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.

I’m going to go against the grain here and say we LOVE iwbs in my dept. I love writing on them and then being able to go back to it later on in the lesson. Have loads of matching/grouping/reveal answer things on there. My absolute fav is a game where they put a number into a ‘machine’ and it spits out a new number and they have to work out the rule. Labour of love to make and I add a new one each year so have loads now 🤣

Everyone else in my dept likes rows but I like groups.

Agree with @noblegiraffe that no-one else in the school writes on boards. The rooms are crazy - how the bloody hell anyone has ever modelled anything I’ll never know! We’ve now run a whole INSET on it 🤣

It was carbon paper you had to write on, then apply one of the layers to the drum of the banda. It had to be filled with a spirit to make the copies.
I was on 2nd year teaching practice in 94 and we slowly students weren't allowed to use the photocopier, only the bands. Then I the following year that was all the small school I was in had.

I miss our IWB. V useful in primary. All of them swept away in an instant the second the new (Apple mad) ht arrived and secured funding.

Replaced with apple tv boxes and TVs

Apparently we have more money again specifically for tech and will have TVs we can again write directly on.

Good. There have been a few times I've directly written on my screen with whiteboard pen when it was the beat thief to do...much to the amusement of my class.

It elicits the same sort of gasp you get when you apply paint or ink directly to a table for using printing rollers with without putting g down newspaper.

Not that newspaper is easily sourced anymore for art and craft tasks.

... unless you’re in secondary and have a library that takes a range of dailies and the local weekly. Then the Expressive Arts Curriculum Asst and the Librarians are on very good terms!

We can't afford newspapers in our library. Our budget is pitiful.

MrsH

God, I remember the Banda machine. As I remember, it was the nice smell, i.e the fumes form the chemicals that got it banned in schools eventually.

Along the line of MrsH, newspapers have been reduced in our library, down to one from three. It's a tax on knowledge. Shameful.

Everyone else in my dept likes rows but I like groups

But you're a maths teacher, MrsHP!

One of my colleagues decided to go with groups. She taught top set GCSE and some other nice groups. I had to teach in her room with 9 set Z. It was grisly.

The next year she went back to rows.

Merry Christmas, everyone! We are getting C02 Monitors from the government.

This will tell us what we already know, which is that ventilation in classrooms is balls.

www.tes.com/news/covid-dfe-plan-ps25m-classroom-co2-monitors-schools

Maybe by Xmas 2022 we'll get some money to fix my blinds.

Incidentally, it looks like the C02 monitor announcement was embargoed as both Schoolsweek and TES published their stories at 1 minute past midnight.

DfE not wanting to be accused of making announcements on a Friday night again?

One device per 2 classrooms? Another Chocolate Teapot measure from them there.
I’ve got a C02 monitor in both downstairs rooms with gas fires and one upstairs in the room where the boiler is. I didn’t know I could save some money and just have one floating vaguely between them and still feel safe…..

@JanglyBeads

... unless you’re in secondary and have a library that takes a range of dailies and the local weekly. Then the Expressive Arts Curriculum Asst and the Librarians are on very good terms!

You take the local paper, too? Who reads it? You must have a healthy budget.

Re the CO2 monitors, though, what's the point in telling us ventilation is poor (we already know that) without any money to do anything about it. We can't open windows further than we already do. We can't magic up new windows or doors.

I already have a co2 monitor. With a large class in a small space it goes off by about 10 every day. And by about 11 with the fan on.

@DanglingMod

Re the CO2 monitors, though, what's the point in telling us ventilation is poor (we already know that) without any money to do anything about it. We can't open windows further than we already do. We can't magic up new windows or doors.

It suggests you only open the window when it alerts you. By which time you will have been breathing in a fair amount of C02. And Covid. Who is going to have time to nip next door and ask to borrow their monitor anyway?

Great! So I'll be sitting in my classroom on a rainy day, with the windows that barely open and know the quality of the air is poor and we're likely to be spreading covid. Oh and there's nothing I can do about it!

Oh, well, I'm likely to have all the windows already as open as they go (one inch) all year anyway. Menopause.

We already have CO2 monitors in classrooms. There’s a button ont hen that the kids can press that resets them back to green without us doing anything so they’re useless.

Genuine question.

How do I deal best with the 'I don't want to do this anymore' thing?

Do I go part time?
Different school first?
Try and take a year out doing a McJob so I've got time to think about options?

My dread about going back has already started, and I'm not back until 1st. That's a huge chunk of holiday to waste on dread.

I think it depends on what the reason for the dread is, Rule

If workload then part time
If shitty school policies/terrible SLT (not you!) then different school
If covid/hate being in the classroom then McJob

Obviously it’s not as simple as that, but trying to identify what the problem with your job is will help.

I'm sorry you feel that way @RuleWithAWoodenFoot.

I understand about the anxiety. It's started for me too. Not sleeping, feeling like I'm quiet all the time.

Would part time be a possibility?

I always say different school first. Sometimes it cements that the job isn't one you enjoy, and sometimes it makes you realise it was just that school.

I've started the school dreams. Luckily they've been ridiculous ones so far.

I've said I'd like to go part time, but also recognise that it's a bad year to judge anything on. I've not had a good first 2 years at my current school, but I was miserable at my last school too. Probably for 4 out of the 7 years I was there. Schools are very different, I was DH there, so different things that made the job horrible.

I also recommend stepping back from management if it's a possibility as well. Made such a difference for me.

I've been looking for alternative jobs all year, but nothing has come up. Right now (I know not a good time to be looking), there are no jobs at all.

I’ve been looking at jobs too. I don’t think I even want to work in a school any more though. I’m dreading this year, budget is as tight as it’s ever been, O is looming and we are one of the few non-academies left standing so it wouldn’t take much for the. To ‘find’ something wrong which will cause us to fall to the dark side despite us being a Good school with a brilliant head .

Has any more been said about Catch Up or extended school days or teaching hours, or has that all gone very quiet??