The Sixtieth Republic - One half term to go - just need to survive Sports Day and Activities Week!

[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.

There’s a special sort of despairing expression that comes over faces at the mention of Activities Week, first seen in staff when some junior member of SLT announces it with forced enthusiasm and later in students when their form tutors announce it, trying to feign the enthusiasm demonstrated by the infant Assistant Deputy Associate Head of all things tiresome and pointless.

The person who organises the whole school walk is leaving this year. I'm hoping the walk will leave too.

Whole school walk?
Whose effing idea was THAT?!

I love our whole school walk and am sad it was cancelled and presumably is again this July.....

My own DC definitely do not agree!

What do you lot make of EPI’s research? When discussed here haven’t mos Tod you said, no lost learning just lost behaviour?

@MrsHamlet

The person who organises the whole school walk is leaving this year. I'm hoping the walk will leave too.

We only have a walk for year 8, and that's bad enough. They go up one of the easiest hills in the Lake District, and the amount of moaning and complaining is unreal!!! I've done it with them a couple of times, and it's really difficult to keep a group of about 15 kids all together. I want them setted according to walking speed/fitness for the walk, and send the least fit kids up with a headstart and the fittest would still overtake and get a longer lunch at the top. Now I stay at school and organise "crafts" with year 7 for activities day. I've done cross stitch, crochet, card making and candle making with them in the past few years. This year I'm going on one of the year 10 trips, maybe to the water park or the zoo.

Thanks for the new thread staff.

Years ago, before elf n safety, we used to take 60 Yr 5s on a long walk along the South Pembrokeshire Coastal footpath. It was beautiful, but bloody hell, the WHINING!!! Not to mention how close some of them actually got to the cliff edge. 😱

Nowadays we do PGL.

I am not sure if any of us are in the parts of the country where the leaning loss is said to be huge. I haven't seen the actual report but it does annoy me when loss is set against arbitrary standards.

In my head that’s conjuring up nice images of Chalet school type walks. I’m guessing the reality is somewhat different.

We're in the flat bit of the county and part of our walk is by the sea and they still complain!!
The best bit is the free staff icecream

Thanks for the new thread @StaffRepFeistyClub

New planner arrived today. Have spent an hour in the sun with stickers. Yes I am actually 10 🤭

I was going to ask that Piggy. The first thing that jumped out at me was that I can’t see what the ÉPI have assessed against in the Bbc report. Are children in the SW being compared against previous cohorts of children in the SW or a national standard.

I can see how children in the SW might have lost less over the autumn term, because we’ll have had fewer school closures. But i can’t see why there should be a huge variation between regions over a national lockdown unless something else is causing the problem and what’s being measured turns out to be a pre-existing issue that has nothing to do with school closures.

www.nytimes.com/2021/06/04/health/covid-flu-hospitalizations-children.html

This is paywalled unfortunately. But the CDC are saying that while hospitalisation is rare in children, they are three times more likely to be hospitalised with Covid than with flu.

This is the whole shebang if anyone has time!

www.gov.uk/government/publications/pupils-progress-in-the-2020-to-2021-academic-year-interim-report

God I'm tired tonight. 3 weeks to go.

Is anyone else getting deja vu all over again? How did the government let it get to this stage again?! I can't do another lockdown. I will lose my mind.

Oh wow have just had an initial peek and what they’re using is STAR reading and Maths tests - ie Accelerated Reading and the Maths version!!!! 🤮

Fantastic advertising for Renaissance Learning

Honestly Dolly, I’m 35 days away from seeing my mum for the first time since Oct 2019. If we screw this up before then I might break.

Today has been the first day since flights were booked that I’ve had a bit of a wobble over it not happening.

Our Y12s had to walk up a high steep hill on their residential because it was the only place they could get a phone signal. It was a really good residential with loads of benefits for all so naturally they (management) stopped doing it.

To be fair it seems quite a good idea to use the Renaissance data. It’s not the tests I object to, just the enforced reading of a narrowed range of books at a set pace.

I really hope you get to see her Rafa. Apparently Israel had a post-vaccination/lockdown wave too, hopefully this is ours and it does settle.

We're going up to your neck of the woods in the summer, @MrsHamlet.
It'll be heaving with people, but still something to look forward to.
DH has been clamouring to do this trip since we last went in 2008 and this seems the year to do it.
My lasting memory, apart from jumping off the bridge at Ulpha into the river, is going to a slate mine near the Honiston Pass, the wettest place in England. Everywhere was grey, sleeting rain. We hurried inside the mountain, only to find it was raining in there as well. There had been so much precipitation that the rock ceiling was oozing water wherever we walked.
We will be taking our waterproofs this year, and any nice weather will be a bonus.

I used to teach in the school nearest to Ulpha. If the weather was good, we'd lose kids to going to jump in the river rather than be in lessons. I see the appeal.

Fingers and everything crossed that you see your mum, Rafa, what would stop it?

How come you lot all know where each other lives? I am so bad at geography.

"I am so bad at geography."

Well, according to Piggy, it's all Oxbow lakes and colouring in.