Sorry LJ readers for the sudden mega-spam, normal daily updates will resume.

It was school’s open evening tonight and I decided to go and make an appearance just to see what’s going on.

I know it’s not right to go on about how much money you have, but it’ll be a long time before I have a monthly wage as high as the one I’ve just had. I won’t add numbers, but let’s just say that I’ve been paid the equivalent of three months in one.

Why? It’s all down to our government’s bribe golden hello paid to new teachers when they’ve successfully completed their first year of teaching. And given the effort and hassle I’ve had over the past few years, I think I am entitled to jump around a bit

Bills will be paid, money will be saved, and I think I need an iPod Touch.

Work has upgraded their servers and disk space. It appears we’ve all been moved onto a much larger disk array with an excessive amount of space. What will I do with it all? Maybe I could back up my house to it

It does worry me that in a few years we’ll have filled this…

My view of work

Of 39…

It’s going well so far. I managed to keep a class of year 9s quiet whilst I spoke to them for ten minutes, which is a big improvement on last year when I was fighting the buggers to keep their mouthes shut. Tomorrow I will have looped around all my classes once, so I’m watching now for any of the quiet timid ones to start poking their heads up.

And when they do, I’ll soon make them hide again.

This year’s motto of “take none of their crap” is proceeding well.

While sorting out my diary’s categories I made that strange realisation of just how old this site is. I’ve been pushing words into this since October 2000 - LiveJournal users, this is where you follow the link back onto my real site . The database is growing quite large now, and there’s some fun posts hidden in here. I think I’ll have some self-indulgence and post up a selection of my favourite entries. It can be the blogging equivalent of those “Top 100 ways to watch paint dry” programs that TV is full of.

At the weekend we’re supposedly off to rescue some ZX Spectrums from being thrown in the tip. I have no idea what I’d do with more of them, but the books and assorted addons interests me. I’m a sucker for weird hardware

Well it was back on Monday, but I was busy doing things to bother writing “I am back at work” in a post. Instead, here’s one three days into the new term.

Good points

There’s new staff (fresh meat) for the kids to chew on, I’m now old and boring and not worth winding up any more. Although my form take the piss still, but being in a smaller, more contained room with no art supplies or water helps.

My timetable is more spread out, I no longer have all my lessons rammed into Monday and Friday with a giant gap on Thursday. Mondays will feel less like I’m jumping on a tredmill running at full speed.

Today’s year 7 class couldn’t have been more quiet and timid, it was funny. I hope it lasts.

Putting the frightners on a kid who was farting around with the XP accessability settings was funny, and had the desired effect. It’ll be a long long time before he shows the class how to press Ctrl-Alt-Down to invert the screen, or mess with sticky keys.

The Bad

I’ve not got rid of all my irritating students from last year, and might have picked up a few new ones hiding amongst the timid. They do stand out a bit though and my new tactic of writing detentions in their planners seems to be working well, they have no excuse for “I forgot” now.

There’s some timewasters in my AS Level group, they’ll need weeding out.

Apart from that though, Day 3 in the Big Brother Zoo went well. Tomorrow I have one of my more disruptive students from last year. I wonder how many seconds she lasts before I remove her and fall out with her.

Work starts on Monday, best boot my work laptop and see if there’s anything important I need to do before I start. Monday is an INSET day though, which is good since I’ve not got my class lists yet, so I don’t know who I’m teaching.

I do have more clue about what’s happening next term though. There’s a lot less to learn, I should only have to learn the names of four classes of kids, rather than twenty and the work I did last year can be modified and used again.

School has finished for the summer. That’s one year I’ve completed, and since I passed my NQT year I am now considered a “normal” teacher. I will use part of the summer holiday to sort out next year, so that it works a bit more smoothly.

This year has been pretty difficult, but I’ve learnt a lot and have plans for the new term. I’m going to approach things differently and make my year 7s pee with fright Well, I won’t; I will train them to do certain things at the start of lessons though.

I now get to apply for my “golden hello”; a wodge of money the government gives you, probably as a bribe, if you manage to stick out your first year of teaching. They should call it the “golden carrot”, if anything I orginally lost my application form, filing it away somewhere safe after making a copy of it. I suspect I filed it away in my recycling bin by mistake. A replacement has been posted to me and I just need to get it signed by the deputy head.

I’m now off to Wiltshire for the weekend with Amy to visit her grandma. We’re camping in her grandma’s garden in Amy’s giant six-person tent.

Here we go… just a few days left, then Summer Holiday.

It was our NQT (Newly Qualified Teacher - or “Fresh Meat”, if you will) celebration this afternoon. Yes, one of those silly social affairs where all the NQTs, their mentors and some token people from higher up in the school make light conversation, nibble random food and - because it was only 3pm - look at the wine and think “why?”.

I got a certificate and a plate full of food, then after sticking around for some photos, escaped and went home

Then, at half seven, after a catastrophic failure in journey timing, met up with our Curry Club - a once monthly meeting of a select group of staff (getting into the Masons would be simpler) who’s objective is to consume curry. I have some left over, I will eat it tomorrow

I used to have a very boring job working in a shop. On the busy days I got to run around dealing with the great unwashed, and hours would fly by. On slow days (so… any day that wasn’t Saturday) I would waste hours just standing still.

Really… once I stood totally still for two hours without moving.

I’d gone through the phase of wandering the shop floor learning where the stock was, then progressed through the phase of “let’s unpack a delivery and take three hours”, off into the “let’s see how quickly I can unpack a delivery” and right on past “clean every square inch of the shop”. I seriously had nothing to do but look after my (deserted) section of the shop.

It gave me quite a while to reflect on things (mostly “why is the clock going backwards?”) and decide that on the whole, being paid £5 an hour to stand still wasn’t really worth it.

Now, since it’s a week and a half before we break up for summer at school (different job, much more interesting) I’ve suddenly found lots of free time. And I’m getting a tad bored again. So bored that I’m planning what I will be doing next September. I have a cunning plan to work out all my lessons for the coming school year so that I don’t have to do much during next school year except zoo keep and teach If I had a list of kids, I could even write my reports

So far I’ve made a nice little Gantt-style chart that’s neatly (and colourfully) organised all the units of work. From this I’ve started to list the lessons and brief ideas for them. There’s even the required 5 weeks ‘fudge’ time for when things kick my plans in the balls.

Hopefully I can get my planning done so that the holidays are mine and I don’t have to work after school planning stuff either. Next year looks more straight forward, I’ve taught all the stuff before so will scrape the bits together and make them better.