Broom cupboard 4 - soon be time to think about heating this place

[TheHoneyBadger]

Will post this on the end of the other thread too but I have just found this:

If you are identified as a contact and asked to self-isolate by NHS Test and Trace, including by the NHS COVID-19 app you may be entitled to a payment of £500 from your local authority under the Test and Trace Support Payment scheme. If you are the parent or guardian of a child who has been told to self-isolate you may also be entitled to this payment.

^Presumably that is all of the 'thought' that has gone into the situation I've been talking about. Still doesn't tell us if we would be seen as taking unauthorised leave or able to work from home or anything - need union specific advice on that.

Take care Atta (feel we know you well enough already - via MrsH - to shorten yr UN!)
Whatever my DS has got it’s not a normal cold. But also different from when I believe he and I had Covid in Mar 2020. Who knows..... they said 24 hrs for results at the test centre yesterday.

Just popping in to say DD1 positive LF and PCR done this morning. Her secondary school is rife with it and PHE are useless (masks are back) School doing what they can and this was inevitable. So annoyed at government right now.

I've just read a post on Twitter saying "I've eaten 4 cherry bakewells and only been marking for 40 minutes".

Apart from test marking (and presumably secondary exams are chunkier), does anyone still mark for hours and hours anymore?

I mark my maths class work during the lesson, I then spend around 10 - 15 mins a day during break or lunch prepping same day intervention for those who need it, or sorting out scaffold for the next lesson. I mark writing books in around 20 mins - do whole class feedback on this the next day before they edit etc. I mark their edits/talk to individuals who need it during this part of the session. No other subjects need marking in any depth - as I'm going through a pile (expecting it to take 10 mins max), as soon as there are 3 kids with the same 'issue', I put the whole lot aside and start the next lesson with that point and get the ch to correct it. I then mark that during the lesson.

Most of my kids can't read my (perfect cursive!) writing anyway, so no point in giving written feedback.

Is that not what we've been trying to move to for years? I never, EVER take any marking home. I spend any time working outside of lesson hours+ around 30 mins, on scaffolding for SEND/those who haven't quite got it. Admittedly this takes hours a week, especially for kids who don't really belong in mainstream by this point, but that's inclusion for you - and probably a better use of my time than marking.

I generally think I’m quite quick / pragmatic at marking. Definitely no deep marking here. But I’m a secondary English teacher and seem to have set long essays for all of my classes this week. Stupid timing!

Secondary so maybe different - yes I spend hours marking. Had 3 sets of year 7 mini assessments to mark this week and the marking format we have to follow means that we technically only have to write numbers beside S W A Ns (strengths, weaknesses, assessment ((ie grade)) and next steps) so long as someone has got there first and created a SWANs template yet it takes ages first to mark them and secondly to realise you were too mean with the first set so go back and change marks to sort of self moderate. We then spend the start of the next lesson explaining their marks and getting them to do their next steps in green pen eg. include a second inference, include a quote to support your inference, explain.....

I spent less time marking in my early career when it was down to me how I did it and I could take the common sense of approach of right, seems like no one really understood how to use a quote to support their inference so I'll write off that piece of work, do some whole class feedback and input so and then get them to do a similar piece of work to see if that's stuck.

I suppose I'm a bit resentful of the lack of trust in individual teachers. I understand that some teachers can't be trusted with that but feel like they should address those bloody teachers rather than collective punishment.

Hi everyone, popping in to say hello (and avoiding marking an A-level Applied Maths paper).

Attagirl, hope you're feeling better soon. And sympathies to everyone who has been affected by illness, covid or not, since we returned to school. My dc have been rotten and dd can't shift her cough, but still testing negative on LFT (were PCRd a few weeks ago).

I hate marking - when I mark work which hasn't been marked by the kids in class themselves, it takes me hours and hours. For A-level I normally try to have a go at the homework itself, so I can figure out what the heck some of my pupils have been doing! But I know I'm not efficient.

But I’m a secondary English teacher and seem to have set long essays for all of my classes this week
I told all three of my y14 classes to take the weekend off because I was 🤣

Y13. No y14 this year!

I've also worked out that I'm better off to come home on Friday and quickly finish anything that I need to do over the weekend. I'm in the work mindset still, and even if it takes me until 8pm, it's done. I have to sit by a swimming pool for 45 mins on a Friday evening anyway, so that's a bit of time I can spend sending stuff through to the printer for Monday.

Allowed me to spend all day yesterday being a child taxi, then go to a beer festival and get drunk... and have a hangover on the sofa all day today when I should be painting a plastered room white

Yeah I'm staying late at school this year Rule (14yo so no problems with childcare) exactly so I can switch off at weekends. I'm only part time though so you would hope that with staying late and occasionally going in on a day off that I could have my weekends free!

I'm definitely getting more efficient and less perfectionist. I used to feel like I had to personally make up for the fact that assessments were shit or expected too much of them and assumed understanding that we hadn't actually taught. That's wearing off. It is what it is. If the hod insists on putting in a poorly thought out assessment that they haven't yet got the skills to complete or which doesn't actually accommodate them being able to achieve higher marks then what can I do?

