I thoroughly dislike this part of the school year. The wind down to the Summer break.
I’m notorious too for not really using my Summer break well and failing to rest. I don’t cope well with loose time – I don’t ever really know what to do.
Anyway, this coming week sees so many different events that it’s hard to keep up.
Tonight we had our performance from our leaving Year 6 children, which is quite early, but it was lovely. They get to spend the next few days enjoying their time together with less pressure hanging over them. That may also turn them into a total nightmare, but I’m sure we can manage that. They did very well, and I have lots of wonderful memories of them which I shall treasure.
Their performance generates a lot of work, though, as I take photos of their performance and also create a video of it for the school website. Turning it around in time for the end of the school year isn’t easy and these add to my workload. This final week consists mostly of editing video, cropping photos – never photoshopping, but slight editing by focussing on the main parts – and making them suitable for online viewing. I generally aim to get it done within the day. This week, however, we also have a re-scheduled, due to poor weather, Summer Concert, which gets the same treatment but involves the whole school.
That’s four huge projects – two videos, two massive sets of photos to sort – in the space of two days to try and turn around as quickly as possible to not upset parents. There’s also the fact that placing the photos online ages after the event is pretty meaningless too, as the momentum has gone.
Anyway, those are my biggest pieces of work this week alongside teaching full time. I have finally finished the spreadsheet task today too, creating a whole school assessment system for reading, writing and mathematics from scratch in Excel, making it as simple as possible for my colleagues to use. Never a straightforward task, but one that’s been made easier with the support of my head and the knowledge of the people I work with. In the long term, too, it helps that I am around to fix any problems with it that may be thrown up once they are used in real life situations. All the theoretical testing in the world won’t find the problems that teachers inevitably will. I shall cross that particular thorny bridge when it happens!
