That’s it. The year 11s have left school and now they are on their own. Of course, there are still revision sessions in school that they can drop into and they are welcome to come along to ask questions.
Whether many come in for the help is another question. It is quite a strange feeling really. There are certain groups that I teach, you know the ones, where each lesson is very different and the classes contain quite a few characters.
Getting certain students to engage with the lesson or even pick up a pen is a real achievement sometimes. I said goodbye to a few such students last Wednesday after a nice last revision lesson. I told them that I wasn’t going to wish them luck, because luck has nothing to do with it – if they do the revision and put in the hard work they will get the grades they all deserve.
At the end of the lesson, each one of them said thank you to me and I really appreciated that. It shows that even though these teenagers can have bad days and don’t always want to be in your lessons, they do appreciate what you do for them.
School now feels a little bit strange and very empty. There is only year 9, 10 and 13 in school at the moment and so there seems to be a lot of room.
Year 10 have already taken the place of year 11. They seem to have spread their wings a little and are adjusting to being the “top dogs” in the school and year 9 no longer seem to feel like the youngest either.
As for lessons, the flow seems to me to be slowing down. Lessons are now all in preparation for year 10’s summer exams and even though this is a really crucial time it still feels like things are beginning to wind down.
The obvious benefit to this stage of the school year is the gained time I now have due to my year 11 and year 12 groups being on exam leave. As I write, the students have only been gone for two days, but already I feel much more organised.
For a start, I now have 56 less books to mark and worry about – hooray! The next thing I have tackled is my desk. My desk does have a system. To anybody else it may appear to have no system and be a complete mess, but I know where everything is and I know I am not on my own with this approach to desk organisation.
Nonetheless, I decided to utilise some of my spare time and get my work space in order. Everything now has an exact place. I am using trays for different resources and different year groups.
My room is a lot tidier, books have homes that are labelled and everything just feels a lot better. It is one of those jobs that I have been meaning to do, in all honesty, for the past few months but it just wasn’t a priority.
I like to think of this time in the school year as offering a chance to do these kind of jobs – the ones that have always stayed at the bottom of my to-do list.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t have anything else to do though! I have just started the medium term plan for the new GCSE content in year 9 ready for their transition into year 10. This means piecing together lessons and making sure that all the specification outcomes are achieved.
I am going to use as much of this time to get the year 10 lessons planned in preparation for next September.
- SecEd’s NQT diarist this year is a teacher of science from a school in the Midlands.