Paradise Lost

The protagonist of this epic is the fallen angel, Satan. Seen from a modern perspective, it may appear to some that Milton presents Satan sympathetically, as an ambitious and proud being who defies his creator, omnipotent God, and wages war on Heaven, only to be defeated and cast down. www.wikipedia.com (Can't plagiarise when I shout at the kids for doing that)

Any resemblance to events currently taking place at the school are purely ficticious and bear no resemblence to any living person.(Well maybe...)

The fight will go on, so I heard today, through committee discussion, I wont hold my breath. So while I wait for confirmation of my contract, its just a matter of getting on with it. (Though I have been in contact with Dubai and my applicationn is in so I live in hope).

Today my classes were all away on a visit which meant I had no classes of my own but did manage to pick up a cover for a grade 11 class, I couldn't really object. I always seem to get South American Social Anthropology, the kids were great they did nothing for the whole period apart from socialise and talk which I took was as close to being social and anthropological as they were going to get. I did make a point of sarcastically thanking them for all their efforts and hard work just before the bell rang, sadly sarcasm isn't something that works very well when English is your second language, so really it was wasted ... ah well.

Printed off the School Layout ready for the Grade 8 Project, I used the www.BlockPosters.com programme (It really is good) splits any JPG file up into whatever number of pages you want to print it out as. To make the Image large enough for the kids to actually Model on, where the models are a reasonable size, I had to print the map on 72 pages of A4 which now have to be stuck together. This will result in a Map thats about 3m by 2m in size (Will need to get the 72 pages photocopied 4 more times though so each class has their own map to work on. Its ambitious but could be outstanding if the kids get into it, particularly if we can incorporate some simple electronics.

Tomorrow is the short period day which isn't to bad, though I do wonder what the meetings will be about, since no one will be in any mood to work on school spirit and ethos when the School Board are playing hardball.

No doubt kids will be up in arms tomorrow as they have access to their grades already via the internet and bound to be a few who don't like what they get, its a good learning experience though.

Todays thought.... Longer teaching hours does not help improve pupil learning, Committed, motivated professional teachers do that.
Shame this school is being squeezed by professionals who should really know better particularly when they are products of the same system. The only ones that will suffer are the kids, a straw poll showed 40 staff would not renew contracts next summer if this proposal goes through, and then they have to consider if they can get replacement international teachers. I am pretty sure there arn't many who will give up 6 weeks summer break for 4 weeks, and an October break for a working week and a salary that is a 1/2 what they earn in UK just so they can teach good kids in Colombia. I could be wrong of course.