It's all shiny and new

So here I am more than half way through my very busy two weeks - 1 trip to Leicester down, 2 to go.

I have spent the weekend moving house, although the distances involved are pretty short, about 3/4 of a mile actually. However, it's all done and I now have a lovely new flat in the New Hall which I have packed to the rafters with books and kitchen equipment as is traditional for my residences.

More importantly I have met the team of sub wardens who I'll be living and working along side to keep this shiny new hall with its shiny new students in line and all smiles. Best news is that they are a lovely bunch of people and I'm sure we're going to have a cracking year with lots of jocularity along the way. Of course we're all comparing flats and how everybody has set them up whilst preparing for courses and writing up theses. It's weird because the flats are basically all the same. Anyone who has ever lived in a halls of residence would certainly find it hard to find a fault in this accomodation, it's pretty nice.

So for me, I'm back in the North West to carry on with my primary school placement which should see me observing the different age ranges this week and even venturing into the big scary senior school!

Can I go to the toilet?

Well here I am three days in to my primary school placement and I have to say I'm loving it. I am with a year 6 class who are the oldest in the school which means that there's not so much tears and 'accidents' as I hear reported in the staff room at break.

I think going into the primary school is a very clever thing for the Uni to make us do actually because it gets you used to telling off kids, picking them up on bad behaviour and how to praise them. The clear advantage is that the kids are much less likely to thump you if you tell them off!

One thing I am having to get used to is giving the children permission to do things. I find it a very odd notion that I get to decide if a child can go to the toilet or have a drink. Of course I know that most of the time the kids just want to go and mess about or block up a sink but it's still strange. I don't think I have ever had to make so many decisions for so many people.

Besides these rather unusual situations there has been some good successes; I think I managed to teach a kid some division today. I have been trying all week to make a breakthrough with this kid and today with the aid of a humble abacus the penny seemed to drop. It's true what they say; it is a great feeling if you help to open somebody's eyes to something. It also taught me that sometimes kids play up because they don't understand and find a task hard. Once they have a small success they just go on and do even more - its fantastic.

I do appreciate that this is all a but gushy and sentimental but I'm sure this is another reason why we are all dispatched to primary schools to see these first discoveries made and the pleasure that comes along with that for the teacher and the student.

I was told this week that primary school teachers really nurture their own classes and care about them a great deal, I think this is definitely true.

The variety of knowledge that primary teachers require is genuinely astonishing, I doubt you need to know about plant reproduction and gymnastics instruction in one day. And on Friday it's French which I have a funny feeling I might be rather heavily involved in, no doubt making for a pretty interesting blog entry...

On a more personal note it's great to be spending a bit of time with my dad and seeing my mum more than once in a week. Naturally the best bit is that every day when I come home I get three wagging tails waiting for me as three excited dogs leap all over me and try to knock me over, at least somebody loves me....

Day one, new beginnings

Well I guess you could say it has really started now; I'm on my Primary School Placement and all is going well. I'm sitting in with a year 6 class who have a really great teacher. Inkeeping with how I imagine the rest of the course will go it was straight in at the deep end helping with guided reading and a maths class, all very entertaining as I'm sure you can imagine.

The most exciting part was getting to sit with the teachers in assembly. I remember all those years at primary school sat on the floor in neat rows while the teachers had chairs to scowl down on the children. The subject of today's assembly was New Beginnings with a reading from 'The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, which I thought was wholly suitable to my own new beginning. I also approve of the school prayer which advocates looking after each other and ourselves, very admirable indeed I thought.

So to tonight, well I have a few notes to make about the day for a report I have to prepare and will try and get through a few chapters of my book.

Best of all the school is only 100 yards away so I can leave at 8:44 and still get in at a reasonable time - marvellous!

More tomorrow...

Le weekend

As you might imagine I have been spending a fair bit of time lately thinking about my own school days, which I lumped in with my ‘uneventful’ childhood in my first entry. Of course, school is never uneventful and neither is childhood but I think I’m a bit bashful to start delving into those awkward years just yet.

I do remember from school that my first French teacher told me that the French government had tried to stop the people of France using ‘Le weekend’ and to get them to stick to the proper French version. Since we were never taught the proper French version, presumably something along the lines of ‘fin de semaine’, I must assume that their gallant efforts were met with the gallic indifference we have all come to know and love from our nearest neighbours.

By this point you may not be shocked when I tell you that this is a whole weekend entry as I am leaving for Stoke tomorrow with most of my furniture to stay at my dad’s and do my Primary School placement. This should mean that by Monday I will have something more interesting to tell you than random facts about French etymology and the invasion of anglo-culture therein.

Since I am about to have my busiest fortnight for quite some time I have decided to use these last couple of days to enjoy myself and whilst still stuffing all of my random crap into boxes, to relax. With this in mind I accepted an invitation to go for tapas last night with my friend Tim who then moaned at me for not mentioning him in this blog, so there you go Tim!

Actually Tim, if you are reading this I should point out that Bill Bryson who I admire greatly always makes up pseudonyms for his friends when he writes about them so I’m just wondering what I should call you. Obviously Boom Ba! springs to mind but it seems to lack a certain amount of authenticity. Perhaps Windy Miller is more appropriate or Bob a Job which I think is funny. Anyway I will muse on this further and try to come up with a suitable Moniker for you.

As for today, well I’ve just spent a very diverting 20 minutes cleaning the stove top and doing the dishes I have also washed some towels and had a little explore under my bed to see what lurked beneath. Sadly, as I might have predicted it was just stuff I should have thrown away last time I moved. I guess everybody has some things which however advanced and grown up we become, remain comfort blankets and just have to follow us around wherever we might go.

