3 days of the condor

05Feb09

That condor moment

If it’s Thursday it must be a snow day, the third this week. I’m not keen on snow (not keen on much of anything), but since becoming a teacher I’ve learned to take it as a blessing. An extra day off work in the dark half of the year is not to be sniffed at, even if it’s a day on which you can’t do anything or go anywhere.

I live at the top of a hill, and we rarely see a gritting lorry, though we live next door to a school. The school I work at is 16 miles away, a rural route, so you can imagine: even if it is gritted, the traffic’s not really heavy enough to grind the grit into the snow or ice.

What was funny about this week, my school was being reviewed by a county council team. All the experienced teachers were stressed up to their eyeballs. I was fairly stressed, but only because my wife was so uptight and miserable. I’ve always had the attitude with these things of bring it on, and a determination not to do anything too special. It’s one of the unfortunate side effects of inspection/review systems that people very quickly start to game them, so that all inspectors end up with totally unrealistic impressions and expectations about what goes on in schools.

So the school produces an elaborate lesson plan, full of check boxes and categories, that you’re supposed to complete for every lesson. This is the kind of thing a school inspector sees all the time, but the reality is that experienced teachers know what they’re doing and don’t do much planning at all, other than to have a vague roadmap of what they need to cover by which date. I’m not that experienced, but even I often “plan” a lesson by flicking through the newspapers in the library first thing in the morning.

So I scribbled a few things on the elaborate lesson plan sheet, but I didn’t do a thorough job, and I didn’t do any of the other things that the school’s management “helpfully” suggested, which were all the kind of things that no teacher in the real world has any time to do. I wondered what the chances were I would be visited or observed during the 3-day review, and figured I didn’t have much to worry about. I tidied my classroom, which I have to do periodically, but it had already started to look messy again – with the added bonus that I no longer know where anything is, because I tidied it away.

Then it snowed, so we had Monday off. Normally you’d revel in an extra day off school, but my wife was so uptight and stressed out that it was impossible to enjoy. She was convinced the review would be postponed, which would mean we’d all have to go through it again in a few weeks’ time. And the school was closed Tuesday (no other thing for it: icy rural roads and ancient double-deck school buses don’t mix), but at the end of Tuesday we learned that the Review team had been in at the school even though there weren’t any students and even though most of the staff weren’t in. Hilarious: just goes to show that school inspections – while they purport to focus on the quality of the education being delivered to the students – do nothing of the kind. It’s all about systems and paperwork and covering your back so the Daily Mail don’t get outraged. Again.

So, all that stress for nothing, really, and we had just one day at work with the review team around, and then it snowed again, a thick blanket this time. I could go out and give myself a heart attack clearing the drive, or I could light a fire.

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Tags: snow days