The Fifty-Eight Republic - Do no masks mean that Sports Day will take place?

[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

Imo cbt is a better mental illness prevention tool than a fix. Kids need to learn the basics of things like how their thoughts effect them, what kind of framework in one's life is needed to maintain mental health, what is anxiety and how do you work with it etc. It doesn't need pathologising (obviously not talking about mental illness here just general mental health housekeeping) but normalising I think.

Trouble is time! I'd happily do it voluntarily and build up a programme and resources and get feedback - could feed into some postgrad study - but I'm not sure they'd let me.

I’m going to talk to the teacher who runs our student mental health ambassadors and mention if any of them would like to train in CBT techniques that they could teach to other pupils. Might be more effective than just releasing a new PowerPoint to read out in form time every month.

@JanFebAnyMonth

Have started a thread on Covid board about the masks tweet, thought it would save noble’s time and energy! People should know .

Thank you.

It has just occurred to me I don't need the schools permission or to do it for them for free - it's something I could run privately in a village hall or whatever as an 8 week course with max ten kids and charge for it.

I do have a qualification in Counselling and various other bits of training I've done btw as well as the teaching experience. Do you think anyone would actually pay for that?

Thanks for the reassurance ladies, I just know im up against nqts who have the time and energy to produce some bloody reenactment of the execution of Charles I complete or some such malarkey.

Regarding mental health, i think at my current school the pshe curriculum doest help with the little we could do to help, there's no sense of it being planned out or thought put into what happens when, and they get two extended form sessions a week which is rather random.
Another one of my bugbears is poor sex education, don't get me started on that one!
to mrs HP, i hope you don't think this is a trite suggestion but have you considered your dd starting a new low pressure hobby. As a teen I loved that if I was stressed about school i had a whole different realm to be a different me with different friends.

petition.parliament.uk/signatures/112766111/signed

Petition for £400 bonus for exam marking.

wine that's an excellent suggestion about a low pressure hobby. Dd2 goes to guides when it's on, but they've been on zoom for the past year and she can't cope with being on camera. I hope they start up again in September so she's got that outlet. Currently the only thing she does is hang around with her school friends at the park, which I don't think is quite structured enough. We're getting a puppy on Friday, so dog training is going to be a shared hobby for at least a year I think. Dd1 used to join every club going for a while (not the sporty ones). She ended up with an orchestra/band most evenings between school ones and the city youth/junior ones. That was excellent as a low pressure club, as she was always allowed to play at whichever level she thought she could cope with, and they even lent her a piccolo to try which was fun but earsplitting

@DreamingofBrie Thank you for the long division tips - DD picked it up so quickly!

[quote motherrunner]@DreamingofBrie Thank you for the long division tips - DD picked it up so quickly![/quote]
That's great, motherrunner! I do like to link the division sign to a fraction line whenever I can. Looking forward to trying Phlebas's dividing by factors too next time I'm teaching it.

@winewolfhowls

Ok, so I'm having a wobble. I have an interview this coming week at somewhere posh and serious in tone. I have planned my lesson but it seems a bit.... Not exciting? Im confident it is a good lesson, but is it enough without some type of wow factor. Just too bloody tired for any wow at the moment.

I did my NQT at an independent. My interview lesson was fairly solid and dependable - starter, bit of paired work, bit of teaching, bit of independent work, walking round room and checking. Things my interviewer said made a difference included knowing the children's names (gave them all a bit of card and asked them to put their names on them, gameshow style). He also mentioned non- verbal gestures, so small signal to a child to put their hand down whilst I was teaching, then come back to him at an appropriate time.

As a team we've we've a year trying to build resilience because the children don't know how to deal if something is difficult or new. They panicked and refused to even try, now they give it a good go and then ask.

Feel like lots of children have lost skills in being resilient, being worried (different to anxious), being bored as we don't let them experience them.

*As a team, we have spent this year

Serious case of butter fingers there.

Parents would bite yr hand off for those classes honey

New income stream??
You’d maybe need to inform school though (?)

I totally agree with your post Chloe sometimes life is stressful, a bit shit and heaven forbid, boring.

Thanks @winewolfhowls she does a few clubs she loves outside school which I think are great for her and don’t involve people from school.

