I am really undecided about this.

I don’t think SATS are really benefitting my pupils anymore, and most of my colleagues are definitely only concerned about how they affect our league tables. Not our standards. All the work we do in school is to make sure the average of our SATS are good enough so we beat the rest of the schools in the area; not that each child is achieving what it should be.

To be honest, they don’t work for the schools, and I’m not sure they work for the pupils either.  But is there a better alternative?

Read this in the TES forum the other day. An article about a troubled and troublesome child – Little Tommy – who used to be a perpetual truant but is now (thanks to Ofsted targets) attending school regularly – much to the chagrin of his teachers. Basically, it’s better for everyone if difficult children truant, because they don’t then disrupt the rest of the class.

This is such a complicated and confusing argument. On the one hand there is the idea that ’inclusion’ for the most challenging minority means ‘exclusion’ for the well-behaved, less difficult kids whose education is usually sacrificed for the sake of a bit of peace and quiet. Keeping a disruptive child in check takes all of your time, and the other 19 children in your class are basically left with no teacher. It doesn’t seem ‘fair’ – but then if you bring fairness into it, you’re looking at the fact that some of these truants have such a hard home life, and deserve all our support and love.  What is fair is ensuring that their awful homelife doesn’t determine their future. But is it fair that this is at the expense of other children who don’t cause trouble?

I don’t know the exact answer; but I do know, and I don’t meant to sound overly idealistic, that opting to have children not in school because it makes our lives easier isn’t what I got into teaching for. It’s just another sticking plaster for a bigger problem.

Having sorted through the mountain of heavy catalogues and shiny, shiny promotional material that was dumped on given to me at BETT i’ve now been able to process the wonders I discovered there.

1) Schoolchildren pay absolutely no heed to running past you and knocking you over wherever they are; it’s not just in your school, and it’s not just you. They do it to everyone.

2) Bring your own lunch. £6.99 for a 6 inch pizza beggars belief. And empties your wallet rather too quickly.

3) Nodding and smiling is an excellent substitute for being interested, but beware, if you nod at the wrong time you’ll find yourself sitting on an hard orange bench, forced to watch a ‘fun afternoon demonstration’ for an hour with a group of equally bored confused teachers.

4) Virtual learning environments are the future; and there’s no point trying to convince yourself it’s any other way. Books will become ‘digital data’; the library will be turned into a ‘learning pod’.; and resistance is futile.

5) While it is in London, Olympia still remains one of the most obscurely difficult places to get to, with tubes only running every other Friday in a month with a full moon it’s a veritable miracle if you make it there before the end of next year’s BETT. Thank god for the Teachable bus to Hammersmith.

Over the weekend my classroom was painted, finally. It’s been begging for a makeover for at least five years – cracks and peeling paint are so last decade. What would Kevin Mcloud say?  So, I requested all white walls except for one bright red wall which I thought would give the kids enough stimulation and colour, without sending them insane. However, somewhere along the way my request got rather lost in translation and the entire classroom is now some kind of rancid green.

The caretaker swears it’s pistachio – it’s a very seasick pistachio if that’s the case – and said that it was approved by the bursar because green was more ‘cost-effective’ than red. I don’t know about the current costs of cheap green paint – but I can’t believe the difference was so much that they couldn’t have managed one wall of red paint. What this smacks of is the usual purse strings bureaucracy that we are increasingly dealing with in schools. Jobsworth, glorified accountants who have to change what you’ve requested simply because they CAN. I know they’re stretched for cash, but splitting hairs over some paint really is going too far.

That said, the silver lining on this pistachio cloud was the reaction of my class – a real bunch of little treasures for once – who politely told me how great it looked, before setting about, like a tiny interior design army, sticking up their art homework all over it. And little Timmy even passed this inspired comment on it: “Miss, it’s not red. But now it’s not peeling. Lovely jubbly.” And promptly sat down. Out of the mouths of babes. I feel a classwide gold star coming on.

Have decided to drag myself to BETT – apparently it promises much goodness in the way of ‘innovative technology’ and apparently I need to be more innovative (I really hate that word).

