Staff meeting number 1

In form 3 physics we have spent the past week downstairs in the lab making circuits. I really like to take them outside of the classroom and get them doing something because I teach them at the end of the day. They are tired and sleepy and I probably would be the same if I was sat in their classroom all day. It has been the first time I have taught boys so that is an experience. There were girls that seemed like boys in my last school but not many of them. The boys are easy enough to teach. They like to do practicals a bit more than the girls but other than that, they are just the same as the girls.

I had my first Guyanese staff meeting yesterday since I have been back. I was expecting something slightly more organised than the chaos that went on in region one. It was slightly more organised. We had to take a lot of moans from senior leadership who kept referring us to the staff handbook. By the end of this, a few of us were getting frustrated. We keep being asked to clamp down on behaviour, punctuality and uniform but there are no systems to do this consistently across the whole school. One of the other teachers used to work in the Bahamas so, together, we built a mini-alliance to advocate the use of a computer system to do registers, grade tracking and behaviour tracking. SLT said they are looking into it.

A lot of the teachers moaned about the canteen selling sugary drinks again. Apparently they have started to re-sell them because the kids were ordering food from outside that contained sugary drinks anyway; “It was a losing battle.” I completely disagree with this point. SLT asked us if we had any alternatives. I said about schools in UK with water only policies, at which point, everyone laughed at me.

Although I don’t feel like I am in the position to suggest change at this school, it is so frustrating to see a collection of brilliant teachers teaching brilliant students without the support of a team within which we could all be working. Each teacher is like their own army when it comes to their jobs.

I woke up at 0615 this morning. The sun was slowly starting to heat up as I was sat on the balcony watching the homeless guys wake up on the field. I ate my philadelphia on toast as they started yawning and stretching. I always think about how badly they must get attacked by mosquitos and wonder if there is a worse place to be homeless.