The Fifty Ninth Republic - May Half Term beckons

[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 for school staff to let off steam.

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. Finally, upload your covid test results twice a week on Wednesdays and Sundays.

Oh, and also , as discussed , do a lot of marking. the elephant in the room is that excellent written feedback is actually the most effective feedback - especially with older students in literacy subjects- if it is detailed, thorough and personalised in terms of comments and targets to improve. Class sizes are what prevents it.

It’s so important to do what works for you and the pupils you teach.
Too many times I think perfectly good methods get forced on ‘everyone’ when it doesn’t work for everyone in the same way and can be why teachers get sick of the next forced on fad or the SLT scrutiny and demands that work for them but not the pupil or teacher.

Yes, that exactly!

Green pens/ red pens/ feedback stamps blah blah blah.

I once tried the sit down individually with all of them to discuss work approach for sixth form. Didn't work. They didn't listen or absorb.

Fucking green pens

Question of the day : all this stitching Hancock up like a kipper thing... can't Cummings go for Gav too??

If he can find him...

But what has Gav actually done to be stitched up with? Fuck all seems to have been a good policy for him. Can't get stitched up if you've just been sitting with your feet up for months.

True but there was the not closing then closing schools in Jan...

@Piggywaspushed

Oh, and also , as discussed , do a lot of marking. the elephant in the room is that excellent written feedback is actually the most effective feedback - especially with older students in literacy subjects- if it is detailed, thorough and personalised in terms of comments and targets to improve. Class sizes are what prevents it.

Yep it is and therefore that's what our school have gone for. It is huge amounts of work with large groups in an essay subject though. Even at ks3 we do a minimum of 10 quality marked assessments with each year group which are all essays and marked with SWANs (strengths, weaknesses, attainment ((grade)) and next steps). It takes way too long plus it all has to be recorded on the system as well as in their books.

Maths would do double the amount of marking points (fortnightly rather than 4 weekly) but presumably some of that is tick or cross and a score rather than having to read essays. I wish I could talk our hod into streamlining it a bit. Some units have two qmas in one half term with just a couple of weeks between them. I think we should do one essay type one per half term and then one knowledge based one word answer type test per term with a numerical score.

I sometimes end up with 3 sets of year 7 essays and 3 sets of year 8 essays to mark and do swans for at the same time. Way more work than tick and flick and a close mark of one lesson or a homework. Homework just doesn't get marked now with the qma system which makes it even more pointless.

Maths would have half the number of groups too I guess. On a 0.4 contract this year I lead on 6 groups so 12 sets of essays to mark per half term often. I quite miss tick and flick with comments here and there and a target and a stamp or two.

On a 7-day snap lockdown in Victoria. Like the fierce on last year but no curfew:
Masks everywhere and all the time outside your house.
Primary and secondary closed - so back to remote
5K limit for travel: while most of my 5K is in the sea, it still covers all essentials.
Only out for food, compassionate, medical, essential work
All shops except chemists, supermarkets closed. Oh, alcohol is food.
2 hours exercise with one companion.

And breathe.

I teach 11 groups but am only the lead, and therefore responsible for marking, on 6.

I actually have a pile of year 7 books beside my bed now to crack on with marking essays in. I've been putting it off repeatedly but it'll be noticed the marks aren't on the system soon. Two sets to do.

Morning btw. Got carried away with the marking talk.

We just don't have any rules about marking in my schools. It's one of the things I do like about the place!

Maths feedback is mostly instantaneous - read out the answers and they know if they’ve done well. It drives me mad when I observe a lesson and the teacher runs out of time to go through the answers. If they don’t know whether they’ve got it right, they might as well have not done it.

The exit tickets are to inform the teacher what needs revisiting or extending.

We did have one dreadful period in maths when the marking was meant to be ‘this piece is level 7, to reach level 8 you need to...’

Which in maths was ‘this Pythagoras work is level 7, to reach level 8 you need me to teach you trig... but you got it all wrong so you’re a level 0’

Blanket marking policies are crap. What works for maths won’t work for English.

@Piggywaspushed

Question of the day : all this stitching Hancock up like a kipper thing... can't Cummings go for Gav too??

