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(At least) three things that are wrong on so many levels

1) Theft in multi-storey car parks ((c) Tim Vine)

2) The leaning tower of Pisa (*) (@facesake)

3) Farting in lifts.

Also, getting caught telling filthy dyslexia jokes in the staffroom by the headteacher as he washes out his mug.

For the record, a student colleague kicked us off with the notion that DNA stands for National Dyslexic Association. And so I chipped in with my series of similar spelling jokes recorded over the years. The are as follows:

Dyslexic pimp – bought a warehouse
Dyslexic devil worshipper – sold his soul to Santa
Dyslexic, agnostic, insomniac – stayed up all night wondering if there was a dog (Jasper Carrott)

(Which also leads to the necrophiliac sadistic guy into bestiality who wondered if he was flogging a dead horse)

I also forgot the fabled slogan of the DNA – Dyslexics of the world – untie! – but I did get in the joke stolen from @Pundamentalism just this morning – his filthy reimagining of the old standard cheesy chatup line “If I could rearrange the alphabet I’d put DNA inside U.”

Fourteen years ago, I caused a bit of offence on Usenet with a series of schizophrenic jokes not hugely dissimilar from the ones above. Worryingly, the text of what I wrote on the Archers newsgroup fourteen years ago is still easily findable and I have just been rereading the subsequent exchange. In a way, I don’t know what’s more disturbing – that I can recall the exchange fourteen years later, or that it’s so easy to find throwaway conversations after such a long time. I rest assured that anyone going for dirt on me would have an awful lot to dig through.

And the substantive point, made by Simon Townley so well, still remains: outsider jokes like the schizophrenic and dyslexic ones are funny, but also have masses of capacity to offend those directly affected. They are almost always completely inaccurate in their characterization of the nature of the other. And so my conclusion: I will probably carry on telling these jokes, but they are almost certainly better placed in the pub than the staffroom. I have no idea what sort of sense of humour my present headteacher has.

(*) I have been consulting style guides to work out capitalization, but Guardian and Wikipedia silent thereon.

Three horror stories about teaching interviews

Stories I have heard about how mean school HR staff and headteachers go about recruiting. I have no way of knowing whether or not they are true.

1)

The school had a preferred style for referring to its charges. They were students, not pupils or children. They were referred to consistently on the school’s website as students. Applicants who used the wrong word in their application letter were summarily rejected, regardless of their other suitability.

2)

The school preferred neat, organised candidates. Whilst the applicants were busy with interview day procedures, the school sent someone out to look at their cars in the car park. If they were untidy or messy or showed other signs of a less than organised personality, including not being regularly washed, then it was a black mark for that candidate.

3)

Horror of horrors – the school made all sorts of IT available to the candidates for their interview lesson… but planned to hit the trip switch half way through the lesson. How well could the candidate continue teaching when they didn’t have their planned electronic resources available to them?

(This last one happened, not during an interview, but during an Ofsted observed lesson, to a colleague at school. The homework sheet became the rest of the lesson.)

I don’t think most schools would do anything like the three above horrors, and I have not been subject to anything like it on interview myself. Most of my interview days have actually been quite nice affairs, with headteachers keen to show their schools in the best possible light and all the candidates being super collegiate in the inevitable long pauses as we wait for the next activity.

May posts over the years

A whole bunch of blogs I read have been trawling their archives for the last few weeks, and since substantive posts here are few and far between, I though I’d join in the archive unearthing.

Come September, I will have been blogging eight years, and there is an awful lot of writing hidden away in these pages. Some days I think I should pull the plug given my career change. But I am generally too proud of what I have written over the years.

It’s coming harder and harder to give a rationale for this blog. No one person would want to follow the mish mash of politics, cooking, cats and lately education. But I still like having a place I can write things.

Looking back to May 17ths past…

In 2011, I was improvising cherry cheesecakes out of store cupboard ingredients, and making good use out of a bag of frozen cherries. I’d lost my seat a few days before, and wrote some helpful tips for successors after that.

In 2010, I live tweeted from the Lib Dem Special Conference that discussed the coalition agreement.

2009 saw me giggling at swearwords on Countdown. I also brought you this photoessay from a recent walk I had undertaken around Nottingham’s Guildhall.

In 2008, I was enjoying my work.

Similarly in 2007, I had just had the fascinating opportunity to tour a power plant in Lincolnshire.

We got our cats in 2006 and it pleases me no end to see the comment from Rob there when in the last few days I’ve been able to reciprocate on his post about getting a puppy.

I rewarded myself in 2005, after a gruelling election campaign, with a six week holiday under canvas in France, and one of the first posts from the multi-thousand-mile road trip can be found that month.

