This week has been a rollercoaster of events and emotions. The week started with a trip to Ilford to meet with yet another Teaching Agency followed by a similar trip to Brentwood straight after to meet with one there. I arrived in Brentwood with 2 hours to spare so I walked to Sainsbury\u2019s with the aim of getting some food. Before I had even set foot inside the store I had a phone call from the guy I met with in Ilford, how did I fancy 4 days\u2019 work this week starting tomorrow? The job sounded good, it was not too far away and he offered me good pay. I accepted the job and called one of my ex colleagues who was going to need to do my reference as quickly as possible so everything could be finalised before 5pm.<\/p>\n
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I had no idea what I would be teaching but I was looking forward to it.<\/p>\n
I arrived at the school before I was due to arrive and went in to find the Deputy Head. She was happy to see me and showed me the room I would be teaching in. The room was nice and big but was quite dull, smelt of paint and had 4 computers just sitting on the side all unplugged. I was then handed the largest bunch of keys ever and was told to make sure the doors were locked at all times.<\/p>\n
I was introduced to more staff as they arrived, mostly TA\u2019s (Teaching Assistants) or HLTA\u2019s (Higher Level Teaching Assistants). There was a SENCo and several other support staff. There was one other Teacher, he was teaching the year 10\u2019s and I was teaching the year 11\u2019s.<\/p>\n
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The way I plan my lessons and what I take into a classroom had to be completely different from what I have become accustomed to. Anything could end up as ammunition; this meant I was definitely not going to put my Holborn Filofax in jeopardy when even a whiteboard marker will be damaged and used recklessly. This week I therefore used my Holborn to write in my first day\u2019s lessons at the end of the day so I knew what we\u2019d done and then made some notes for the next day on their pages. Usually I would have my lesson plans open on the desk in front of me but this week I just had to get all the resources out and lay them out before the students arrived, at least if they threw the resources around they could just be reprinted.<\/p>\n
Rather than having a selection of ICT lessons across the day to plan, all at different levels, I had to plan a variety of different subjects at different levels that would keep the attention of the least enthusiastic student. After all, I<\/em> was Lead Teacher for the entire week.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Not once in the entire 4 days did I have to raise my voice. I know there are a lot of people who would not want to work with this sort of student and a lot that would make them worse. I realise now this is why I was praised so much during the week and I need to seriously look at more positives about how I work than things which are in many ways still haunting me from negative people I have worked with in the past. I also want to develop my curriculum knowledge in other subjects so that I can support and guide my students better. Rome wasn\u2019t built in a day and these students didn\u2019t arrive in this position over night, they have 5 months roughly until they leave school and either get a job or go to college. I hope in those 5 months they can achieve the things they need in order to turn things around for themselves. In the same 5 months I am setting myself the goal of achieving the things I need to in order to go in the direction I want to in my career and also life. Smart goals reached by celebrating every small achievement along the way.<\/p>\n \n Views: 1991 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This week has been a rollercoaster of events and emotions. The week started with a trip to Ilford to meet with yet another Teaching Agency followed by a similar trip to Brentwood straight after to meet with one there. I arrived in Brentwood with 2 hours to spare so I walked to Sainsbury\u2019s with the aim of getting some food. Before I had even set foot inside the store I had a phone call from the guy I met with in Ilford, how did I fancy 4 days\u2019 work this…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,35,41,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-filofax","category-holborn","category-it","category-teaching"],"gutentor_comment":5,"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NTg0-cn","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jarfm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jarfm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jarfm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jarfm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jarfm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=767"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jarfm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":771,"href":"https:\/\/jarfm.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/767\/revisions\/771"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jarfm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jarfm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jarfm.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}