Gi's a job

One of the first emails I had today was a reminder from recruitment site eteach that there are vacancies in my area. Of course I had to check. The grass always looks greener after all. Then going to check the news at the BBC I noticed that one of the top five stories was about the thousands of teachers who leave the profession. According to findings, nearly 10,000 teachers left teaching for other jobs between 2000 and 2005. And in 2005, 8,000 people qualified to be teachers but did not go into teaching.

Now this sounds like a lot but I know that the number of teacher training places at colleges and universities has increased, and that there is now a variety of funding and grants to train to teach certain subjects or in certain areas. To a debt-burdened graduate, being paid to gain an extra qualification is no bad thing. However, paying somebody to take a course when there is no intention of doing the job after the training seems like a waste of money. So why are too many teachers being trained?

Some trainees find it difficult to get a job upon completing the course. Those who are flexible and willing to move and tough it out in an area with a high teacher turnover will always find desperate schools ready to snap them up. But those who are restricted geographically because of family, for example, often find themselves on the books of a supply agency, sent out to all sorts of jobs on an irregular basis, unable to consolidate the work they've done during their training course and not able to complete their NQT years. And when there's no supply work they have to find something else... and suddenly they aren't teaching, but working in an office or a store: a statistic in surveys.

Why should teaching be for life anyway? Some of the worst teachers I know are those jaded and brow-beaten by years of churning out the same content, trying to make it fresh and exciting for the 35th year in a row to the 70th class... "and we call that an ox-bow lake..." or "to find x we have to multiply together these two figures...". New teaching methods come and go but the content often stays pretty much the same: "a simile is different to a metaphor because...", "and in October of 1066 Harold was defeated...". It doesn't matter if you use flashy interactive whiteboards or show innovative DVDs, reveal information by piecing together cards in groups or by playing a game, when you have stood in front of a bunch of adolescents for the tenth or twentieth time and hear the same factoid trickle from your lips it can cause alarming deja vu.

Some of my colleagues have been doing the same thing for three times longer than me. I'm tired of it now, already. Some teachers get promoted and move out of regurgitating the same old stuff but there's not room for everyone at the top. Maybe there should be more opportunities for sideways movement to non-teaching but education-related roles. That way the teachers who are weary of cutting out cards for the next class to wreck can move out of the classroom before they become too jaded, and the new fresh teachers from college can bubble and fizz at the front of the class while they have the enthusiasm.

Love the holidays!

Sunday evening of the holidays - is there a more sweeter time?! Usually I'm in a grumpy unmarked-book and unfulfilled-weekend kind of mood, but for the first time since the third week of August (um yes, I was working half term week, more fool me) Sunday evening is here and I feel burden-free. Lounging around in the bath just now, getting ready to go out (ha ha! - no school nights for two weeks!) I was thinking about how much I love the holidays if only for the most mundane of reasons:

• I got up to date with all my washing. I hadn't had time to do my washing for so long that I'd forgotten quite how to operate the washing machine, but once that distant memory was restored the machine was in action from sunrise to sunset. I know it sounds odd - it's not like we have to go scrub our smalls at the cold river's edge any more - but the sorting and loading and unloading takes up precious weekend time that I just haven't had. Or I've just been too lazy. Now for two weeks my laundry basket will not overflow, and I will always have something clean in my wardrobe. Happy days.
• I slobbed around and read the papers without feeling guilty and annoyed with myself because I should be marking instead.
• I watched a load of TV programmes I'd Sky-plussed and which had been waiting on the hard drive since about October.

And although my cold is still rampaging through my body, I'm trying very hard to ignore it and not let it spoil this Christmas like it did last year.

Just to say...

And so it took less than 24 hours of the holidays commencing for me to get a sore throat with a side order of sneezing fits. And this is precisely what happened last Christmas holidays too. I was ill last year for about 10 days of the holidays, sneezing and snorting all over the place, and feeling too grotty even for a New Year's Eve tipple. If anyone knows of any quick fixes that don't involve whisky (tried that one this evening; hasn't worked) then please do let me know!