So, there you have it. Travel, animals, francophonie, politics. A reasonably typical mix of posts from Niles’s blog.

Tomorrow is the last Tuesday of teaching practice

For the last 14 weeks of term time I have hated Tuesdays because it is my “busy” day – I have been teaching four lessons out of the six slots on the timetable. It has caused me a lot of anxiety most weeks preparing for it. Two of the classes I only see once a week, and I share with another teacher, which is difficult because it is harder to build relationships, work out what they are capable of, and build up a head of steam. The other two are the only classes I see more than once, but have been difficult in their own special, other ways. All four groups, for different reasons, make me doubt any nascent ability as a teacher I might have. Consequently weekends and Mondays over the last few weeks have been getting harder and harder.

Knowing that tomorrow is my last ever one of these is a bit of a relief. But then again… in my mind is the ever present knowledge that next year, starting September, if I get a job that is, a four-lesson day will be at least the norm, if not one of an NQT’s lighter days. If I’ve struggled this much now how will I cope next year? There’s a variety of opinion about whether the NQT year is easier than the PGCE one, but the main conclusion I seem to be drawing is just that it is differently hard. Out go the essays and assignments, the bittiness and the gaps caused by sudden recall for university days; but in come the hard graft of maintaining class control by yourself, the longer term work with groups, the responsibility for young people’s futures and new and scary ways of being accountable to colleagues, headteachers and parents.

There is no question this has been a challenging year in which I have been questioning my sanity, my plans for the future and my sense of self. There are many aspects of working in schools and teaching which I am really enjoying. The classes that let you “feel like a teacher” where you can sense the progress and see your students engaging with the curriculum. The first time the “difficult Y11s” seem to like you enough to acknowledge your presence in a corridor rather than sullenly averting their eyes. Staffroom banter is awesome and working with other teachers is great. After many years away from languages, working in a community of linguists – at school, at university and online – is really inspiring.

But is it enough to counter the aspects of teaching that are causing the sleepless nights, the loss of appetite and the early morning up-chucking? No job yet for next year (although 3 interviews in schools have been productive and give me hope). I’m not yet very good at class control, behaviour management and even name-learning, from which any sort of maintenance of discipline and good teaching hangs, is a constant struggle.

I dunno.

Ask me next year.

Librivox release recording of the Pirates of Penzance

A recording over five years in the making, it’s worth leaning on what a technical accomplishment this is.

Dispersed volunteers around the world, most of whom have not met each other, have spent five years making a recording which has recently been released. This includes a number of people who have sung chorus parts whose individual recordings in various parts of the world have been skilfully merged into one MP3.

You can download the recording for free.

I’m credited as being in the chorus, although I don’t actually remember making any recordings of this!

Tom Bennett letting go #pgce #mfltwitterati

An awesome post by Tom Bennett talking about how a shocking night of street violence helped him find better equilibrium as a teacher. But the bit that really jumped out at me was at the beginning:

When I began to teach, I went home every night feeling like weeping, and spent lonely weeks racked with self-doubt and dismay. Children wouldn’t do the tasks I asked, and what kind of man was I? It was one of the lowest points of my life.

By my second year I wasn’t drowning any more, but I was barely breaking the surface. I fell into a familiar vortex of fail: my classes were all hard; they barely seemed to work when I asked; as time passed I did less and less about the behaviour because nothing seemed to make a difference, and I couldn’t cope with the effort of doing anything about it. As things got worse and worse, I circled the drain, hating myself, despairing for my ability as a teacher, and my ability to help children many of whom, seemed not to want to be helped. In many ways, I took their behaviour home with me every night, and it burned.

Oh boy, that sounds awfully familiar – and I’ve barely finished teaching practice and have had relatively little time swirling around the vortex of fail. Even Tom Bennett felt like that? *The* Tom Bennett? And it took several years to deal with it? And it was a street beating that helped him fix his classroom practice?

Why does anyone do this job?!

Tips on behaviour

Since I registered with the TES Online for job ads and free resources, they’ve been sending me regular emails with links to forum discussions, resources, daily job alerts, and links to blog posts from their wide panel of experts, in my topic and more widely.

I couldn’t possibly follow all the links. Who has time? But I do sample, and I have found some of the information patchy. Sometimes I’m too cynical – sounds like a good idea, but I could never make that work in my classroom. Sometimes it sounds too hard and I dismiss it.

But two links today in an email have been utterly fantastic and had me cheering as I read them.

Firstly Tom Bennett’s tips for new and inexperienced teachers and those who work with us – OMG, awesome! Read through, do! I don’t like everything Tom says elsewhere and haven’t always agreed with everything he suggests, but this article is amazeballs. At the start of teaching practice in particular I was concerned at his “always have a seating plan” instruction – now I’m increasingly sold.

