Finding the ‘bright spots’

I found this post in my drafts – And I think it is worth sharing, even if it is unfinished. Hope you are all finding some bright spots.

For a multitude of reasons, the last couple of months have been a bit tough in my teachy life. Work stresses including two teachers resigning in the space of two weeks, the upcoming teacher strikes, multiple interruptions making it hard to get into a routine and get through work required, report deadlines looming, knowing that some teachy friends are going through some really tough times…. well it has all contributed to a big pile of unhappiness. And those creeping thoughts of  why don’t we look after the people who are still turning up and working hard as well as the people where the wheels have fallen off. The kind of time where it is easy to forget to find the ‘bright spots’ and things I LOVE about working with young people. And ‘old people’ too.

So I thought I’d take some time on a friday night (with a gin in hand after take aways for tea) to write some of these down.

I guess this was mostly highlighted for me this week on Wednesday, when I had 4 out of 24 students arrive for Level 3 Chemistry. The rest where out on a Biology field trip. Bugger this, I decreed – let’s go get a coffee. And so off we went (after leaving a note on the board so if anyone came looking for us they could call my mobile) to a cafe 5 minutes walk from school and they were all ridiculously polite and ordered small drinks and I topped it up with some cakes. And we just talked about future plans, uni or polytech? Gap year? Work? Our international student talked about plans for when she returns to Germany. We talked about travelling, and then about formal dresses and suits (the formal is in 3 or 4 weeks). And it was really lovely to just sit with some exceptional young people and talk, to be able to listen to them.

Another moment was today, P5 on a friday, where my yr 10 Science class are finally starting to see some results from their independent learning around windmills and/or renewable energy generation. Having worked on a high trust model, and given them some space, it did take 3-4 hours for them to settle into the task, but now some of their projects are really taking shape, and they worked pretty solidly with very little input from me for the whole hour today.

Different ‘windmills’ taking shape

I also attended a girls coding event for tech week (which I will cover in another post), watched the girls football team play superbly well for a 4-3 loss, took pleasure in being able to help some people because their need was greater than mine, and also made some progress on the rather long list of things to do.

And this is where I got to…. I can’t remember what I was going to add…. but the windmills were definitely very cool and I was proud of what the students acheived.