It's here! End of term!

Yes! Made it! The holidays are here but I've got a feeling I'll still be in bed by about 10pm this evening. No "Black Friday" shenanagins for me. I'm tired and will hopefully have caught up with sleep and laundry and present wrapping by Christmas Day. I did see the sun rise on my way to work, beautiful and golden red, and then it sunk down again as I drove home. At least the days start to get longer again now. Hopefully teaching will be far from my thoughts over the next few days, so wishing you all a very merry and restful Christmas!

So near...so far?

So here we are then. Just one more working day of this year - well, at school anyway. I know I've got three carrier bags of books waiting by my desk to bring home tomorrow, so that's something to look forward to. And what will tomorrow bring? Over-excited children, rampaging around corridors, floors awash with sweet wrappers and Christmas card envelopes, and a good couple of hours of keeping the pupils contained while they're in no mood to work - or sit, for that matter. Then there is the carol service, which could be so lovely, but usually ends up with the head teacher hollering at anyone who dares to shuffle in their seat during the hour's service.

Today though, I have laughed. Even at 9am my Year 8 class were hyperactively over the top, and took their quiz way too seriously, with some massive sulking and jeering going on - it was like being down the local pub's quiz league. But even I have been infected with end of term fever, to the extent that come lunchtime when I'm normally running around or running a club, I just couldn't be arsed to do a thing. It was great.

Cleaning out my closet

Some of the random stuff I found in my classroom cupboard while clearing it out today:

• 40 year old dust on a pile of old books last used in 1960-something;
• a bunch of coursework from a class from a few years back who were the biggest pains in the butt - and I really enjoyed shredding that lot!
• a folder full of newspaper articles I'd collected that I thought I could use in my lessons but never did, and instead they now look dated and irrelevant;
• some of my PGCE-year resources that I've never been able to use again because the curriculum changed soon after;
• a set of Year 7 exercise books belonging to some of the students who are now in my Year 11 class, which made me smile because their work was so lovely back then... as opposed to now...!
• several umbrellas that for some reason have been chucked in there over the past few months;
• a big bag of coloured paper and pens that I'd forgotten about and which the school could never afford to buy now, so I'm going to have to hide and ration it all out very carefully.

And that was the most interesting part of my day.

EMAs: Education Mess Around

Whilst perusing other blogs, I found myself nodding along in agreement to this comment about EMAs. EMAs are Education Maintenance Grants (or something like that) which are weekly sums paid to sixth form students as long as they turn up to lessons and stay in education past the age of 16. In theory this sounds all well and good. In practice it means that our school now attracts a whole extra quota of ne'er-do-wells and has to provide courses for them to take, such as "Deckchair Studies" and "Hair and Nails". And as many of these students have previously failed to gain a C grade in any GCSE subjects, they also re-sit a few exams.

Or rather, they are supposed to. Instead, I have a couple of slots per week on my timetable which are for some crappy waste-of-space course to which these students rarely turn up. I obediently do all the necessary preparation, and was quite enthused to start with in that typical September way; I researched ways to teach the course in an interesting way to get the best out of such slackers, and prepared topical resources. And for the first few sessions I did relish having just a few students to concentrate on, as they each had some tutorial time with me to work one-on-one whilst the others started projects. But now these sixth-formers have wised up to the fact that they can still get their grants without actually having to do very much at all.

Therefore today I had a class devoid of students, until one turned up half way through the sesssion, blowing gum bubbles and nodding along to his ipod, no books or bag or even a pen. I just sent him away again in disgust and went back to clearing out my book cupboard and eating the chocolates I'd brought in for prizes. So yeah, it worked out well for me. But at some point I'm going to be expected to be accountable, and these slackers will have to sit their exams...