Today was supposed to be the most depressing day of the year, and it certainly started off that way. Walking to school in the freezing cold, a Science test from 1997 (with little-to-no relevance to our current syllabus) and suddenly I find myself unable to write or spell. Great.
But the wheel started to turn in History where, get this, our teacher was smiling! You can’t imagine what an achievement this is. And not only that, but homework deadlines magically get extended to tomorrow. In English we did lots of nice talking and listening, and no writing. And then both my MCP exam and Maths coursework get their deadlines pushed back too. Woo hay! I can breathe!
And despite the rain and the snow (which didn’t stick around long) it turned out to be a pretty good Monday 24th. And blocking the IP address of a nasty comment spammer was fun too. The mark of the beast isn’t 666, it’s 67.19.91.50.
Oh, and the BBC are re-launching their wonderful Radio player tomorrow. Miss it, miss out! (Random fact – I remember when MIMO was Live and Kicking’s slogan, and would be repeated endlessly at school.)
That’s how I went to school today. I’ve realised that it’s the only way to get better – just get up, grit your teeth and get on with the day. The minute you decide to lie in bed all day you could be out for a week.
And I really don’t have a week to spare. My current TODO list has 11 items on it, and that’s a conservative estimate. I’ve got an MCP 70-270 exam on Friday (eek!) and I need to cram my head with Windows XP knowledge before that.
Oh, and one more thing. I am not going on the Eton summer school visit. I don’t care if the people are lovely, or if we get free tea and biscuits, I am not losing a week of my life to go visit Prince Harry’s friends. If they’re really desperate to meet real people, why not come down to London for the day? Better not – email me instead.
At the stupid new policy of forcing you to wear uniform on Progress Review Day.
And on a serious note – this is the only way to do protests. Have fun, it’ll work better than being boring and rude.
I was told today that I write as I speak. Not sure if it was a compliment or an insult, but there you go, it’s made me all self-conscious and I’m spell-checking everything. Anyway…
Another thing I was told today came from my History teacher who kindly informed us, five minutes before the end of the lesson, that the two pieces of coursework we had been working on since, oh I don’t know, June, could only be 1,500 words long each. Now I just ran a word count, and I’m at 2,744 and 5,500 words. Not good. And before you start blaming me for waffling on, I’ve actually got to put more detail into some of them! Writing to a word count is a necessary skill, writing to a word count you don’t know about is not.
How many marks would they really knock off in practice? I think I’ll just take my chances to be honest – it would be impossible for me to hack them down and not lose marks anyway. Maybe I’ll put on my CV: “Main Weakness – Doing too much work.”
Our form tutor has some very finely honed skills in the field of emotional blackmail. Apparently, we all have to be nice all of sudden, and fetch registers \ file SMILE cards etc. I’m so sick of those damned cards after five years of this now, I think there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that whole-class teaching in Maths might be a better idea, especially for the later years.
Still, we get the regular ‘Progress Review Day’ on Tuesday. Whoever invented this, I salute you, Sir. Going into school for a mere 10 minutes should win some kind of award. On the downside, you do have to think of these bizarre targets to set yourself.
Helen on It’s (waiting) time.: “Fabulous news, congratulations to you both! X” Jun 8, 21:51
