This weekend marked the end of my first half term in school and 10 weeks on the School Direct programme if we include the two weeks worth of summer school. In many ways it has been a long half term, and in others the last 8 weeks have just flown by. Until now I have been teaching four hours a week on my own and observing and helping out in 6 others. I've been taking bits and pieces of starters, plenaries and half lessons in years 7, 8, 9 and 10, some French and some Spanish.
A week or so ago now another MFL trainee and I went to the Languages Show Live at Olympia. It meant losing the usual weekend lie in and getting on the train nice and early in the morning and making our way across to Olympia, with the usual barriers that Transport for London like to throw in for good measure! There were loads of stalls and so as well as attending talks on using the target language in the classroom and the new national curriculum for 2014 we managed to spend quite a lot of money...! We justified it by saying that we're investing in our future by helping ourselves to do better this year, at least that's what we've convinced ourselves of anyway!
As I've been teaching year 7 on my own for a few weeks now they are my classes and so I took the lead in talking to the parents on parents evening this week. Although I went to year 11 parents evening a few weeks ago I didn't really participate other than to add a couple of comments so this was quite a big step up. At first it was quite scary sitting on the other side of the table and telling parents how their children were getting on in my lessons but by the end of the evening I realised I was actually quite enjoying it. It was really interesting to get to meet the parents and hopefully I'll be able to see the effects of some of the things we talked about when we're back in the classroom after half term.
Unfortunately this half term break is not going to be that relaxing. I've had a weekend off but work starts tomorrow as I not only have 6 hours of lessons to plan for the first week back but a 4000 word assignment for the PGCE and I'd really like to get at least a first draft done. I might even have to pop into school at some point to help plan the primary link we are starting in November. Hopefully I'll get it all done, but it'll be nice to not have to get up quite so early every day in any case.
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