Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Miscellaneous drivel...

Well the official notification from GTTR (the Graduate Teacher Training Registry) finally arrived on Monday. It has taken me until today to finally log on to track my application's progress. Last year I was checking every 5 minutes. Let's wait and see what happens. I'm a bit nervous since I have applied for Primary Education with a Spanish specialism and I think they get a native speaker to phone you up and speak to you in Spanish before inviting you to interview. My Spanish was never exactly brilliant but I would be hard pressed to hold a conversation in the present tense these days! Would you believe that they didn't do any such thing when I applied to do Secondary! So presumably it is OK to not be able to speak the lingo if you are hoping to teach it to A Level students but not if you are looking to teach little tots in Year 6! Of course, as I always say, you just sneeze and find yourself on a secondary PGCE course. I think these primary courses with a language are funded partly by European Union money so you have to do a month long placement in Spain and 'buddy' up with a Spanish trainee. I must admit, I don't relish the prospect of leaving the family behind for a month but if that is what's needed I'll just have to bite the bullet. Anyway, there's a long way to go before then.

At work, I am currently supervising the kids who are doing mock speaking exams as they prepare their role play. Several days of being cooped up in a small room with two lads (a different two every 10 minutes) and issuing instructions which are getting more like the air cabin crew safety instructions by the hour. There is the odd thing to break the monotony - such as the delightful little blighter who left his calling card in the room when he went off to his exam. It was the smell of pure fear, I think! What is it about teenage boys? Do they all have defective flatulence retention reflexes? And what on earth do they eat?

I've got this 'thing' on at church tomorrow. It's a poetry evening. People come along and read their own poems or their favourites and we try to get some musicians to do a little musical interlude now and again. I've done a little PowerPoint to some music and I am a bit anxious about it. PowerPoint never seems to run the same on different machines. They all run at different speeds and synchronising the words and pictures is a nightmare. I think I've sorted that now but we've only just acquired a projector. I don't know how to sort out the audio side of things so I am hoping someone will be able to link the thing up to an amplifier. I will have to take advice. Anyway, I've been out to buy the wine so the key is to get everyone at least mellow so that they won't even notice! (Is that ethical, in a church?)

Of course this Thursday is a lousy night for me to have to be involved in something like this. Given a choice I would have preferred Wednesday of next week. I will have to dash home at the end and sort out a bag of clothes. I am off to Newcastle straight from work on Friday to see my baby girl up in Newcastle. We're gonna have a girly weekend together. So that's something to look forward to.

C.

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