It's Officially Spring!

Happy Spring, everyone! We have more hours of day light and in the last week I have been walking (because my bike has a flat front tyre) to school in sunny conditions except on Friday when it was raining for the first time in weeks.
It’s really interesting to be working at Alderman Blaxill School these days. There is so much going on, especially in the past few weeks.

• The OFSTED report apparently was positive (written report is still to come), which is a great relief.
• The school production of Oliver was last week.
• During the production dates, there were interviews for the head teacher (UK equivalent of principal) position. About this time last year the then head was forced quite quickly to resign, and one of the deputy head teachers became the acting head teacher. So she had to apply to become the head teacher position, competing against 5 other candidates (2 of which were strong contenders). The candidating process also involved giving a presentation to the staff about teamwork. In the end, the acting head teacher got the position, so now she is the official head teacher of the school.
• This past week we had yet another parent-tutor meeting (the 4th one this year so far, but never with the same parents).
• Because of funding issues, the school is going through a major staff reconstruction, abolishing the department system (such as the science department, maths department etc.) and leading with “learning zones”. I know this sounds confusing. Basically, there are too many people getting paid higher wages for middle management positions, so the number of positions is going to be cut down by about 25%. So this week people were applying for the fewer middle management positions (all to be filled internally). As you can guess, some people that are currently have a higher pay scale were passed over for others. In the past few days I can feel a lot of bitterness between staff. Well, what can you expect when colleagues are competing for the same positions?
• One of the Modern Foreign Language (in our case it’s French and German) teachers has found a different school to work for and will be leaving next week. There are a lot of students in this school who are quite xenophobic, and she, as a French national, suffered a lot of abuse. (The xenophobia also accounts for some of the reasons why both I and another science teacher from Sri Lanka get a lot of verbal abuse.) As far as I know there is no-one hired to take her place yet. This is making the MFL department very anxious.
• On top of that, support staff belonging to certain unions are encouraged to go on strike on Tuesday on the issue of pension. This is going to affect basically all of the Colchester schools.
• Oh, yeah, and then there are the students, too. We have been made aware of some “disagreements” between the boys between two different year groups on the issue of the older year group are dating the girls of the younger year group. Staff were instructed to be extra vigilant during lunch (whilst our emergency meeting regarding the strike on Tuesday) on a possible fight breaking out between the two year groups.
• My tutor group is supposed to be doing a presentation for all of year 8 next week, and there are a whole lot of students who don’t want to do anything to help out. A lot of the work is falling onto me.
• And then there is the teaching that I am supposed to do as well (on top of dealing with student behaviour).
  

Thank goodness that I was not involved with the drama or applying for any of these extra positions. I think I would be a total wreak by now with those extra responsibilities.

I went to see it on Friday, in which the student playing the Artful Dodger fell ill and the director of the play filled in. Also, the person who played Mrs. Bumble (as well as picked up the roll of Nancy only two weeks before performance because the original Nancy was not attending rehearsals and not doing her line) had seriously twisted her ankle on Thursday night’s performance. So on Friday she did both of her roles with a crutch. Nancy’s character gets knocked around quite a bit, requiring her to safely fall down and get back up again. Within the performance she had tweaked her ankle a couple more times and in one scene she hopped off saying she couldn’t carry on. The cast on stage just froze for a while, and after a minute Nancy returned with a teacher supporting her. She completed the scene with the extra prop. What determination!

Realising that I had not left Colchester since returning from Ireland back in mid-February, I decided to go to Cambridge on the 18th for a Science Festival. It was good to be out and be inspired, though due to rail works and missed connections, it took me 5 hours to get there, (normally it should have taken about 1.5 hours). I was able to take in only 2 hours of the Festival, but I still was able to explore Cambridge a bit and walk around its Universities. Carrying with the theme of travel problems, I missed my train by 5 minutes for the return trip and had to wait an hour before I could catch the next one. But it was a blessing after all, for on the train I happened to meet a teacher from Ipswich and we were able to share ideas and stories with each other. I don’t really have a chance to unload regarding difficulties I have with school except for the weekly phone calls I have with my parents (who have been very supportive). So to be able to share concerns and realise that they are not unique helped me to focus for the week ahead.

Fortunately I have still quite a bit to look forwards to during my time here, including Easter holidays, meeting up with friends from home in May, and warmer weather. Someone told me that forecasts have been predicting 15 °C for next week! Wouldn’t that be nice?

Shalom
Kevin