The Sixty-Sixth Republic - Who will be the medal winners on Results Day? Grade inflation predicted again

[Staffholidayclubrep]

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.

Good questions @HSHorror.

Yes noble, and there’s been other reporting assuming 10% of the whole school - DT, was it?

The more important q is why does the gp not want his kids to get covid- or is it to protect the adults?

He doesn't want his kids to get covid. Seems reasonable.

We had IWB at the last place I worked. Bloody awful things. Forever needed realignment, no one could write on them properly with the daft pens and I found them very inflexible. As a Physics teacher, I often want to model a process/my thinking/demonstrate changing strategy during a problem and it was difficult on an IWB.

Thankfully, current school has whiteboards and projectors. They are slowly replacing projectors with TV screens but we managed to convince the premesis manager that we also needed ordinary whiteboards and he obliged

My current IWB is very sensitive to random air movements / dust.

This proved very exciting last year, when the wind blowing in through the open door, often laden with pollen, leaves and other debris from the trees outside, blew directly across the face of the board.....

Those bloody interactive pens are hopeless. They need realigning every few minutes and even then they are apt to randomly jump sideways. It's impossible to write neatly with them.
I tend to type directly onto the screen, having downloaded a handwriting font that matches our school's style.

Mind you, I will dream fondly of such things once I'm trying to teach out on the playground this coming November.

Those TV screens are bloody awful too. They are tiny and shit. Can only assume not designed by a teacher.

Mind you, I will dream fondly of such things once I'm trying to teach out on the playground this coming November.

The kids don’t like that I can type and still look at them.
Touch typing is apparently magic.

Sort of touch typing (I can't actually touch type properly but can do quite a bit without looking) and being able to read student work upsidedown are both abilities that students view as magical powers in my classes.

I've just had a tv screen thing installed in my classroom. I've very underwhelmed. Awful to write on.

Is it really small? The one I had to use was so narrow from top to bottom that you couldn’t project a question small enough that you had space underneath to write in, but big enough that they could actually read the question. Why is fancy new technology actually worse than the old stuff?

I have got a touch screen in my classroom that is like something off Star Trek. It didn't come with instructions though, and even YouTube couldn't help because the serial number for the screen is on the back of it which means taking it off the wall.
Sometimes I only have to look at it and the Ppt advances. Other times I'm bashing it with my fist and nothing happens.

It is quite small and strangely enough it's been put on the wall really low down so if the children are following exercise activities (as we often do during wet play) the ones at the front block the ones at the back!

I miss OHPs.

We still have an OHP in our dept office. Only two of us know how it works because the others are all children!

I've got a filing cabinet which still has some favourite acetates in it.

Was about to ask if anyone remembers the old banda machine?

@CallmeHendricks

Was about to ask if anyone remembers the old banda machine?

Yes! We had one in my NQT school. We were forbidden to use it - that was the technician's job!

Was that the machine that printed everything in purple? I used to have a 'job' of turning that handle during MFL lessons to prep the teachers sheets.

Ooh, Banda-yes! Was that the one that had a nice smell?!

You had to hand-write your worksheet onto the A4 "special" paper, manage to secure it into a slit on a weird drum, press a special button numerous times to get ink to pump through something-or-other and then turn a handle a gazillion times to get copies.
Invariably, you ended getting the ink on your best work clothes.

And Risographs. They smelled lovely too.

Our German teacher used to give her OHP acetate roll to a favoured pupil to take home to clean once she had written all the way through as a special treat.

I really liked my OHP sheets. I have an OHP lens somewhere that I saved from a dead OHP. It’s enormous!

Banda machine in action: