I´m having lots of fun in Granada (despite the weather being appalling!) because I am, as C puts it, "among my own kind". That is to say, the kind of people who are willing to spend their holidays learning a foreign language. It´s nice to chat away in Spanish with a Polish lady who lives in Croydon about the intricacies of the subjunctive mood of ( Read more... )

Granada is as lovely as I remembered it save one small detail - it is FREEZING COLD! And raining. It is due to be 19 degrees Celsius and sunny tomorrow so the Spanish Met Office had better be right as I haven´t got the gear for cold weather ( Read more... )

Hurrah, I have made it two thirds of the way to becoming a proper teacher. All my second term NQT forms are signed off and two lesson observations passed and sent to the right people. Only one term to go ( Read more... )

Earlier this week our school hosted an event which was organised like Dragons' Den - groups of young people from various organisations, from schools to the local basketball group, youth clubs and refugee/asylum seeker organisation worked with a couple of adult facilitators to come up with an idea to spend £1,000 to reduce crime among the young in ( Read more... )

My pupils at school have to do a piece of "active citizenship" as their GCSE coursework. This means going out and identifying a social or political issue that affects them and then trying to do something to improve the situation. Some of them have done some really interesting stuff like lobbying for a law that means they get sent home from school ( Read more... )

I had a mad panic yesterday to find an end of day lesson for a really mental Y9 group on democracy and dictatorship. I found a really good US teaching website that had a few ideas. I nabbed the best one where you do a role play with the teacher as dictator. You tell them that you are the dictator and anyone who does not perform the tasks you set ( Read more... )

I went out for a lovely evening about ten days ago with m1nstrel and terriem (thank you ladies for a fab evening and I owe you both a drink). As they will have noticed, I was suffering a bit with a sore throat and losing my voice. I had an important meeting with the headteacher next morning so went in for that but had to go home at break as I had lost my voice ( Read more... )

So I'm now half way through my first year of teaching and here is what I have learned ( Read more... )

I have two holidays booked now! C and I are going to spend two weeks from late July at this place of loveliness Wild Boar Cottage in the Alpujarra mountains in Andalucia. That's after my two week stint back at language school in Granada over Easter...more beer and tapas me.

Hmm, round one to the headteacher I'm afraid. He was very helpful on what I could do my Fast Track project on (making sure gifted and talented children are properly catered for and coming up with a whole-school approach to these shiny children) but far less so on promotion. He agrees entirely that we should have a head of citizenship and that I ( Read more... )