What's all this then?


I tweet too much. So I needed somewhere else to start storing all the words. This is it. Think of it as the external hard drive for my thoughts.

I don't have an obesssion, a dream, a fixation or a hook, so don't be expecting a focus here. It's like great big lumps of my twitterings. You may see teaching stuff, rants, maternal anxiety and occasional sojourns away from reality.

Anyway, I like a nice chat so we should talk. By we, I of course mean me...

Sunday 20 June 2010

In the beginning...

I wasn't always a teacher, it just feels like it. The Brighton Rock of professions, it tends to write its way through your personality. However, it has made me happier than most jobs ever could and now I'm bowing out it's like someone changing my name (not telling) or the colour of my eyes (mostly red). It's making me think back on 12 years of trying to make learning happen and it's making memories leap out with more energy than I currently possess.

It will of course be the kids that I remember.

Some kids stick in your memory forever. Some make you wake in the night in a cold sweat as you relive the moment they grabbed the rounders bat, others make you wonder wistfully what became of that little Botticelli angel (he grew into a 6ft Sports Student).

There are the kids whose actions make you love them forever. Like Joe. Who used to hang from the electric hand dryer in the boys' loos, wind in his hair, yelling "Arrrrrrgh! Crocodile attack!" and who explained to the whole class what insemination was despite my best efforts to stop him. Others will remain in your mind because that is what they desperately need: someone to remember them, to be thinking of them. These are the kids that write to you after you've gone... "Dear Miss Bird, school is boring and so is Mrs Plant. Are you coming back?"  There are the kids who you remember because remembering is what you do when they're not around any more. And there are the little blighters who make you want to bang your head on the table to block out the time they announced in the Holy Communion lesson that "Joseph was very angry cos he thought Mary was having sex with another man".

Then you remember the kids that had you saying the most ridiculous things. "Put your clothes back on please lads, I'm old enough to be... well, frankly unimpressed". "Are the police here yet? Because he's up a tree now and he's still got the blue paint." ...It was an EBD school.

And when I remember, I smile. Because they were proper kids. And they turned me into a Teacher, which is different to being someone who teaches.