Got this through the post today…

I am pleased to inform you that at the meeting of the Board of Examiners held on 15 June 2007 it was recommended that you be awarded a Post-Graduate Certificate in Education (Schools)

Blah blah well done, come to the graduation ceremony in November, blah blah wish you well

A squiggle

The end is in sight I have just had one of my files checked at University and am now waiting to go and have my other file looked at. That’s the big one that caused the piles of paper in my house.

I finished sorting it last night and then went around my front room with a box, stuffing anything made of paper into it. I’ll probably have stashed an important piece of paper like a gas bill in there too, no doubt. It’s great, no more 6am starts and having to type out loads of stuff.

My next game is to find a house to move into before the end of this month. Starting that is tomorrow’s job, and on Monday I’m off to Bletchley Park, which should be good

Right, it’s my timetable slot to have my files scrutinised. I just had a peek in the window of the person doing this and he’s grilling someone else at the moment. I’ll go in a few minutes.

This is night #1 of “oh shit, my Uni work has to be in NEXT TUESDAY? Not a week on Tuesday?”

You see, for the past eight months I’ve been teaching IT to kids. This involves quite a lot of paper as I have to meticulously plan everything - I have yet to acquire the ninja skills required to simply turn up and go “right then, today we are …”.

It’s the worksheets that do me in. 30 kids in the room, I’ve made a two page worksheet for them. That’s 60 bits of paper to hand out and then take back in.

Here is the current state of my front room after sorting through this shite. The piles mean things, they’re important. A lot of this stuff is evidence that I can teach kids properly. It all has to be sorted, collated and put together into one coherent folder that can be assessed. Then I have to invent a reference system so I can say “ah yes, I meet standard 3.2.1 because lesson plan for class 7S3 - 3/2/2007, Period 1 says so”.

Obviously I’ve not just started to do that now. No, this is the finishing off - checking that if I taught something on the 8/3/2007 at 10:45 there really is some paperwork to back that up. No, not the 8/3/2006 at 10:45, nor the 9/3/2007.

Yes, I am finding lots of typos that I never noticed before. Head, this is Mr Wall, get acquainted

Not to worry, I’ll run out of A4 paper soon and my toner’s going.

My final placement has finished. No more will I have to endure getting up at 6am and staggering about the house for fifteen minutes just to wake up. I’m off until my proper job starts in September so expect to be completely nocturnal by then.

Kids are strange. You fall into three categories - people the like, dislike or couldn’t care less about. Being in the first category is a handy way of keeping them under control, and it’s weird the way they’ll decide if they like you or not. Sometimes they decide you’re likeable simply because you don’t shout at them all the time.

Now I have a week to put all my files in order, sort through the work I should have done six months ago and generally make sure I am ready to have everything assessed. I see a week of typing and organising ahead of me; dividers and sticky tabs have been bought for the occasion.

My new school are holding an induction day at the end of next month. In fact a lot will be happening next month as I need to find somewhere to live again and then move. Currently I’m on the scrounge for things to put into an empty house - handy things like tables, chairs and settees.

Next door there is a small group of year 12 students having a panic because their coursework is due in tomorrow. No, most of them have quite a lot of work to complete.

In here there is me who has a university assignment to finish for Monday. The best part? I am away from tomorrow night until Sunday at Retrovision so tonight is the last time I can finish this work unless I spend some time in school tomorrow doing it. I also have quite a bit to do.

Oh joy, I’m as bad as my students

I’ve recently been climbing mountains. These aren’t the usual windswept rocky ones, but rather paper-based ones that I can do in the comfort of my living room sat at my PC. It’s just amazing at the amount of paperwork someone training to be an IT teacher churns out in a week. I’m teaching IT - computers… why do I need so much paper?

Well, first there’s the lesson plans. They need printing out so I can put them in my training file as evidence that I do really plan lessons. Then there’s all the evaluations I’m supposed to do… supposed… and the evaluations of me, written by other people. And don’t forget the worksheets for the kids - if I have 32 kids in a class, that’s 32 pieces of paper.

Quite a lot can be re-used though with some thought. I’ve found that teaching my classes how to fill in worksheets on their computers reduces a lot of photocopying and paper shuffling. Anything they need to read, but not write on only needs printing for one class and then re-using. If OpenOffice had the same “book-fold” layout as Word does, it’d be the best thing ever.

In addition to all this teacher stuff, I have the university side to do as well. I have a course to pass, which means writing assignments and filling in sheets to say I have done things. This is currently two files and growing. These assignments aren’t short - the last one I did came to 75 pages, the one before that was something like 30 pages long and I have two more. I’ll be glad when I’ve finished the course, half the paperwork will go away.

Lesson plans are a curious thing. As trainee teachers, we have to write them in full down to the last detail. The reasoning is that by doing so the trainee will be forced to consider every small part of their lesson. Want to hand out the kids’ books to write in? That takes time, there’s mechanics involved in getting everyone sat down and their computers working. Shutting the beggers up takes minutes sometimes, depending on the weather and what they had last lesson. By writing all this down as meticulously as NASA plans an astronaut’s trip to the toilet things go smoothly. Fail to do this planning and it all goes badly wrong. There’s a point to it.

