I am truly sorry for the lack of posts this week. Things had gotten quite hectic and I ended up having a busy week overall. It was fun, entertaining, stressful at times, and ultimately quite exhausting. I’ve finally just now gotten the opportunity to get it all written down. Hopefully this will fill you all in to how crazy (yet awesome) my week was.
First off, I worked all of last week at my lovely archenemy school: Bishopsford. Now, I don’t want to sound too much like a broken record or continue to bash this school on my blog. Okay, so there are a lot of students in the school that have behaviour and learning issues and it is quite a difficult school overall. However, the principal has made significant improvements to the school overall and they have done better in recent test results and GCSEs than ever before. The school is on its way up and I want everyone to know this and not think that this school is a complete waste of time. I spent last week mainly covering a Religious Education teacher who has unfortunately been out sick for a number of weeks. This hasn’t helped the students very much because they’ve had a merry-go-round of teachers coming through and giving them book work to do. I ended up being booked for last week and this week to cover all of her classes. I’m hoping that this brings a bit more consistency to the students. One of the biggest issues they face in that school is the fact that it gets judged quickly. Teachers come in from different agencies and have difficult days in the school and immediately cast a judgment. Most of them refuse to ever go back and therefore Bishopsford becomes this school where there are constantly new teachers going in and out. Through my experiences over the last week in the classes there are a ton of amazing students at this school. A lot of kids want to do the work and are quite creative as well. It was a cool experience being able to walk through the hallways and having kids say hello to me and I get to know their names as well. The familiarity helps in controlling some of their classroom behaviour and it builds a bit more trust when I have certain students. Although I’m still not going to be there for the long haul it’s nice to know that if I go back for certain days that at least I’ll still know a lot of the students there. The week itself went really well overall and I won’t get into a ton of specifics about each class but I had a lot of good ones and a few bad ones but great experiences overall. As I said before I’m back at Bishopsford Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday next this week covering the same classes and I actually get to plan the lessons which is pretty cool so we’ll see how that all goes.
The academic side of my life last week as pretty consistent in terms of location but my social life was all over the place! On Monday I realized that the show that I really wanted to see (Krapp’s Last Tape) was closing over the coming week-end so I impromptu bought a ticket and attended the show Tuesday night. I posted a review the next day so please have a look at that for more details about my thoughts.
On Wednesday night I attended the England-France friendly match at Wembley Stadium. As it my second England match I opted not to bring my camera and pay a bit more attention to the match itself. Unfortunately it was quite a bad match indeed. Fabio Capello (England Manager) called up a lot of young players for this match to get some first team experience. As a result they had a lot of problems meshing on the pitch and were outplayed consistently all evening. It was quite cold and raining a bit as well. It got to the point where I was just getting frustrated by the whole deal and left in the 75th minute. It was nice to attend another football match but hopefully the next one will be a bit better in terms of a result.
Thursday night I attended the Protocol Winter Travel Evening. It was an event held in a pub in central London on Chancery Lane where different tour companies attended and talked about their services. They had a ton of flyers available (of which I took many) and I got a free drink and entered into a raffle. Although I didn’t win anything in the raffle I did win….at a free drink? Sure. Although I don’t think I’ll be heading anywhere specifically just yet it’s nice to have the information for future reference.
Saturday ended up being a really cool day. A couple flatmates and I along with others went on a “Dick Whittington Ale Trail” through the streets of London. These are a series of different pub crawl trails that spread throughout different areas of London. You get a map and a stamp at each pub that you attend and if you get five stamps you trade it in for a t-shirt that commemorates your accomplishment. We ended up taking the Blackfriars Trail which led through the City of London (the old part). We went to a lot of pretty cool and old pubs along the trail, along with a few that were not a part of the trail. I took a few pictures and they’ll go up on Facebook soon.
This week coming up is going to be another pretty crazy week. I’m already booked for Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday in terms of work. I’m also attending a Chelsea match on Tuesday night and a Fulham match this coming Saturday. Busy, busy, busy as per usual but I promise to update a bit more consistently you keep everyone updated!
Cheers and love to you all!!!
Erik
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