Full circle

Starting to write about another staff training day, I realised that I began the blog a year ago. 92 posts and a couple of thousand views later (thank you for reading, by the way - I do appreciate the visits by humans a lot more than the somewhat suspect sites that drop in occasionally), I've found this has been a bit more than just writing practice for the OU course I was doing. It's been nice to become part of the blogging community that's around. Reading other blogs has shown me what's going on in all sorts of places - it's interesting to find out about other people's everyday lives, and I hope that reading about mine hasn't been too boring. 

So, back to today and preparing for the new school year. Thankfully we're not expecting any nightmare children in the class this year (hmmm, no, that's not actually true, I've just remembered one I'd been trying to forget). Last year's horrors will, I think, be in for a bit of a shock at high school on Thursday. We did try to turn them into decent people, but they weren't having it, so bring on the detentions and raging high school teachers. 

A lot of this morning was spent discussing how the words on our school 'vision' needed changing. (The school vision is basically a poster which advertises the fact that our school is a nice place to be and that we don't beat up children.) So we tried out lots of phrases and words which were just different ways of saying what was already there. One teacher made the bizarre suggestion that all the words should start with 'c', because we are a church school and 'Christian' starts with a 'c'. For some reason, this suggestion was taken seriously by some. 'Caring..., creative..., ummm...,' okay, that idea was ditched. After the best part of an hour, it was decided that we'd actually leave the vision just as it was. So we stopped for coffee before moving on to the second item on the agenda. I have to admit that I took very little part in the discussion. I just looked at the clock and thought how I could have spent an extra hour in bed. 

Tomorrow is another staff training day. This time we have to go to another school and be taught how to discipline children who pick on others who are gay or disabled. I have a hunch we might already know how to do that, but the boxes must be ticked. These training sessions alongside other primary school staff make us behave just like children. We refuse to mix with staff from other schools, pretend that we're listening and watch the clock till it's break time. When we leave, we moan about the training and say what a waste of time it all was. 

I had actually intended writing about our holiday in Cornwall today, but the words had a mind of their own and took me in a different direction, so I'll try and do that next time. Because we did have a good time, and I didn't chicken out of doing the longest zip-wire in England.