"Ding, dong... etc"

Today we’re “signing off” the students portfolios from the first four week block. They ought actually to be doing a City and Guilds exam at the end of the next block, so the mind is concentrated somewhat. It will be a “challenge” to get them though the exam, but the attempt will be really interesting. At last I’m beginning to feel that what I’ve been learning with my MA, - what I learned in my last FE job, and over the last ten years of teaching, too – is beginning to pay off. It’s possible to look objectively at a group of learners, at the examination they are to do, and to try to stitch those two abstractions together.

What I think I’m saying is that there’s an externally verified goal we’re working to. Success or failure in that is almost as vital to me as it is to them. I cannot say, for example, “Well, Farouk is lazy, that’s why he failed”, because Farouk’s laziness is a matter for me as his teacher.

We are beginning to breathe easier. I hadn’t realised how bullied we felt until this morning. LM confessed as much, a bit shamefacedly, without any prompting from me. I’ve spent more time talking today about work to T3 than in the last two weeks or so put together. There’s a feeling that the war is over, and we can get back to work.

I asked LM whether she jumped or was pushed. She jumped, and wrote a long letter of resignation castigating him. He’s a fairly well centred bloke, but it’s clear he’s a bit upset about the whole affair. She was the sort to get under your skin. I lost some sleep last night, which wasn’t due solely to the strange, strong winds which came and went mysteriously in the small hours, rattling my bedroom door so that I had to wedge it shut with some folded paper.

It’ll be a relief to know that TOHH is actually out of the country. I’m drafting this between lessons at work, with no internet connexion, to post when I get home. It’s absurd, but one feels that the birds will sing more sweetly if she’s not there when we get back.

In the course of a discussion about what-went-wrong, LM said that he felt that the application procedure was wrong. I had to do a task – prepare a lesson plan for a given teaching point for a fictional class. TOHH didn’t do that – management had objected that it was putting too many candidates off, whereas LM thought that that was the point: to weed out the idle and incompetent. I think he was probably right and that’s one of the lessons I’ve learned from the TOHH debacle.