Friday, December 22, 2006

Sleighbells in the warm grass...

A Merry Christmas to you all. I'm off skiing until the 30th. (Although given the current state of the Alps we might well be fishing, playing tennis or walking through flower covered meadows)

Anyway, best wishes for the New Year too and may 2007 bring you all lots of laughs and good times.

Rest assured that I shall, on principle boycott any Snowman (whoops, Snowperson) building competition on the grounds that all the entrants are white.

11 comments:

Pogo said...

You must be going to a very posh resort if you can't find any yellow snow!

Anonymous said...

Speaking as one who is working near to the Holy Land, I'd like to point out the difficulty of finding Three Wise Men around these parts. Certainly, none of my students would qualify...

Shell said...

ohhh my! i've just found your blog and, howling masochist that i am, i'll be back often to read you! I'm still recovering from breakdown and ousting in '99 - everything you have described so far is exactly "it" ... am heading off to buy your book in the hope that i may be the hundredth monkey and you'll be able to save yourself immediately! *wry grin*

Unknown said...

Happy Christmas & New Year from a Monday author, book out in May titled `Watching Men Burn` will add you to my Blog.

Drugsblogger said...

Why don't you just pack it all in then? If this blog is a reflection of your real feelings about children and teaching - just leave.

Or does it all just make good material for a lucrative book deal?

Anonymous said...

Drugsblogger.
He did pack it all in, read the blog properly. If you read the book too you would see that he is trying to make a wider audience aware of the problems in schools in order to get something done to help children. From what I've read he cares more about the plight of our children than most of us, and he's had the guts to try and do something about it.
As an author myself I can assure you it is far less lucrative than you imagine.

Anonymous said...

Rather than a reflection of his true feelings about children, I see it more as a true reflection of how children are. We are still expected to deliver a 50s-style education to post-millennium children without even the disciplinary tools our predecessors had at their disposal - and I include parents in that category.

Parents disbelieve teachers' accounts of their children's behaviour because they either accept it themselves at home or they don't accept it and can't believe their children would behave that way anywhere else just because they can.

In the sort of school that Mr Chalk and until recently (I have taken your advice myself and left) I taught in, teachers continue to plod on making the best of a bad job because it's the most they can do under the circumstances; or they decide that to continue to support it is to prop it up and condone it, and they leave, in my case to a new career direction on slightly more than the minimum wage. The staff turnover in my last school was a steady 30% a year, so I presume that the grass must be greener somewhere else.

Anonymous said...

Sorry, meant to add, drugsblogger, I could afford to do that because my last child has almost left University, our mortgage has only 18m left to run and my husband earns enough to keep us both. Otherwise, your blithe advice to "just leave" would be completely worthless.

Cynnie said...

Hiya!..
just wandering through..
You looked interesting ..and you are interesting !
I'll be back darlin..

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