However, after a few months of doing this, half of it becomes automatic and you naturally allow “faff” time for the kids to decide what colour text they want to use in their Powerpoint slideshow. Lesson planning goes from minute detail to an overall “they’re going to do X, Y and maybe Z”. It’s a bit like programming - work out what the program should do, and the method of doing that becomes quite easy to work out. My lesson plan really could be “kids do quiz for ten minutes, we go through the answers for five. Kids spend half an hour doing worksheet 1, then twenty minutes on worksheet 2. Good kids then do worksheet 3, or we end the lesson by doing a crossword”. Two lines of text for an hour’s work, but no I have to write it all out, listing how many computers I need and what they are going to learn this lesson.

To avoid drowning in this workload - it’s not just one lesson, it’s four a day and if it takes an hour to plan one lesson you’re going to die - there is great benefit in scrawling out the basic idea for a whole string of lessons (the week is a good start) and then at another time typing this out properly with worksheets and sample files. Doing any of this the night before isn’t pleasant - teaching for six hours a day and then spending three hours planning at home is a good way to go mental.

Time management is the key. Know what you’re doing next week, don’t live for the next five minutes.

Yesterday I had to go into Uni to get rid of some paperwork, books and an assignment. This meant that on Friday I was running around my school getting people to sign stuff and give me bits of paper. Of course, one of these highly important bits of dead tree didn’t get filled in and even though I snook it under a pile of other stuff it got found.

So today I got it filled in, signed and then scanned and emailed it back to Uni.

That’s one more assignment down and just one more report to complete before I am done in June. It’s whizzing past rather quickly! Before I know it I’ll be in Spain on holiday and it’ll be August

Keep reading…

Last night I set out to write a world class lesson plan for my interview today. Something different, something useful, something that shows I can make kids remember things.

Hmm… well group work goes down well, they can find me information about parts of operating systems, different types of GUIs. They can do a few past exam questions. We’ll discuss it at the end. Yeah.

Or with some modification I can take my laptop running Linux in, show them that and actually demonstrate the difference between a GUI, CLI and a menu based interface. We can then compare and contrast Windows and Linux, GUIs and command lines. Do a few questions and explain what the examiners are looking for. Even better, bonus points for doing something different.

So I set off at 6:15 - never arriving late to an interview ever again, I was due there at eight. I obviously arrived at 7:15, bang on the target time Google said. Oh well, half an hour of web browsing on my N800 helped to pass the time. And then in I went.

Laptop was connected to projector. Laptop didn’t like the projector. X config file was edited and the projector behaved itself. Then my USB drive didn’t like the school’s computer until a real teacher logged in. Right, objectives are on the board, lesson plan is on the desk. I know what I’m doing, I know who I am… go go go!

And the lesson went well, even with two people doing proper formal observations of me. The kids sat there in complete non-comprehension about GUIs. They couldn’t even tell me what kind of user interface Windows was.

Right… I see a problem here, can I fix it? Can I get the kids to at least recognise a GUI when they see one?

Well yeah, I can. It took an hour and a lot of repetition, and examples. Being able to boot my laptop and show them a real, live CLI was useful.

The lesson ended and I was given to the IT techies for a while with the comment of “he’s technical too, tell him about this place’s computers”. They have site-wide wireless networking with roaming capabilities, staff laptops, a new tape loader that isn’t working properly and people who ring up and moan about their pc not working. They aren’t BOFHs, give IT teachers higher privileges than regular teachers, and generally aren’t afraid to show off their system.

Eventually the school remembered I existed and asked me into another interview. This one was full of people very high up the school foodchain. I’m fairly sure there was a governor there too. We had a talk, I had more tea. They offered me the job, I took the job and signed some contracts.

Yeah, I got it I start in September.

So it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

University want me to talk to the rest of the ICT trainees about interviews and getting a job since I’m supposedly the first person to do so. That’ll be another odd experience on Monday.

So, it’s finished. I’ve survived my first school placement. It was interesting, difficult at times but mostly quite good. Onwards to my next one in January. Let’s see how different it is.

Thursday consisted of Student Review Day, where we talk to each person in our form and tell them what to do and how to improve their grades. Some of the kids were quite receptive to what we had to say, some just sat there and mumbled at us. There was even the odd parent.

Now sat at my cousin’s house typing this on his Intel MacBook which is quite nice, but feels like Linux with a different window manager. Nice small computer though, even if its keyboard does feel like typing on a ZX81.

And in true student style I have gone into my overdraft. The Student Loans Company said I’d get paid on the 11th so of course I went and bought a Freeview box; a Humax PVR 9200T, it’s very nice.

Enrolling was about as thrilling as I remember, although not so much queueing. To make up for the lack of queueing the University routed me all over the building looking for a sacred Council Tax Exemption Letter. Guess where they came from? Yes, the same room I handed my first enrollment form into.

The lectures are excellent cures for insomnia. It’s not that they are boring, but trying to sit and passively absorb information for three hours is hard going. My Wiki will have a use now though, it’s the perfect place to store the notes I am creating.