{"id":2258,"date":"2009-05-29T00:52:30","date_gmt":"2009-05-29T00:52:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/teachingexpertise.flywheelsites.com\/index.php\/2009\/05\/29\/planning-balancing-act\/"},"modified":"2009-05-29T00:52:30","modified_gmt":"2009-05-29T00:52:30","slug":"planning-balancing-act","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.teachingexpertise.com\/articles\/planning-balancing-act\/","title":{"rendered":"planning &#8211; Balancing Act"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Did last week seem like\u00a0a 4-day week??<\/p>\n<p>Well quite aside from what to call the upcoming holiday (I&#8217;ve taken to calling it the fake\u00a0&#8216;Easter&#8217; holidays) is the question of whether it&#8217;s a holiday at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve got to teach 4 days of GCSE revision, plan Key Stage 3 revision and (fairly importantly)\u00a0prepare for a Deputy Head interview (oh, read back for my thoughts on the joys of being an <strong>internal candidate<\/strong>).<\/p>\n<p>I find myself agreeing with Beverley&#8217;s <strong>comments<\/strong>\u00a0on another post and wishing that I could go to a website somewhere and find a list of possible interview questions for posts on senior leadership team.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s geting to be that time of year again so perhaps I&#8217;ll support my readers and start a list of questions for Assistant Headteacher jobs as I&#8217;ve been for 4 interviews (this is my second job at that level).\u00a0 That list will have to be in my next\u00a0posting because i haven&#8217;t even handed in my application form and need to get it finished!<\/p>\n<p>The summer break is long enough to catch up on things you should have done in the Summer Term, completely relax and then move on to things you want to do during the autumn. \u00a0 It\u2019s the start of the second week of the holiday\u00a0and I\u2019ve finished marking my Year\u00a010 coursework.\u00a0I\u2019ve also\u00a0emptied my laptop of all documents.\u00a0I\u2019m changing schools and so those are the last jobs I needed to do in order to feel I\u2019ve been a good colleague to whoever inherits my teaching groups or laptop. \u00a0 I\u2019m just coming to the end of the visits to the dentist, optician, etc.\u00a0My car\u2019s had a \u00a3500 service (don\u2019t ask!).\u00a0I\u2019ve booked the hotel for our wedding anniversary weekend.\u00a0So although I have a few planning meetings for my new school still to come,\u00a0I feel at a loose end. \u00a0 More than ever this year I want to have a (school-related) project.\u00a0The cynical part of my mind suspects this is so I don\u2019t get around to my home-related project of painting the bathroom.\u00a0I started that job at the same time as I started applying for jobs.\u00a0Funnily enough I now have a new job but still have an unpainted bathroom. \u00a0 I\u2019m not sure I\u2019m brave enough to try to consolidate my teaching materials.\u00a0Every year (for 12 years now) I\u2019ve said I\u2019ll put all my \u2018number\u2019 stuff in one place and then sub-divide into categories such as fractions, types of number, percentages, and then start on the \u2018algebra\u2019 stuff. \u00a0 I\u2019m going to have to synchronise all my electronic teaching materials as well.\u00a0They are currently scattered on\u00a0three memory sticks, a PC and two portable hard-drives.\u00a0However, it would make life simpler and my planning more effective if I only had to look in one place to find my indices pairing game! \u00a0<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re changing jobs this summer, how are you spending the holiday?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Checklist for today<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Mark the Year 10 graph homeworks that I found at the bottom of my bag on Sunday evening \u2013 they&#8217;ll never let me live down having two weeks &#8216;off&#8217; and not marking their work.<\/li>\n<li>Produce a list and schedule for the photographer of our new school prospectus. He&#8217;s not coming until the middle of May but he needs the list this week \u2013 <strong>I don&#8217;t know why<\/strong>, I think he needs to check I&#8217;ve got enough Sports, ICT and other exciting things on my list.<\/li>\n<li>Find the Head and explain I&#8217;ve got a job interview on Friday. I can do this bit but I cannot explain why I didn&#8217;t tell him I&#8217;d applied to another school. Whoops \u2013 never mind, cross your fingers for me! Nothing much would change with my blog I&#8217;d just be the assistant head in a different mixed comprehensive school!<\/li>\n<li>Start planning a 10-minute presentation on &#8216;What makes an excellent lesson&#8217; \u2013 guess what that\u2019s for! Why do they make you jump through such hoops? I can add that one to <strong>my earlier post<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<li>Prepare my study skills session for Year 11. They&#8217;re off timetable for a double lesson tomorrow. There&#8217;s a team of 10 or so staff delivering a high-energy session to small groups of students, reminding them of things like SQ3R and mind-mapping and how to set up a room for study. Luckily we&#8217;ve plenty of resources from <strong>The Life Skills Company<\/strong> to help us.<\/li>\n<li>I know I should have planned this in the holidays but I left my folder in school and forgot to pick it up when I was doing Easter revision. I am only human!<\/li>\n<li>Teach three lessons and hold a line management meeting. I have planned these, and the line management meeting will be okay although it means one less free period in which to do all the other items on this list.<\/li>\n<li>Stay awake through coursework moderation \u2013 nothing worse than reading more or less the same thing but in different handwriting 10 or 15 times, except possibly reading it 20 or 30 times when I&#8217;ve marked it. Bring on the end of coursework!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Oh that&#8217;s enough, surely!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Did last week seem like\u00a0a 4-day week?? Well quite aside from what to call the upcoming holiday (I&#8217;ve taken to calling it the fake\u00a0&#8216;Easter&#8217; holidays) is the question of whether it&#8217;s a holiday at all.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve got to teach 4 days of GCSE revision, plan Key Stage 3 revision and (fairly importantly)\u00a0prepare for a Deputy &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ub_ctt_via":"","_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Admin","author_link":"https:\/\/www.teachingexpertise.com\/author\/webdev\/"},"featured_image_src_square":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.teachingexpertise.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2258"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.teachingexpertise.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.teachingexpertise.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.teachingexpertise.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.teachingexpertise.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.teachingexpertise.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.teachingexpertise.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.teachingexpertise.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.teachingexpertise.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}