Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Back To School!

As usual the new school year kicks off with that special brand of agony- the Training Day. Emails from various parts of the Country have confirmed that the usual culprits are alive and well- ie The Five Hats and The Five R's along with a couple of horror stories involving women from the Council with short hair, large earrings and funny shoes.

I spoke to a friend who works in IT and asked what his lot would do if they were treated to any of these delights. He just looked at me with a puzzled expression and said:

"Just walk out- what do you think we'd do? Our time's valuable, we don't work in the Public Sector."

It's a forlorn hope but I wish that more teachers would stand up and do likewise.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

what are the five hats and the five R,s
good luck
John Gibson

AnneDroid said...

Sounds fun. Enjoy...

The Scottish schools went back a few weeks ago. One day without the kids. Then the kids start back. Then the next day the auxiliary staff were on strike so there were no kids again. A one day term!

Anonymous said...

Ah yes, training days. AKA 'a complete waste of bloody time, we would be better off if the SMT would just let us get on with our planning and paperwork rather than having to sit through this drivel'.

Makes me glad I got out of teaching.

Anonymous said...

Do training days show different levels of disruptive behaviour?

The Mail(?) just used 'a school' as
the collective noun for sharks.

Old Holborn said...

Just sent my kids to their first proper senior school.

I hope the little bastards get bog washed and beaten to a pulp. I can't touch them, they have social services phone number on speed dial, the little shites.

Got a phone call from the Head today. He had tried to fingerprint them and they resisted. After a brief rub down with a housebrick he agreed with me that it is not "the law" to take a childs fingerprints when they start school.

Mr Natural said...

There was a time when teachers wouldn’t put up with this nonsense; I suppose because a large proportion of them were red-nosed, tweedy old men who had been through the war and had built-in bullshit detectors.

It must have been in 1975 that the Council decided we should have a training day and sent a couple of hapless souls to address us in the assembly hall. Their theme was school discipline, and they told us that rewards such as lollipops were far more effective than corporal punishment. The audience’s disbelief showed itself first in pointed questions, followed by barracking, derisive laughter, then booing, and finally the meeting dissolved in uproar.

The Council never sent anyone else and we were told to organize our own training days. The Headmaster, being a wily old bird, told us that if we could justify to him that we had put in the hours at lunchtime or after school, we could have these days off. This we duly did and he thereby earned the undying loyalty and respect of his entire staff.

Anonymous said...

I have tapped my feet and bitten my tongue through scores of these pointless activities, knowing that to question the orthodoxy would be to draw an unwanted extra lesson obs for myself in case I didn't quite share the vision and add pointlessly to the time the rest of us had to endure it.

However, entertainment was at last on hand: the verbal gymnastics our HT went through to claim that the 1% drop in A*-Cs, from the level that has already put us on the National Hitlist, was in fact a triumph, was worthy of Mssrs Barker & Corbett at their finest.

Kimpatsu said...

@Old Holborn:
Good for the kids for resisting intrusive fingerprinting. Whatever happened to civil liberties?

AnneDroid said...

My mother did her teacher training in the early nineteen sixties. She says the low point was when they had to pretend to be trees, for some reason. She was training to be a maths teacher, btw..

However, in those days, I think if you survived teacher training college you had no more "training" for the rest of your career!

Margaret English said...

I agree that so-called staff development days continue to be a waste of valuable time. The same old stuff continues to be re-packaged and re-delivered, such as hats and learning styles. On Monday we sat through an horrendous hour as our Head spoke about the "Learning Deeps"

Anonymous said...

Let us not forget that training days...or Baker days (not to forget the saddo ex-Conservative Education Minister who first instituted these imposed tortures) were originally part of the school holidays. As we, as a profession, were not considered hard-working enough we had to work for an extra week. Why don't they just let us get on with the tedious part of the job like reports...at least it wouldn't waste OUR valuable time?

Anonymous said...

We did 5 Hats once when I worked in the private sector. It lasted all of 15 minutes before we stopped playing along and ended up having a really useful planning day away from the office while the consultant trainers went home.