English isn’t really a subject that lends itself well to technology of any kind – being about, you know, old books and stuff – it’s more about the turning of the page and the craft of the ancient text. But I do keep seeming to be at the wrong end of the deputy head’s wrath when our ‘IT Agenda’ is discussed, and am hoping that BETT can give me enough ideas to get her off my back for a few months.

But seriously – an IT ‘agenda’? FFS – can’t we just use computers and whiteboards and blackberries and be done with it? Why do we have to have a specifc laid out plan, with milestones, targets and endless, endless - so endless - reports on our success? I spend more bloody time writing reports on how IT is becoming part of my teaching, than actually teaching.

Last term I wasted at least 35 lesson hours, on a malfunctioning whiteboard (it just kept flashing one powerpoint slide at me in this desperately sad way); several millions of my own personal hours on trying to plan lessons while my computer kept turning itself off for no explicable reason; and have recieved no less than 47 homework excuses that were blamed on technology.  “Sir, my laptop ate my homework etc.”

Not that I don’t believe them, my computer constantly hides work from me that I’m sure I spent ages doing. Bastard.

I just couldn’t let this one slide by without mentioning it. The lovely people at Teachable are rewarding the best digital teaching resources with free access to its site for a year – and more importantly, £1000 to spend on whatever you want. All you need to do is submit one of your best digital teaching resources to the site and wait for the winnings to flood in….

You have till 22nd Jan to submit your entry, check out all the details here.

Have been pondering the merits of BETT this year. I’ve been the last two years running and I always make the same mistake of thinking it’s going to be a  rather handy day away from school, doing something different, reflecting on my ‘craft’, drinking in the atmosphere, and that I will return inspired and ready for battle with new endeavours to motivate the preying hoards.

And then I still seem to spend the entire day on my feet, dodging other teachers, talking endlessly about my subject, and being run over by packs of schoolkids. Which means I end up concluding I should have stayed in school in the first place, where it was warm (ish) and I had my own ‘I know best’ mug to drink strong, delicious tea out of, rather than several cardboard cups filled with brown scalding water.

So you see; I am still pondering the merits of BETT. If someone has some wise words, do send them my way.

Arrived into work this morning, again - fighting through a depressing lack of snow – to be handed a document during the staff meeting entitled: “A Mission Statement for Success.” Yawn.

And oh yes it was as bad as I expected. Our new ‘tag line’ is “Inspired Learners, Inspiring Teachers” – and of course that’s ILIT for short. We must work the ILIT concept into everything we do, a meeting at the end of January will ask for evidence and ideas on how we’ve brought ILIT into our teaching on a lesson-by-lesson basis. And that’s it. Class dismissed, with  no more guidance than a reassuring: “I know you’ll all come up with some inspired ideas,” from the head. Give me strength.

Still, I’ve been working hard on the project already, and so far have focused all my efforts on trying to find a way I can make the mission statement a bit longer, so it becomes ILLITERATE for short. How about:

“Inspired Lazy Learners, Inspiring Teachers, Endlessly Reaching Abominable Target Expectations” ?

Opinions on a postcard…

Coming back in January is so much worse than coming back in Sept; mainly because my pupils are hyperactively showing off their news toys, even though they’re not supposed to bring them in.

And the shock of rising early in the morning seems to hurt all over again. And my desk appears to have been attacked my more woodworm. And this morning a note arrived on said holey desk asking if I would bring the work I’ve done on my ‘Improvement Plan’ to the head’s office this afternoon so we can discuss it. Well that shouldn’t be too difficult, because I havent’ done it. A nice short meeting then.

…about the start of term are:

1) How cold my classroom is for about three days until it is eventually warmed solely by the breath of my students. Not, the radiator, obviously.

2) How, without fail, despite numerous traps, another mouse has eaten through the whiteboard cable.

3) The overlong and tedious ‘catch up’ meetings we have with the SLT. What is there to catch up? I ate turkey, drank too much, and New Year was disappointing – nothing changes.

4)  The fact that mocks are in about three days.

5) My end-of-holiday headache that takes exactly nine and half days to shift; without fail.