The Fifty Seventh Republic - the joy of bank holiday marking

[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

Well piggy, what do you expect from such an enemy of education and general decency on MN!

She hasn’t started any trollish threads recently, what else has she got to do with her time - it’s not as if secondary teachers have much to do at the moment, is it?!

(Actually she kindly PM’d me to check I knew she was joking... lest anyone thinks I’m now actually being quite rude to her!)

No one thought you were being rude Jan I love that you had to clarify though.

I think the generally affectionate banter is obvious to any regulars on the thread. You can be as rude as you like to each other, lol

There are a lot of astonishingly affluent people on MN for sure.

Present company excepted but Mumsnet is really boring now! I'm having a particularly knackered and bored weekend spent mostly in bed and I have regularly scanned the active page looking for something interesting and failed to find anything.

I only really got drawn back to Mumsnet due to covid and looking to see what was being discussed and then finding teachers and staying. Is it just me? Was it ever interesting or was I just at a different stage of my life? I also can't seem to find 'in the news' - does that board not exist now?

Yes piggy there are. Is it weird though that even if I was massively affluent I wouldn't give, and would be embarrassed to say I gave, hundreds of pounds a month to a teenager? I may just be very working class and very squeamish about the idea of giving money no sense of value.

Presumably they all assume their children will be high achievers and earners because the amounts they're giving them as children would make working in a low paid job and having to make ends meet feel like a slap in the face. Like how would a young person be motivated to take work and pay bills that sees them worse off than when they were 13? Maybe it's me and I have issues with money.

Someone once got banned for being affectionately rude to me...fair warning

No, it's not just you.

I have actually never given mine pocket money. But, then they don't buy anything. They are very unmaterialistic. If they want a book or something, I buy it. If they need clothes etc I buy them. Treats/ expensive stuff : use birthday money.

I am also quite dispirited by all the kids at my school who have jobs and then their parents cut them off financially. They don't have textbooks because they can't afford them and their (well off) parents make them pay for everything.

I agree MN has been dull. Covid at least made it lively. Now the whole covid board is about vaccines.

She hasn’t started any trollish threads recently

Low iron levels....

Although which side your draining board goes on was more contentious than I thought.

We have a student who is being home edded. She left us in year 9 because she was being bullied because of her parents' wealth (she thought that kids telling her not to be such a bloody show off was bullying)
She came back onto roll at the start of this year when they realised she'd possibly not get any GCSEs but has now left again because the teachers were bullying her by making her do assessments AND ITS NOT FAIR.
They are loaded. She used to mock kids on non uniform days, and for not having the latest stuff.
She's been given a job with daddy so she'll never need to get any qualifications.

I joined mn a decade and a half ago or more when ds was small for the SEN boards, followed and mostly stuck to primary and secondary education boards thereafter and never really noticed the Staffroom for years.

I read lots of and "enjoyed" some of the Brexit/political threads, but otherwise stick to Books, Baby Names, a bit of Style & Beauty/Property and the odd genuinely funny classic thread.

Oh I love the ones who ‘don’t need maths because I’m going to work with my dad’

We’ve got some v wealthy kids and some kids who stay off school on non-uniform day.

I've got the same issues with giving that much money to teenagers honey, it's definitely not just you. When I was a teenager I just made do with not much money, until I got my first job at 15 (£2.20 an hour, 8 hours on a Saturday in a butchers shop deli counter). I always considered us pretty middle class, but the money just wasn't there for frivolous things. Then when dd1 was young I was a single mum on benefits for a year, then a student for another 4 years. I'm still not used to having ANY disposable income, so there's no way I was ever going to give that much to a teenager.

I used to mainly hang out (prolifically start threads) on Secondary Education. It was at its most fun when Theresa May announced the return of grammar schools but was also pretty busy when the new GCSEs were coming in.

Similar piggy - ds has never had pocket money and I buy what he needs and expensive stuff comes from birthday and Christmas money.

I've recently started paying for him to go to the gym with his friend and he goes to a much nicer gym than I can afford because his friend's mum could add him to her membership for £25 per month which I'm happy to pay because it's something healthy and constructive to do with his time.

He doesn't 'go to town' or out for meals or the cinema with friends. He goes out riding his bike or playing basketball or to the gym. He has fortunately, thank the fairies, grown out of the all clothes must be nike stage and I buy a certain amount of snack stuff in with the weekly shop.

I do hope he'll want to get a part time job when he's a bit older and experience earning his own money but I'd see that as his money not money he had to spend on books - that's really odd parenting!

Yes I agree it’s difficult to find anything interesting on here at the moment.

I only have young dc so may be horribly out of touch but there's not a chance I'd be giving my teens more than a tenner a week. I'd also keep tabs on what they were spending it on.

We have some MC kids but mostly they're not totally minted. About a third are v deprived, a third just about managing and a third with decent disposable income. Very rare to have extremely wealthy parents though. Kids with lots of stuff/phones tend to be involved with county lines.

I could have guessed who was going to be behind the mindfulness is racist thread. There seems to be a thread like that every other day.

I don’t know how young you have to be to not know about what Barclays meant to left wingers, certainly in the 80s......

I know Barclays didn’t have a stall in our freshers week, despite our uni having a student con club (which was rare outside of oxbridge back then).

I still get a frisson of naughtiness when I buy Cape apples or grapes - I’m sure my mum boycotts them to this day.

Cheers mrsad
I've just finished marking so I'm about to leave the house for the first time since Friday

Thank you all for your sweet words on Thursday, I have slept a lot, caught up with housework and done a jigsaw puzzle - bring on the moderation!
I'm quite glad I missed the political conversation as I'm disgustingly ignorant when it comes to most things political 😳

I used to give dd1 £30 a week to cover school lunches, bus fares and pocket money. I was budgeting £2.50 a day on lunch and £1 a day on bus fares (a child weekly saver ticket used to cost £5 a week). She generally bought a cheaper lunch and walked to school (about 2 miles, but pretty much the only exercise she got), so she could keep the money. I was ok with that,I was still within my budget.

@MrsHamlet

Cheers mrsad I've just finished marking so I'm about to leave the house for the first time since Friday

Omg, your workload sounds absolutely manic!! You need some downtime at the weekend, that is not sustainable.