I'm not quite as blase as I'm making out and I do still do too much work but I am getting better lol

I've decided that if I can't do all my classroom work during the school day (+ a couple of hours on Friday evening), then it doesn't need doing. Don't mind doing my TLR work in the evenings, but I get a day a fortnight out of class for that too, so as long as their are no emergencies on that day, I can get through most of it.

I get in to school around 7.45 (kids in at 8.30), and have to leave at 4.45 for childcare pick up. Kids leave at 3.15. I get an hour and a quarter during the school day. So that's over 3 hours non-contact time during my working day - if that's not enough to get the job done, then the job needs to change. Going to try, try TRY to keep with it this year.

Thing is, one conversation that goes on a bit, or a behaviour issue that I have to deal with during PPA/MT/break/lunch, then everything goes to shit.

Thing is, one conversation that goes on a bit, or a behaviour issue that I have to deal with during PPA/MT/break/lunch, then everything goes to shit.

And this hits the nail on the head about teacher workload in my opinion - not that we can’t or don’t know how to manage our workload but that our workload goes way beyond what is in our job description most of the time!

iSAGE scientists on twitter pointing out that the govt can hardly claim Covid doesn’t spread in schools when the rates are 10 x higher in school children than in community in some places.
But it’s the buses of course.....

I terms of marking, I teach a subject where I only see Years 7 to 9 once a week and Years 10 to 11 twice a week, so I just don’t have much time to mark/feedback in lesson, self/peer asses in lesson.

I do have to take marking home to provide feedback on improving and to see how they are doing but I do use a method Dylan Wiliam recommended when he came to speak at an old school I was previously at.

It does involve me writing but only in response to what the pupils have assessed whilst they were doing their homework (I give them a target, they write straight after doing the homework how they have met that target and how well they think they have done it and I agree/disagree and set them a new/same target for the next homework and so on.)

I have to say, attainment has hugely improved and pupils no longer find my subject the ‘doss’ subject

Yeah I can't resent the SWANs approach too much because it is to the point and definitely directed at improving. It's once or twice per half term per class (I'm history and we have 3 lessons per fortnight). My HOD tends to say oh it's only a paragraph to mark but that's not what I get - I get full essays from more able students because I honestly don't see how they could hit their targets in a paragraph. The issue seems to be that I give a shit if they're 'on track', 'below' or 'above' their targets at ks3 and mark honestly to the markscheme and this seems to make me a bit of an oddity. I need to either accept doing way more marking and way more planning and input or relax my standards towards what seems to be the norm. I suspect somewhere in the middle will be my way.

HOD once looked at my year 8 ones and was like wow I never get mine to write that much or to that standard. Initial thoughts were well that's a bit worrying and why not but now I'm thinking hmm maybe it's me setting my standards too high and what's presented as meaningful assessment is really showing we've ticked the box and no one is really expecting you to do what it says on the tin.

Bloody teaching.

The trouble is you could always do more, better, more in depth, get them further etc. There's no natural and obvious, "Finished" point.

Marking I avoid like the plague. Live mark in lesson, give an ATL grade to homework (studenta self mark) and I mark one assessment per term. Every mini assessment (twice per half term) students self mark and then I take in to look at for common misconceptions and whole class feedback. The best feedback they get is live during lessons.

I've decided what I want to do with my ks4 this week is less about the need to know x, y and z because it's in the exam etc and more can they actually imagine that? Can they conceive how different life would have been if you didn't know about bacteria or virus' and genuinely thought you were ill because god was punishing you etc. We do so much logical knowledge cramming when the reality of learning is to be able to actually conceptualise and imagine and connect that to your own lived experience.

I've 'got' the curriculum and key ideas and exam criteria, I want to get back to the learning to enrich your mind and your imagination and to really conceive things. You can bet some twat will come in on a learning walk or book scrutiny just when I've got them off imagining how different your interior world and feelings about life would be in the middle ages

I like marking...

DfE has a blogpost explaining that rates in schools reflect community transmission and that they are not drivers of infection.

Not sure these people have ever looked at a graph. So interesting, the bullshit people are willing to peddle.

piggy Covid has addled your brain

@JanglyBeads

iSAGE scientists on twitter pointing out that the govt can hardly claim Covid doesn’t spread in schools when the rates are 10 x higher in school children than in community in some places. But it’s the buses of course.....

DD school rife with it. They all walk to school.....🤷🏻‍♀️

There was a teacher tapp question about which bit of the job you like most and 0% said marking.

Live marking essay style work just isn't happening unfortunately. I'm too busy 'live' scaffolding and elaborating and demonstrating how ideas and facts link together. I may be doing it all wrong but they need so much input to string ideas together and to use basic syntax and structuring of ideas and links. I feel like I'm trying to think out loud for them a lot of time to model how thinking works and how it translates into writing.

The idea of a quiet teacher and busily productive class is lovely but they seem to need an externalised stream of consciousness to help them order their own thoughts and ideas and know how to communicate them. I can see how it would be great to teach the same class through school as you'd hopefully actually see that pay off and be able to step back more and more and take out the scaffolding. You can sort of see it a little bit within a year with a group but to be honest the ability range means actually you're still doing it for half the class even when you've got the other class doing it for themselves.

That must be a nice aspect of primary teaching? Seeing genuine progress and increasing independence as the year goes on and really knowing rather than having to pretend to know from a spreadsheet where every single kid is at and how they've progressed? Come dash my delusions.