Secondly, Phil Beadle’s specific advice on seating plans and room layouts. Have your tables in groups if at all possible, preferably groups of six. One of the rooms I teach in is in groups, and it is the home to some of the worst behaviour when I am teaching, at least partly because most of the students are not looking at me but at other students and it is really easy to start conversations. But I am increasingly of the view that a group layout is best for MFL if not other subjects, because whenever I plan those lessons I am always thinking more about group and pair work than the other room layouts, because they are already in groups of four.

My experience hosting a supperclub

(File this one under “things I should have blogged months ago!”)

In November last year, just over a year after I opened our doors for CDWM, we hosted a supper club in our house.

We weren’t cooking, we were hosting for my vegan chef friend who used to blog here but is presently on hiatus.

I think it was a good evening. We had an interesting blend of people, who enjoyed our chef’s food. Our guests were a mix of vegans and not. For an evening, we had a house full of people who had never been here before.

In order to get the house ready we had spent about a week tidying clutter away, and I spent the Saturday hoovering, dusting and laying tables. Our guests didn’t seem disgusted by the state of our house, but then, as we learned on Come Dine With Me, they don’t usually express their disgust to your face! (And they weren’t allowed in as many rooms as the CDWM guys!)

Some things I learned:

* if I borrow a table and six chairs, I can easily seat 16 people for dinner in our house.

* We already have enough cutlery, crockery, glassware, candles, table linen without borrowing any more (!)

* in November, we need to run the heating all day to get the house tolerably warm

* if you deadbolt the kitchen door and put a camping table up against it you can get an extra prep surface. But it will be uncomfortably low down.

Some things that were hiccoughs along the way:

Boiling enough water to feed gnocchi to 16 people takes a looong time. They had to be cooked in separate batches because some of them were gluten free, so we needed two pans of boiling water. The gnocchi had been made ahead and frozen and needed to be plunged into large pans of boiling water. Getting 20l of water to the boil in a domestic kitchen is a time consuming challenge.

The second thing that held us up was plate warming. This is all the more important in our house because our kitchen is unheated and the cupboards fix directly to the walls. In winter, some of our cupboards are colder than our fridge. Our plates are often icy. There’s no point getting the food good and warm if you then By the time we needed warm plates, the oven was very hot cooking puff pastry, and the sink was full of used pots and pans. We actually warmed plates in the end by wetting them and microwaving them, all the while worrying this might break them.

Two of our guests were the hosts of North Nott’s Clarkies Supperclub (last few spaces remaining at their April event!). We had been worried they might be hostile to competition, but that wasn’t the case at all. It seems there is plenty of market share available for another supper club in the Nottingham neck of the woods – in fact there doesn’t appear to be any other one currently running anywhere in the East Midlands. The Clarkies have said they are keen for others to set up just so they have an opportunity to go and eat out instead of hosting for a change.

They had suggestions for the platewarming problem – buy a hostess trolley. They’re pricey new, but there does seem to be a steady supply of really cheap ones on eBay.

Which leads me to my conclusion. Would I do this again? Is it worth buying a hostess trolley off eBay? So far, I only have experience of hosting and not cooking. At our last event, our chef partner did all the cooking, devised the menu, and did all the publicity, mostly through the very obliging Nottingham Vegan website. I’m not sure I could cook as well as our chef, nor present the food as well, nor work out such an interesting menu.

Certainly working as a teacher I could not run an event in term time, as the prep and publicity would take too long. Do I want to spend half terms hosting a restaurant in my house?

If you do it regularly, it does seem to take over your house a little. In her book, Kerstin Rodgers confesses she’s had to move her entire life into the bedroom of her flat as her sitting room is dominated now by tables and chairs. In conversation with the Clarkies, it seems they have had to give over a spare bedroom to holding the folding chairs, tables, extra dinner services and linen they need.

Do you ever make any money from it? We were on a profit share basis with our chef partner and at the end of the evening divvied up the takings. And we got a nice handful of tenners in return for our efforts. We had incurred some cost – heating, and professional help in cleaning up ready for our guests – so we comfortably broke even. But the temptation to buy ever more things to make the evening go better – cooking kit, serving kit, must mean if you do it regularly, you incur costs. Would it ever get to the point where you made money? I doubt it. I guess most people who do it, do it for the love of food and the interesting times you end up with.

Will we do it again? I have not ruled it out forever, but I am sure as heck going to try and get teaching a bit more sorted out before I have another go myself. So certainly ruling it out for PGCE year and (hopefully) NQT year to summer 2013.