It's been a while...

I'm back after a short break. Decided that I really didn't need to blog about school over the holidays although I did start my own personal blog for my real non-school/teacher life. After I saw all the crap about the London terror attacks and it was late at night I knew I wouldn't be able to sleep well until I have written something down about it, and so I was set into action. But that is my private, hide under the bed, diary type blog so I will keep that one to myself. Anyway, I haven't really added to it since that first post.

Back at school this term and I am loving my job again. My classes are awesome, a few changes of naughty students here and there has helped, and my Year 9 class are expert flash tech already so I expect it to be a good class. And as I said to D this morning, they actually listen to me when I speak. I really liked my old class but they were all the boisterous, YLC-hit list kids so it was a noisy class. I have three girls in this class but I'm not sure how long they will last. Hopefully until the end. I reflected on the fact that I could probably teach any difficult class now after another teacher commented on how bad nearly all of the kids were in last term's media group. But they did the work in the end so that was good.

A year 8 boy has been a bit funny towards me this week and then I realised he got his report and didn't like it that I said he could be confrontational and argumentative at times. So I told him that that wasn't the way to handle the situation and I realised he was being even more confrontational and argumentative because I have put that on his report and he said unde rhis breath that it was pay-back time!! God...he's like this tiny, weakling Year 8 boy...payback time???!!! But he'll get over it. He hates being wring and thinks that he is a very good student, which he is, but his attitude leaves a lot to be desired.

I'm back tutoring R and she is keen which is good. I'm learning along with her about the Federation of Australia and later immigration, which is really good if I get Year 9 SOSE next year. I was invited to a meeting with the team who were chosen to write the Year 9 alternative program for 2006 but I wasn't that interested because of how I was shafted before the end of Term 2. Basically, I put my name down to be part of that writing team, then didn't get in, then got lobbed with all the classes of a teacher who did get in! So that sucked. But I like the class now so I'm over it. The annoying thing was that we were told we would be chosen based on how easy it was to get us out of withdrawal room supervision and under allotments etc. which I had both of. The class I picked up is Year 9 LFL which is Language for Life (eg: weaker students in English, who can't do German) The class has only 9 kids, 8 who turn up, so we do lots of reality based tasks like resume writing etc.

This week is the VATE conference and our Stella session got scrapped. But I felt that I knew what I was probably going to do but wasn't sure how it linked to everyone else and how the session would actually run. There are just too many things taking up my time at the moment. Before I came back to Term 3 I wrote some affirmations for myself and put them on my storage system door at school. They are along the lines of don't get caught up in other people's negativity, if someone says no but you know it is okay, do it anyway (like team teaching etc) and don't take on too much and do better planning before each lesson. So far the planning has been going really well. I have been using powerpoint and love it. It seems to perfectly suit my style of planning and now I just write in my diary Tues P6- Slide 12 and that works really well.

And I'm team teaching on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays and that is going really well.

Ok have to go...Period 2 starts in about 3 minutes.
Bye for now,
M x