PeriodOne

My word: end-of-term staff dinners are an experience not easily forgotten. That is, of course, if one remembers them in the first place. In any case, on our last day (and the morning after such a night of revelry), I enjoyed the surreal experience of creeping to my desk in semi-darkness whilst carefully stepping over more senior colleagues foetally curled in deep slumber on the office floor.

Thus initiated, the experience of ending the first year was further heightened by the darkening of the skies (street lights came on!) and the breaking of a storm of truly biblical proportions the likes of which I have yet to witness in London. Of course, coaxing our pupils out into this maelstrom after our early finish was not easy and effectively extending the school year by an hour for staff (now awake) and pupils alike.

I went home and slept until the evening, waking completely disconcerted and confused but with a feeling of wonder which is just about still there a week into the holidays. Let the good times roll! (until September …)

Having just deleted my bookmark for Radio 1 and replaced it with one for Radio 4, I feel that the vitality of youth is slipping away. This is also evidenced by the fact I’m up at 7.00 on Sunday for no good reason. Which in turn has led me to realise that actually, lots of people are up at this time – there are a couple waiting for the light rail train outside my flat right now. And it continues … I’ve been looking out of the window where a church spire is visible. Not content to note this and move on, I’ve just established the location, name and history of the church. What’s that all about? I read several articles in our very local paper with interest the other day. The lack of sofa in the new flat has helped me discover that getting up off the floor is something best planned in advance. And I like the fact that the news on Radio 4 isn’t delivered over a pounding trance beat which gives the impression that the news reader has just nipped out of a night club to complete the broadcast. What’s this? ‘Night’ club? Since when have I found it necessary to specify I mean a club you go to at night? Isn’t that obvious? Apparently not, any more …

Our parent and friends association, like every other school parent and friend association, has an issue with the way the school sets homework. It’s not consistent: nothing comes for weeks then there’s four pieces in for tomorrow; it’s not challenging as length and scope are not specified; and it’s not relevant – tacked-on little tasks to appease anxious parents.

Truth is, in a highly diverse inner-city school where English (in my case) is taught in mixed-ability groupings, no homework a classroom teacher could reasonably set and mark would allow access to those students at the bottom of the ability range whilst stretching those at the top. It’s a logistical impossibility (my colleague, who teaches some 7 year 8 history groups a week, calculated that 5 minutes spent marking each pupil’s weekly homework task would take him around 14 hours) and the fractious arguments with pupils whose homework is missing impacts negatively on those who have completed the task by impinging on contact time with their teacher.

So, homework gets fudged. A creative and industrious department might co-ordinate homework tasks to fit in with subsequent lesson starters, allowing some brief feedback in class to avoid horrendous marking overload, but an average department will set homeworks now and again, get kids to finish off tasks at home, and try and take a look at the books once or twice a term.

So let’s take homework out of the classroom. It doesn’t belong there anyway – the clue’s in the name after all. Cross-curricular projects completed at home and supervised during targeted tutorials at school have the scope to push pupils without limiting access and can be assessed meaningfully at key points during the school year. Exercise books stay in school, and informed teacher will intuitively link their lesson content to the project which their kids are working on. At least, that’s the theory we’ll be piloting next year. And I’ve got some homework to do this weekend – writing the proposal. And yes, it will stretch me.

6 lessons a day / 6 half terms a year. 60 minutes a lesson / 6 weeks in a term (well, seven in this one). So, essentially, the next few days are one long period six plenary. That is an alarming prospect.

Frenzied, desperate creativity grasps me every Sunday morning. Unfortunately, so desperate and frenzied is this urge that I rarely actually achieve anything of worth: in the last hour I’ve started working out plans for some storage furniture (unfinished), subscribed for job alerts from two employers (neither yet confirmed), and, bizarrely, spent about half an hour finding bandwidths and tuning the presets of my radio in order to sate an inexplicable desire to listen to the BBC World Service at the touch of a button (couldn’t find it in the end). Why? It might be some extremely diluted version of the feeling that Alan Johnston recently described upon his release: wanting to see and do everything at once. Of course, the last three weeks of the summer term hardly resemble interminable incarceration at the hands of dangerous and unpredictable lunatics. Hmm. Interestingly, Johnston also mentioned that the World Service kept him going …