this week we are supposed to mark the junior exams which were done last week and provide reports on all the juniors. My thought on that is Ha Ha. On Monday we had a teacher only day which was okay but boring. Sort of more of the same. Not enough real useable techniques to take back to the classroom, and far too much 'research' and 'philosophy'. It might be interesting to listen to that kind of stuff for about an hour, but four or five is dreadful.
Yesterday I was part of the team that did an orientation day for next years form three/year nine students. It was okay, the kids were busy for the day but the worrying thing was the numbers. Only forty kids signed up for next year so far, which means we will not have a viable seventh form. We have a pretty high drop out rate as they go off to jobs like shearing and stocking supermarket shelves and apprenticeships but that means there will be less and less of a job for me in the time to come unless we suddenly get a increase in enrollments.
The science exam last week was a lot of a disaster, and marking it is just as bad as it is so disorganised.
Posted by Toni at November 22, 2006 06:15 AMYesterday we had a staff only day to go over the new draft curriculum document. Mind Deadening.
Posted by: giffy at November 22, 2006 10:14 AMYes, that was the second half of our PD day. Deadening sums it up nicely. And it seems a bit like something else to shove onto schools. Now even the cirriculum is not centrally controlled, but is part of the school's policy documents. Something else for ERO to hit schools with, and something else for teachers to do, while the Ministry itself gets even larger and does less.
Posted by: toni at November 22, 2006 08:23 PM