Sixty Seventh Republic - under temporary guardianship

[Hercisback]

In the absence of staff and her fabulous thread titles and witty openers here is a 67th thread. The broom cupboard is overflowing so time for another Republic. Hopefully we hear from staff soon.

Stolen from thread 66.
'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.'

We've always marked as we also physically connect with the kids; hugs, helping, physio etc.

We've always had loads of air circulation, ive always been hot on that anyway.

I stopped the insane washing of equipment between lessons (I'm ppa cover) after Xmas. It was the biggest waste of time ever. We had several cases / outbreaks linked only to transport proving its very much air borne.

I think a non marking policy is work avoidance! Though also feel workload is bonkers generally.,

Yep, definitely marking here too (back to our booklets since start of term, before that, work was marked on Teams all last year).
My DD’s primary (Yr 2) has also gone back to exercise books and marking homework weekly in that.
Seems sensible and proportionate for an airborne virus, as has been said.
I can see why you are concerned Bitter.

We also never stopped marking (do nearly all of it live anyway)…being in the classroom together all day made the idea of avoiding their books laughable. I teach littlies anyway so lots of physical contact going on however you try to avoid it.

I tend to mark online, so don't collect books in. Most of my classes are 6th form this year, so they either photograph homework and upload to OneNote or work directly in OneNote.

My KS3 class tends to self-mark at the end of every lesson then I set them a homework that I mark once every fortnight.

We're back to normal marking.

There does need to be a nationwide conversation re marking and the impact of it. Seeing the students work is obviously vital but a red tick on a page isn't evidence of that.

I agree about unnecessary marking but I do believe very focused marking is powerful.

We’re back on normal marking. You’re right about a national dialogue needed on marking Herc. I used to have a HoD who said that current generations aren’t served well by books being marked every few weeks and that verbal feedback in lessons is better. Parents and SLT seem to want red ticks in books though.

@DenbyChina

We’re back on normal marking. You’re right about a national dialogue needed on marking Herc. I used to have a HoD who said that current generations aren’t served well by books being marked every few weeks and that verbal feedback in lessons is better. Parents and SLT seem to want red ticks in books though.

I think that if we didn't mark work at the end of every lesson (for my KS3 classes), any feedback would be meaningless - they would have forgotten it all by the next lesson.

It takes me a long time to mark 6th form because my feedback tends to be very detailed, but it means it can take me a week's turnaround - by which time they've forgotten the homework. I hope it helps them when they are revising though.

I think that if we didn't mark work at the end of every lesson (for my KS3 classes), any feedback would be meaningless - they would have forgotten it all by the next lesson.

Considering our timetables and the constant use of us for cover, I can’t imagine marking once a week, let alone every lesson. It’s clearly better for the students though. I do DIRT corrections and improvements which is a small help.

Why on earth are you marking classwork, Brie? They can mark it themselves! We're maths!

In my dept we don't mark anything that wasn't done in class in silence. What's the point? I want to know what they know, not what their classmate or their parent or their tutor knows.

Apparently Jenny Harries has told Andrew Marr this morning that masks are “not top of her list” for dealing with coronavirus in schools.

Is she bringing in magic unicorns or something then?

Maybe she's counting on the GavO2 monitors.

Vaccinations should probably have been top of their list as the most effective way to stop spreading in secondary, infection rates in sixth formers and uni students have gone down significantly since schools returned. But they ballsed that.

There's a list of things for dealing with covid in schools? Have they thought about using it?

I mean the kids mark their own classwork at the end of every lesson, not me! That would kill me off 😂.

They put their own feedback on each lesson (well, most of them do 🤭).

I know it’s unkind to make personal comments but every time I see or hear Jenny Harries I’m reminded of a very senior staff member at my previous job whose talents seemed to be limited to incessant bluster and the wearing of the sort of shoes that made me wince.

Marking policy as normal here - every book marked for the next lesson of every subject - so 5x a week for Maths & English, once or twice a week for everything else......

Yes, our policy is insane.

It always baffles me that there is no shortage of primary teachers when primary teaching is just mad.

An interesting thread from Bristol Oliver about the LFT/PCR thing. This graph is mad. It's very back of an envelope-type working, but does seem to show something's going wrong.

The graph says 'implied false positive rate', however my concern is that it's not false positive LFT, rather false negative PCR.

twitter.com/bristoliver/status/1447129562681327617?s=21

"Well otherwise how do you know who to support in / differentiate the work for in the next lesson and who needs same day intervention to catch up?"

(I quote SLT)

Note that I have no time or resource allocated for same day catch-up, so it is done at break, at lunch, in a snatched 5 minutes at the end of another lesson, by taking a silent 'counted heads' register and thus gaining a few precious seconds of time before the next lesson officially starts....

It always baffles me that there is no shortage of primary teachers when primary teaching is just mad

Cause the kids are cute? I really like my bottom set year 10s. But cute left the building a long time ago.
I actually think I’d have better luck teaching an average 8 year old how to balance a symbol equation.

The kids self mark their work. We do a mini test every 2 (ish) weeks. That gets marked by us. Seems fair and useful.

Crikey, cant you shouldn't be working lunchtimes.

Wouldn't 'same day catch-up' be an ideal use of the covid catch-up funding?

@noblegiraffe

Crikey, cant you shouldn't be working lunchtimes.

Wouldn't 'same day catch-up' be an ideal use of the covid catch-up funding?

Well, yes, but we have been asked to volunteer to be the tutors for that, as apparently external tutors 'wouldn't be as good'. And it has to be 'children with significant gaps in their knowledge', specifically NOT someone who didn't get that day's lesson, because 'that should already be picked up by the class teacher'.

Yes, we would be paid to tutor, but very few of us fancy extending the working day by tutoring after school and THEN doing the normal marking and preparation for the next day....

Hmm re Bristol Oliver thread:
Why is he only looking at the issue in relation to school LFDs?
Does he mean LFDs taken by school age children rather than in school, must do as there’s data for August and no summer schools did in school testing did they?
A lot of assumptions there, as he partially acknowledges
As you say noble, why should it be presumed to be a false neg LFT problem rather than anything else?