Cummings said ‘we didn’t fire Hancock because we needed to keep him to fire when there was an inquiry’ then proceeded to spend the time slating Hancock exactly as planned and that he said they would do and people are going ‘god, Hancock needs to go doesn’t he?’. As planned.

Oh Echt that sounds hard

No marking policies here either

Hi everyone, been popping on to read the thread. Glad to hear about your room swap, DrMadeleine and I hope your lockdown passes without incident echt.

I'm currently eating cookies with a cup of tea in bed, having given up on marking for the time being. I also loathe marking, don't mind marking assessments but I hate marking classwork/homework with a passion. Lower down the school I read out the answers in class then check quickly in books but trying to decipher A-level working can take so long.

Dh had a face to face meeting with senior pastoral team re. ds yesterday. Without going too much into it, ds was targeted by a big group and has really struggled with being in school since. It's been awful and neither of us is satisfied that the matter has been dealt with. Dh has held firm advocating for ds, he has made it clear how unhappy he is with the school's handling of the situation.

Sorry to hear that Brie but glad you're dh is handling it well. It is tricky when you work in the same school. I'm still really pissed off that ds who had had good marks all through ks3 in science got dumped in set 3 - questioned it at the time and never got a satisfactory response, then questioned again when I saw, as predicted, his marks had plummeted and that he was getting behaviour points (could have predicted that as well).

He's stuck in a set with kids 2 flight paths below him and it has totally put him off bothering with Science. If I didn't work there, and if one of his teachers (the one who ignored all emails plus ignored me asking him not to talk to me about ds when I was in the middle of a work day but to treat me like any other parent - but none of them wanted to commit to writing the dodgy approach they'd taken to setting) wasn't slt who can and often does give me a ridiculously crap timetable, I would have advocated for more assertively.

I think they setted based on how much of last summer's lockdown work they did The Science work set was appalling shite so we did workbooks and stuff instead as I had lots of resources. I think they basically used it as an opportunity to set by parental input rather than ability and proven track record on assessments.

I'm sorry for your ds too, Honey. I couldn't have got this far advocating for ds on my own. The school and dh have kept me well away from it and I don't think I would have been able to argue so calmly in any case.

Both my ds effort grades were significantly down on where they normally are, when we were in lockdown. For youngest ds who is in primary, he had to do an awful lot of work on his own, so I think determining anything on lockdown is a poor way of doing it - we've discounted completely any assessments that took place remotely.

For us now, we need to consider next steps. I'm minded to raise a formal complaint to the school and governors and will talk to dh about it. Otherwise it will all be brushed under the carpet and there will be no record of it next year.

Thank you. Hope things work out with you and your ds - so glad your husband is tackling it.

I braved going out on the bike. Just round the village and country roads but it has broken the ice. Next stop is busier roads and going to the gym.

@JanFebAnyMonth

Aw, lovely Riga! Did you tailor them to personalities?

I absolutely did while being polite there were others that may have fit better.

I did a proper test last Saturday when I first started feeling crap. Wanted to see my parents on Sunday.

Feel loads better today, swam this morning even.

Kids are feral (I was on PPA, but spent various bits of time running up and down dealing with issues - have done 10,000 steps on a day I should have been sat down all day!), but only 5 and a half hours left.

We also do whole class marking for writing.

We can't get into school at all over the summer - we've got one inset in September to sort things out. Eeek!

It was my last lesson with one year 11 class and my year 13s. We played the pirate game and ate cake. I got a bit emotional .

Kids are feral (I was on PPA, but spent various bits of time running up and down dealing with issues - have done 10,000 steps on a day I should have been sat down all day!), but only 5 and a half hours left

Oh no rule you should have been resting at home getting well.

I too hate marking class books. Marking tests, I’m fine with and can really see the point. But marking class work? Nope, Ihave very little interest.

I don't mind marking. I spend very little time on it - maybe 30 minutes a day - I read writing, noting any similar issues across the class, complete my marking sheet, sometimes put some actual marks in a child's book. Mostly WCF. I mark maths in the lesson, always. I usually mark one other set of work a day - this week it's been a DT response thing, an answer to a history question, independent work on a reading comp.