Nerve gas.

My eldest is currently at University, fighting her way through dissertations and essays and student life on a non toilet roll purchasing shoestring (Reference -See mother toilet roll history) The other day she had a presentation to do and according to the wire ( Facebook, twitter, emails, phone calls and texts) she was stressed out at the thought of presenting at University. My daughter! Nervous? Never! Couldn't imagine it. This was the girl who had acted in plays and pantomimes, sung solos, sung in front of 1500 in the Cambridge Corn Exchange, sung a duet with her father and lived to tell the tale. This was the girl who would dare to tell off 5 strangers on a tube who were pestering a young girl....as her father idly toyed with the metro crossword. The girl who wrestled a would be purse snatcher outside the Brixton Academy.
And then I thought, maybe there's more to this than meets the eye as I believe the apple doesn't always fall very far from the tree....although it's probably picked up and packed by Eastern European migrant workers.
Despite my gay and witty repartee, I am, when push comes to shove, a terrified little boy inside this overweight ginger exterior. The acting/ singing /drama god thing has come pretty late in life. even now my favourite moment is the final curtain call. Knowing that I've done something well that I'm really proud of but thankful that I don't have to do it again in case it goes pear shaped.
My first public speaking was at University when I ran for a sabbatical post and had to be heckled in the student union bar. My wedding was terrifying as I stood at the front with one legged locked straight so that I couldn't fall over and trying to be strong knowing that there was a beautiful bundle of tears stalking me up the aisle.
Public speaking is not an easy thing and most people never get the opportunity to do it.
Teaching! Teaching is about facing my fears every day, in some case the OFSTED unfriendly B.Birss show 5 times a day, Funnier than Reginald D. Hunter and no use of the "n" word.
Public speaking is nerve wracking and can make your stomach turn. ( or give you gas)
Hopefully she managed to complete it and was pleased with the outcome.

I'm Kim Jong Un, get me out of here.

 A week ago, all we could talk about was Li'l Kim. Kids at school who hardly pay any attention to new that occurs outside the football and entertainment pages paid attention to the fact the world might end.
The world didn't end when the hadron collider didn't find the Higgs boson particle for a millisecond and accidentally plunge the world into eternal nothingness. Kids paid attention to that.
North Korea were about to launch missiles in the direction of South Korea in response to them unleashing Psy and Gangnam Style.
This week we appear to have forgotten about him and are more concerned about Kim Kardashian's maternity clothing, Gweneth Paltrow's see through dress or Luis Suarez's  teeth
What has caused all this? Simple. Obama sent Li'l Kim an iPad with a BGT app which he uses instead of the nuclear launch button. Apparently this keeps him busy for hours and has kept his mind off of world domination.
The Second World War was won when Churchill sent a colouring book to Adolf Hitler. Hitler's years as a painter came back to him and he would spend hours colouring in.
Sadly, he did spend a lot of time crossing over the lines - force of habit, but it was enough to put him off his game.
Nikita Kruschev was in America at a dinner with all of Hollywoods Great and Good including Marylyn Monroe with whom he was quite taken.
He exclaimed his disappointment that he was unable to go to Disneyland because the US powers said that they could not guarantee his safety.
If only he could have gone then the whole Bay of Pigs incident could have been avoided.
Maybe it's time for Kim Jong Un to do a guest appearance on the BGT panel. machine a new BROMANCE with Simon!

At least Communism had a five year plan!

As a Head of Faculty, I am judged on results.
My maths Faculty have slowly but surely moved forward from a pass rate in the high 50's to 78% last year and my team hope to surpass that target this year.
Well done, I hear you say! Hopefully.
The only problem is that the Government keep changing the rule book. Three tiers of entry to two tiers of entry.
Then scrap coursework.
Then introduce questions requiring more writing and analysis.
Now the march exams are being removed next year and the following year the November exams will only be for resist.
This means that kids will only have one attempt at their GCSE exam unless I enter them for their GCSE's at the end of year 10 to enable them to have three attempts at the exam.
Every school is judged on performance based on how many students achieve 5 or more GCSE results INCLUDING Maths and English.

Yet every year they change the rule book that we have to work to in order to achieve the best for our students.

If students do well the exams are getting easier. If students do poorly then it is the fault of the teacher with no thought as to how their tinkering affects progress.

How can you measure improvement year on year when the rules continually change.

Communism may not have been the way forward but at least when they wanted to improve things, they did have a five year plan.

The Only Way is E-Sex!

Love has changed.
Relationships have changed.
When was the last time you told someone that you loved them....if you have to think about it, I rest my case. (I'm also not referring to footballers or pop stars who have love thrown at them on a regular basis from appreciative acolytes...the exception being my feelings for Didier Drogba in Munich in May 2012...that love can never be broken.)
What ever happened to good old fashioned hand holding and kissing and writing letters of undying or unrequited love?)
Nowadays we have sexting. Lets not be in the same room but talk dirty to each other. Hold on a minute....this is a camera phone....CLICK!
I looked on the Internet for events on at Hatfield Forrest......and came across an article that said it was Essex's number one site for dogging. DOGGING! I drive past the car park most nights and am now afraid to slow down or turn my head.
The Internet is either a technological miracle, an educational shot of novocaine (colouring in for the new millennium as children can cut and paste instead of actually reading and summarising) or a source of concern for parents.
The first day I got a modem, my eldest daughter asked if she could use the computer to do some research on her school animal project. Her chosen animal was the beaver....HELP!
In London it is said that you are never more than 12 feet away from a rat. On the Internet you are probably never more than 12 clicks away from pornography.
My wife said that whilst on her ipad the other day she received an invitation to meet "local slags." I wasn't aware that we had any but shall now look more closely when queuing in the Post Office.
Say "I love you" more often and mean it.
Take time out to show someone special that you love them.
Spend the afternoon just laying in each others arms watching them breathe.
It's a beautiful, precious,vulnerable moment of trust.

