There IS a pot of gold!

All in all, this week’s been brilliant. Everything’s coming together at work, my colleagues and (most of the) students are great, and I finally feel I know what I’m doing. I feel like I’ve been at my new school forever, but in the best possible way.

It has been relentlessly hard work and any ‘free’ time has been spent learning how to do yet another new thing or phoning parents and answering emails, but I think I’ve pretty much done whatever I’ve needed to. Next year, when my lessons are all ready-prepared, life should be a lot easier.

The worst bit of this week was that, while the photographer was in taking the students’ photos, all us staff had to get ours done, too. I thought this was something to do with updating our records but it turns out that the school just thought we’d like to have a nice, professional photo of ourselves, which we can do whatever we like with. I hate having my photo taken, and I look my usual highly unphotogenic self in mine, but I appreciate that it was a nice thing for the school to do.

The best thing was that my head of department came in unexpectedly to observe several of my lessons. Heads of department ‘pull no punches’ when giving feedback and will pick up on any little thing as where you need to improve but I had no negative feedback at all - even with the one where she walked in as I was dancing to the skeleton song!

Everything was positive and she said she’d really enjoyed my lessons. In her words, I ‘smashed it’. I’m not sure I’d go that far - and I’m sure many things will go wrong in the future - but, if you’d told me three weeks ago that I’d be in such a relatively good place already, I’d have said you needed your head examined ! ;-)

Btw, sincere apologies for my lack of commenting, it’ll get worse before it gets better!