So with these domestic concerns addressed and even more of my life consigned to boxes I am going out to eat again tonight with my chums Emma, Jo and Danny. I believe we are going for a curry, which for those of you who don’t live in Leicester is a real treat as the curry houses in Leicester are great and plentiful. For those of you that came down for my birthday I realise that we went for an Italian, which was a missed opportunity!

What I like about the Indian restaurants here is that there is such a diverse range of options; from modern and trendy looking to the classic flock-wallpaper and dodgy music style. My personal preference is ‘the-more-seventies-the-better’. I think a curry house should involve slightly dodgy décor and a soundtrack that sounds like it is being played backwards.

Sunday, the day of rest, will involve my dad bringing his Landrover and trailer and us trying to get all of my larger items of furniture in, on, under and generally tied to said vehicle for the journey to my dad’s place in Stoke and the associated unloading at the other end. I’m pretty sure that once we’re finished I’ll have the best-furnished (desk, sofa, double bed, chest of drawers, wardrobe etc) bedroom in North Staffordshire, just hope there’s room for me!

Of course the best thing about going home apart from seeing the folks, is seeing my lovely doggies. And so I’ll leave this week’s offerings with some pictures of them for your jealous indulgence.

Have a good weekend and be sure to have a read of Monday’s entry after day 1 of Primary School – perhaps entitled they may be small, but they’re dangerous…..

The last of the blonde bombshells

Well as promised I might in yesterday’s blog I have had a productive day of packing and cleaning and washing so that when I return next week to do the move there will be a lot less to do. As most of my belongings are now in boxes dotted around the house I really feel that the move is imminent and I’m getting really excited about the prospect of returning to halls and, more importantly getting a new flat.

For those of you who have never lived in a university halls of residence the basic premise is that each block will have a designated person to look after them and, ahem, keep an eye on them. I’ve done this for two years previously so I think I know what I’m doing. Although this new hall (imaginatively titled New Hall) will have 700 students and that’s, well, that’s an awful lot.

It’s actually a very nice feeling to be going to something new but with the confidence that I know how to do the job. When I was first a sub warden I worried about what to say to students and how to help them and what would happen when the ‘duty mobile’ rang in the middle of the night. Nowadays I feel like I can handle it, although I’m sure I’ll still have a little worry on my first duty evening.

The pay off is that I really like the idea of it being a brand new hall, ready to set its own traditions and develop its own identity, with a little help from those that know…that’s us, allegedly. I also really like the first day when all of the fresh-faced students arrive, looking excited but a bit nervous. I can remember when I landed on Leicester for the first time and how I felt. Looking back it’s amazing to think what that day was the start of and I hope that it’s the start of great things for all the students arriving at New Hall this year, actually I really do. They just better behave….

The more observant amongst you will realise that the university term doesn’t start for a few weeks and so why all this hurry to get packed and moved? Well I have to spend two weeks in a primary school as a part of my secondary PGCE so as of Monday I will be at a primary school in North Staffordshire learning about primary education and the transition between primary and secondary schools. Since last time I spent any time with primary students one of them tied my shoelaces together, next week could be very interesting indeed.

For those of you who haven’t seen me for a while you might have been surprised to read I am a blondie now. Since premature grey seems to afflict my family I have decided to head it off at the pass and have had highlights for a while. Yesterday, though I went blonder than I have for a while and I really like it! I realised last night that the colour is very similar to my mum’s. Not sure that I could get her into my salon for a colour match, but it does make a change for me to have the same colour hair as one of my parents…..make of that what you will!

Last line of defence

I've just got back from seeing 'The Sentinel', a fairly ordinary American film about a plot to kill the president and the loyalty of the men and women (including Eva Longoria - nice) who protect him. Now this is a fairly pedestrian outing by any standards, no plot development and of course it was all very predictable. So why do the big names still get involved with these projects? There's nothing new here and it strikes me as unlikely that Mr Douglas and Mr Sutherland are in need of the bucks.

My little theory to float to you is that in a way these movies are the last line of defence, if Hollywood wasn't telling us that the most powerful man in the world is safe and loyally followed who else would? Do the power players in Hollywood, and Michael Douglas was a producer and star here, feel it is their patriotic duty to perpetuate a myth of invincibility that really protects American supremacy? And if they do, why do they? I guess it's good box office fodder but surely there are more important things to make films about.

Anyway enough of that stuff, I also went for lunch with a gorgeous blonde today and had my own (now) golden locks retouched and chopped. No real progress made in terms of packing or preparation for the PGCE. Two days of concerted effort are required before the weekend when I head off for my primary placement starting on Monday.

Although I am enjoying this time off the pace of life certainly makes time go slowly so I'm very much looking forward to things picking up and boy are they going to....

Welcome to my world!

Well here I am, finally on the verge of starting my teaching training and I hope to use this little corner of the web to record what promises to be a very interesting journey.

For those of you who just happen across my little blog here's a potted history, the story so far...

After a fairly uneventful childhood in North Staffordshire, with seven years at a not very posh independent school I landed in Leicester in 1999 to do an English degree.

Four years later and with a year in Amsterdam (no, not like that) to boot, I graduated with a first (nobody was more surprised..) and went straight back to do a masters.

The masters was not a massive success but I spent the year as a subwarden in the halls and did graduate with my second degree in 2004.

So there I was BA MA and working in a hotel. Staying local and as a sub warden I had a little adventure in the world of charity work for a well known ambulance charity and all the bizarreness that came along with it.

A year spent away from halls living with a uni friend and five months working at an airport brings us right up to date!

Well I did say a potted history and I have missed out lots of very important people and happenings but I'm sure they'll emerge over the coming months. Keep reading and I'll fill you in...