Thoughts of work

Last night, just before drifting into an alcoholic slumber, it started to dawn on me that in three weeks I will have a new class of children and I really don’t have much idea of what I’m going to be teaching them. Well, I know the syllabus but I’m out of touch when it comes to what I should expect in terms of writing ability, numeracy and what sort of level I should ‘pitch’ things to. I know I’ve got a G&T (Gifted and Talented, not the king of pre-dinner drinks) who is achieving at a higher level than some of the loveable muppets I tore my hair out with last year, but on the other hand I also know I’ve got a couple of children (boys, naturally) who are still perfecting writing their own name. What I’m not sure about is where the middle ground is. I worked with the same age group when I was a student four years ago and frankly I can’t remember a fucking thing. I’m slightly annoyed that in my haste to get out of school at the end of term I neglected to bring anything vaguely useful home with me in terms of preparation, so I’ll have to scour the (lethally dull) education websites to familiarise myself with this year group. It’s foolish to even look for notes I might have from my student year, I have the administration skills of a Greek railway boss. Shit.

Another fly in my ointment is that next year I won’t have an IWB. An IWB is an interactive whiteboard, or Smartboard…call it what you will. For those of you who don’t know what one is (and why should you, really), an IWB is the best thing to happen to teaching aids since the throwable board duster. It’s a large interactive screen which hooks up to a laptop and runs on a Windows format. Your ‘whiteboards’ can be prepared in advance, it’s touch sensitive, you can write on it with digital markers, create effects, run teaching programs, play music and best of all, show DVDs on it at the end of term. Well, in our school only the older classes have them at the moment so I’m going back to writing on a normal whiteboard with proper markers. I haven’t done that since my first ever placement as a student. My handwriting will be awful at first and I’m going to have to watch out for spelling mistakes. Also it means diving into the more traditional world of actually having to make teaching resources. That means hours with scissors and laminators. Bugger. Thank God I’ll have a Teaching Assistant for the first time ever!

The up-side of next year though is that the kids are more biddable I suppose, and let’s face it; cuter. Which does help. Quite looking forward to it actually.