dom.blog

At the end of this week’s Enrichement session this afternoon Rishal and I volunteered to do capsizing as part of getting the One Star Award (you gotta start somewhere). The first time we were rubbish, too keen to get up for air and then ungracefully trying to undo the spray-deck sideways. And belatedly hitting the boat like you’re supposed to. The second attempt was much better – once we grasped that gravity is very useful at pulling you down and out under the water. Cheers, Newton.

Anyway – as you’d expect I was soaking wet and freezing, and thanks to certain laziness on behalf of the minibus driver had to walk all the way home carrying half the canal back in a bag of wet clothes and trainers. But it was worth it!

Yeah, we had an ALIS test today. (Thanks a lot, University of Durham. Don’t you have better things to do?) It’s one of those annoying IQ-type tests where you’re not given enough time to answer the questions, and even if you did have time, you have to be one of those people with spatial awareness to fold the net of a cube in your head. I may have flopped the Maths section too. Not to worry, because it’s only useful for ‘predicting your A level grades.’

Of course, the prediction could be wrong, so the easiest thing to do is ignore any predictions and just get on with the work. Which is what I’m doing this evening – as all my homework somehow built up into a little cascade tonight.

I also felt vindicated at not going to the ‘photo reading’ taster session the school ran on Friday. I strongly suspected from the start it was all a con – and from what I hear I was proved right. Hooray for sceptical thinking! And let’s try and get the words ‘con’, ‘photo reading’ and ‘Marilyn Devonish‘ into Google shall we? All together now…

Today was INSET – giving me the chance to (finally!) catch up on some missing sleep from the Gordon Brown trip last weekend. I got up at the leisurely time of 11, did some Maths homework (there is something very satisfying about solving an equation) ate a Pizza and then set off for canoeing. It was my choice out of the various ‘Enrichment’ activities happening on Wednesday afternoons and a few of us decided to go today on our own. (Technically it’s actually a kayak but meh)

It’s really quite fun going up and down the Sainsbury’s Canal at Ladbroke Grove – learning how to paddle faster, turn round, glide through the water etc. More exciting than learning Latin at least, which was also on offer

And then this evening was Open Evening. The whole Self clan seemed to descend on the school actually… I was helping to take a tour group around, Tash was in the Gym while Mum and Katie went for that exciting ‘move to secondary school’ feeling. Hiten delivered a speech, which was reportedly excellent, while I grabbed a few biscuits (They actually included our ‘high GCSE achievers’ photo in the welcome pack so hey, we’re famous.) It was very polished actually this year – a glossy welcome pack, even a few specially shot videos (with apostrophes in the wrong places). Wasn’t like that in our day!

As I said though – I am now exhausted and will have to sleep so that I’m able to do more school and more Maths homework tomorrow.

OK, I don’t know why I bothered with the whole ‘Year 7 – 11’ thing because Sixth Form is so, so much cooler in every single way. Here’s why!

• Every teacher you have is great. They save them up for Sixth Form and tell them to be friendlier too
• You get your own common room to eat in, instead of perching uncomfortably on the benches outside.
• You also get your own room by the library, with its own exclusive computers, and no uniformed young people in sight!
• Just in case one wasn’t enough, you get multiple teachers for each subject. In the case of History – three!
• You don’t have to wait outside for the bell in the morning – you can go straight in and avoid the crush. That is going to become very useful in the winter.

Lessons are great too. New electronic registration is, ur, having a few teething problems but looks fancy. And I’ve already installed and customised Firefox on my user account (my special extra-privileges account I should add)… because if nothing else, tabbed browsing is vital for research.

Now I’m off – I’ve got a week to read Wise Children…

And so tomorrow it starts, officially. For the first time in ages I’ll be going to bed at a reasonable hour, getting up and then staying up. That’ll be odd.

I’m excited though! Doing nothing for too long gets annoying… and I actually want to be back in the system of tasks to complete by deadlines, work to get done, timetables to follow. And no uniform to wear while doing it I saw the Year 7s (who get a first day on their own) coming out of school today – so small! We were never like that! We were big and grown up…

Nic tells me that in his school, they’ve implemented a new system of ‘mixed age tutor groups’ – and not even the Sixth Formers are safe. That sounds utterly bizarre and my deepest sympathy to anyone having to work in that.