I was talking to a mid-twenties teacher recently and used the phrase ‘The Iron Curtain’ talking about The Queen’s Gambit and he’d never heard of it. A bit of digging revealed he had no real idea of the Soviet impact on WWII, that the Soviets liberated Auschwitz etc. His historical knowledge just ended with Hitler being defeated by the Brits and Americans. When you think of the break-up of the Soviet Union and the East European countries joining the EU and the path to Brexit, there’s a whole load of missing context. Then you’ve got stuff like the Salisbury poisonings, Russian troll farms, the concerns about Trump being influenced by Russia etc and they think it’s just a Putin thing.

Our kids do Cold War ad nauseam. And they still don't get it. They have what I would identify as very simplistic view of it.

Oh *honey8, we are watching Deutschland having loved 83.

I have not one clue what is going on in this series! Especially with Schweppenstette and the woman he is living with in the nice house.

I'm watch Deutschland '89. Love this show. We're switching to teaching a Cold War in Europe unit as part of GCSE replacing one on the early American West which the kids found really boring so I guess I can call this research

Wow, we did the early American West as a GCSE topic in about 2002....that’s clearly been around a while! I agree, very boring to study - and history was my favourite subject at school.

Anything I know about history beyond about 1948 has been learnt through wider reading as an adult....

I guess one of the issues with history is it is so broad (obviously) so one could easily have got through a history degree and not gone anywhere near some of the school topics. I do recall a lot of anxiety in out history department when the A Level especially was 'reformed'.

It feels to me like at GCSE in my schol they only ever do the Nazis. DS seemed to do a broader range of stuff at his school.

Primary teachers, have you seen all this about new detail for music at KS1 and 2?

I’m all for children learning through the arts, BUT I’ll willingly admit that music is not a skill I am blessed with. I’m bloody good at English and humanities, and I’ve learnt to be good at other ‘academic’ subjects, but skills like music and some PE continue to evade me. This and PE I think really need specialist teaching, or we’re doing the children a disservice.

Oh yes, I nearly posted a link. Nick Gibb says everyone needs to do Mozart.

@Piggywaspushed

Oh yes, I nearly posted a link. Nick Gibb says everyone needs to do Mozart.

Yup. Some of the song choices for yr 9 leave a lot to be desired too!

I'd have loved to learn about the American West. I went to a really interesting museum about the Oregon Trail in Oregon once.
But my history teacher was monstrously dull so I did geography

I learned about the American West from a monstrously dull history teacher.

As periods of American history go, it hasn’t been that useful, except for the bit about the Mormons.

I went to the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City for a concert - beautiful music but all very strange!

Oh I went to a tabernacle. Barely got out unconverted! Very odd.

They're very enthusiastic!!!
I used to teach members of a Mormon family and I found the whole going on a mission very odd. We have some who regularly try to recruit at the railway station, which seems like an odd place to choose.

See American West has the potential to be really interesting if it explicitly linked to modern times eg. why is the American view of gun ownership as it is? Why do Americans fear 'big' government so much? Why are the American's so self righteous on the world stage (Manifest Destiny etc). The kids are just like why are we studying this and as an Anthropologist I would explain the above and how different USA and Europe are and the differences in our cultures, beliefs about power and freedom and the rights of the state etc but that perspective isn't in it or examined.

I'm fairly sure at gcse all I did was Germany. Ours do 2 large topics of Germany and Medicine through time and two smaller topics of Elizabeth and (now) Cold War in Europe. It is pretty broad.

Our ks3 curriculum is good I reckon. We do all of the usual fly through 1066 to now with underlying themes of power, religion, democracy etc and Empire and Slavery and the Industrial revolution and WW1. We do USA in the 20's and look at how the different countries fared economically and culturally between the two wars and why and how that fed into WW2 and the Holocaust and then the civil rights movements. It's a lot but it's good to have that breadth I think.

Doing Cold War gets us into the after WWII period so it will fit well I think.

Noble do you still remember what happened to the Donner party?

Oh I came on to say I got an email from the Shanghai based school looking for a remote History teacher I mentioned! He was curious why I hadn't applied through Indeed and had sought them out online instead and asked me to send a CV.

I've offered to also send him an example of a recorded remote lesson (stressing they're not great but they may give him an indication of my personality as a teacher).

I don't possess a CV but guess I better make one. Genuinely surprised to get a response. I used my school email to seem a bit more legit and hadn't checked it till today.

There is a job locally being advertised for a Plymouth Brethren school. I've actually been and had a look around before when they were advertising and I'd just come back to the UK but was kind of freaked out. Having said that they're offering more money for a part time TA than I get as a part time top of payscale teacher so....

Honey there is an awesome Ric Burns documentary on the Donner Party. It got me so interested that I twisted XDH's arm to visit Donner Lake many years ago when we were in California.

Piggy, I think that the kids don't really get how terrifying the Cold War was if you lived through it. I teach an Anne Fine book called Goggle-eyes which has a lot about nuclear protests in it. Then I show the kids some of the Protect and Survive information broadcasts on YouTube, pictures of the York cold war bunker, and I've even played them the news broadcast that would have gone out on R4 if we'd been attacked. (Peter Donaldson also on YouTube) They tend to grasp it then . I haven't ever shown Threads.....

It's the one thing the kids always remember because.... cannibalism. Not helped by my crude memory aid of telling them think donner kebab I still remember to this day that the treaty with Greece was Lasagne because in a last minute shit I better revise something I came up with strategies to remember different treaties and that one was 'greasy lasagne'.

Thanks for resource tips SV

New music stuff is a nice idea, but feels like it jumps around a lot. Not sure what s gained by having odd pieces dotted around year groups rather than connecting them into units of work somehow.

Noble do you still remember what happened to the Donner party?

My memory said they left too late and got stuck in snow in the mountains and ended up eating each other. The Wikipedia page goes into far more detail, I think we must have only briefly covered it because in my head it was their fault.

If anyone wants to read a brilliant (fictional) book from the same time period, The Emigrants by Vilhelm Moberg is about Swedish people who decide to emigrate to the US to escape starvation, their boat journey and arrival. It’s like a v gritty Little House on the Prairie. Having ancestors who left Ireland on the coffin ships it really illustrated why people would make those awful decisions in the hope of a better life.