Go on. You know that you want to.

Weapons of Mass Destruction and why NATO can't find them.

......Or as we prefer to think of them Weapons of Maths Instruction. It never ceases to amaze me how totally unprepared students are for the real world. We try to teach them trigonometry and other functions on a calculator.

" I don't need my calculator, I have my phone" In years to come, when that student has become a soldier and not bothered how learn to use the rifle (may have forgotten to bring rifle to Iraq as he packed for the wrong week) but at least he will still have his phone.

The compass is a weapon in its own right as students see it as a tool for stabbing the kid in front. (Thus good for hand to hand combat with the Taliban.) They cannot read the scale of a protractor  because it goes from  1 to 180 degrees but in two confusing directions and appears to mysteriously break the day before it's needed in class. (Sorry sergeant, my grenade broke at breakfast this morning Sah!) 

The pencil. A simple tool which when used effectively can solve many problems.  I didn't  realise that it's sole functions is to be broken into three pieces and thrown at the lad across the room. (I'm dead handy with a smoke bomb sarge but again it broke....)

A pen! Here is the first piece of equipment that the Army has a use for. The ability to strip a rifle down into it's component parts for cleaning and then to reassemble. With teenage boys, I have never seen so many pens that need to broken into individual pieces, (even the humble biro) during the course of a lesson. Sadly many of them never make it back to their existing conditions and many students are "injured" during the fray as the blue blood of battle runs freely through their fingers.

So I am sorry that we have failed you, as many students never bring their "weapons" to the battlefield and so cannot be trained.

Never fear. There is always one student with a fully armed pencil case, fully aware of the functions of the letters above the keys on the calculator and what they actually do. He will design you a weapon or a piece of software that will cover for the reduction in soldiers. We salute you!

Postman Pat goes to the job Center.

Cliff Richard was right. It's so funny how we don't talk anymore. We do, of course communicate using a variety of other social media. The phone text. The bane of the teachers daily life. C U l8r soz lol, and we wonder why GCSE English grades are in decline.  A recent Literacy mandate involved the concern that kids don't put capitals at the start of things .......... such as their OWN names but that capital B's make guest appearances in the middle of words for no apparent reason.......please can we maths teachers help.
I'll Facebook you later. Facebook seemed to me a site where many friends and colleagues would let you know that they were just opening a bottle of wine at the end of a hard working week. I still don't know why all of their friends needed to know every little mundane thing in their life. My wife is still hurt that I won't friend her on Facebook. "If I wanted to friend you dear, I would put down my ipad and roll over in bed and get you to do the same." Maybe if I friended her on Facebook first I could let her know to put her ipad down and save a lot of time.
Twitter. Facebook for the texting generation who can't really express themselves past 120 odd characters.
Blogging. "I like your blog" says Mrs Head of  Maths to me. "It means that I don't actually have to listen to you when you go off on one, which you do regularly enough about the house."
So when was the last time you wrote a letter? I don't mean sending a cheque with your credit card bill or sending an overpriced birthday card with five words...Happy Birthday David, Love Susan. A real letter, filled with hopes and dreams and words that were not using predictive text or spell checked?
I rest my case. I had a heart attack when I asked for some second class stamps to send a birthday card. If that had happened on the same day that I bought a beverage in a coffee shop, I may have had to downsize my house as a result.
Kids today don't write, can't spell without help and use a text language that mutilates the Queens English and share their bland thoughts and life with other people who need to lol on a regular basis.
Imagine Postman Pat, who has had to have Jess the Cat sent to a shelter as he makes his way past the signs advertising BBQ's and Quiz Nites on the way to sign on. At least he knows when capital letters should be used. Soz.

Don't shoot me, I'm just the teacher.

In India, the buses came into town, men were herded in and mass unwanted sterilisations occurred in an attempt to curb the rising population. As an Educational Professional, there are times when I believe that there is still a need for that bus and today, I hope that it's a double decker.
People today have no concept of taking responsibility for their actions. Yesterday, I signed a students report to say that they had been 30 minutes late. "that's f*ckin' ridiculous." I was told. "But you were actually 30 minutes late." Today when the same student walked off at the start of the lesson to talk to an unnamed teacher from an unnamed subject about "something." So I reported her.
Imagine my surprise to be told that HER lunchtime detention was MY fault. Her poor punctuality and inability to follow instructions which led to a detention (unattended and so a days isolation ensued,) had nothing to do with her actions and was all my fault for recording her poor behaviour. "Driver."
A parent called to complain about a member of staff. "We'll I just want to talk about the problem that he's having with your teacher....." At this point I started shouting "oh....oh.....oh.......oh" down the phone. "Did you find that annoying?"  I asked her to which she replied "yes." "We'll that's what your child does when my teacher is talking and was eventually removed for throwing a pen across the room. "He said he got sent out for giving a pen back." "But it's the teacher fault! My boy doesn't like him. He learns when he gets sent out to another teacher."
" So you want me to reward his bad behaviour by moving him to another group?" "Yes because it's all the teachers fault." "Driver"
I do love the phrase "I wouldn't want to do your job." A phrase that is sadly followed by a load of suggestions as to how I should, in fact,  do my job properly.

If people do not realise that actions have consequences, what exactly is the point of their existence?
Answers on a postcard....what...you think I should  have got answers by email .....and its not your fault if I don't get any answers because you didn't bother to ask anyone to fill them in......