When we watch interview lessons I’m much more looking at how the teacher interacts with the students, their tone, classroom presence more than the content. Of course if the lesson is diabolical/off the charts shit we’d notice that. I like to listen to how they respond to questions asked by students, how they speak to students/what they ask the students when they are working.

wine my interview lesson at my current school was a bit of a disaster because I'd assumed they would do something the same way my school did, and the kids had no idea of my method at all. When they offered me the job they said they were particularly impressed that I'd gone off script from my lesson plan and noticed weaknesses that would stop them accessing the main content. So I agree that it's the relationships with the kids and reacting to them in the lesson that's more important than a wow lesson. Day to day, you have to interact and respond to children all day every day, you can't possibly have a wow moment in every lesson though.

wine

Whenever I’ve interviewed the good feedback I get is that I use the kids names (I ask them to write their name on some cardboard and put it in front of them). I’m good with names and during the interview I always feedback how I thought each kid got on, not all of them but dropping a few names seems to impress.

They also like that I move round the room a lot working with the kids. I’d agree with others, how you get on with the kids seems to matter the most. Very best of luck.

Very best of luck,

I’m off to the gym but might use you as a sounding board later if you don’t mind jan. I think the idea could have legs.

I think the idea could have legs too honey. I would definitely pay for something like that for my dd2 if it was available. As a preventative for someone who is currently/naturally a worrier but could head into full blown anxiety if we aren't careful, it sounds great!!

I had to stay when dc1 started rainbows at 6. She's an odd one in that she seems fine socially but then gets strange when going to parties/new places.
Dc2 went in ok to rainbows at 5.3yo which was great because

• they had masks on
• she had only started school a few weeks earlier
• she knew almost none of the kids.

Possibly though dc1 is more of a worrier (but she was ok before sarting school at 4yo so maybe the stress of that knocked confidence etc.)
You can tell dc2 enjoys being one of the bigger/older/faster ones.

honey, if you play it right you get some in school (maybe not yr school) work out of it too, just thinking about a provider our place has used to help students and parents. She’s a local mum!

@MrsHamlet

Our well-being area is exactly the same. "Tilly-Floss had anxiety so she's going to come up any time she feels stressed about her TAGS and do some mindfulness colouring." Perhaps she would be less anxious about her exams if she was in lessons learning how to do well in them? I'm not unsympathetic to anyone who is struggling but I think we've gone too far with trying to protect kids from normal feelings of anxiety. Of course you're anxious about exams. That's normal.

This is essentially the conversation I heard amongst the kids on the bus the other day. The kids absolutely have been paying attention to the stuff about how damaged they are going to be by the pandemic and are playing it for all it’s worth. They know that MH issues will allow to to get out of lessons to go sit in student support services. I’m not sure this well meaning ‘support’ is at all useful to the ones who really are suffering.

I was really pissed off when ds was in year 7 and pastoral were talking to him about depression because he was tearful and down sometimes - he'd just found out my dad had prostate cancer and it was all still up in the air as to whether it had spread to bones and lymph nodes or not. Being upset, worried and having difficulty concentrating is a completely natural response to that not an illness.

I had to subtly get them to back off in the end and point out it was entirely natural to be upset when a close family member has cancer. His peers seemed to go through a competitive phase of top trumps on who has the biggest problem or is the most fucked up. That passed thankfully.

I'm trying to think of what I could call these courses of workshops. I'm thinking doing them in blocks of 5 weeks would be good as they fit into term time easily and no one should be going on holiday. I think year 5 and 6 would be a good age to get them and do basic stuff. Teenagers a bit different.

A colleague's wife died after a long time with bowel cancer a fortnight ago. His son is in year 7 and I had to take him to well-being.

He's not depressed. He's upset because his mum died and he feels guilty that he's a bit relieved.
He's getting counselling outside school but there's a lot of head tilting going on up there. Like many teens, he's also a little bit savvy about which lessons he goes to well-being!!

What we're desperate for is some staff well-being something. It's a tick box inset, and a buffet at the end of the year. Meanwhile I have a colleague who self harms in the loo (which SLT know about) and I don't know how to help.