Pay Negotiations

I just spent about 15 mins negotiating my rate of pay for the next 6 weeks with my agency. Nothing really out of the ordinary there, but the stupid thing was we both knew what the agreed rate would be before we started discussing it, we just both played this silly bluffing game in order to reach it. Agencies are kind of wierd. I reckon they're often big liars and trickers. Kind of like used car sales people, except leasing out people for allotted times. I tried to do it without going through agencies initially but to no avail. Oh well.

We're off to the Lakes district this weekend, school holidays for a week as well, followed by 4 days back at school then 2 weeks in France!! Shivers! My contract requires me to give 1 days notice if I can't be at school, but I try to be a bit nicer than that.

I'm going to be at the same school now till the summer holidays. It's good being able to anticipate the situation for a while. Still some hugely challenging kids though, I guess it will be good being able to mould their behaviour for the next 6 weeks (expectation is my enemy, flexibility is my friend).

And now you too can impress your friends by drawing a cool tank!

A cool thing that happened today.

There has been some really good things about supply teaching so far, the problem is, these often get a bit overshadowed by the tough stuff. Well today I was in my class supervising a study period with only a few students. There was a little kid outside having his early lunch, he didn't have any mates, so I invited him in and I taught him how to draw tanks. He was pretty stoked about it all.

Another week

Last thursday I had a bit of a job interview at a flash school in London, it was all pretty stressfull. I was so blinken nervous, and unfortunately didn't walk out with a job. I don't know how I would have handled the field trips to Costa Rica anyway. So still looking for a job for September.

I went to a nice Catholic Girls school for a few days earlier this week, kind of wierded me out a bit. When I got home at the end of the second day, I realised that I had ink sprayed on the bum of my pants. Nice work.

A couple of wierd/funny things

1: I taught a kid with torretts syndrome yeasterday... no where near as glamourous as tv makes it out to be, just really hard work for the two of us. Poor fella.
2: I taught dance the other day, the mysterious thing was that none of them turned up, the magical disappearing dance class.
3: I was sitting in a staff room and a huge conga line went dancing past, complete with a boy playing a giant euphonium.
4: Trying to control a very noisy/low ability class today in the library. Reading time. After asking a young girl 5 times to get herself a book and start reading, she finally gave me an exasperated look, stood up and said, "right, so where are the books?" I advised her to perhaps open her eyes, as nicely as I could.
5: In the same class, due to a lazy lady taking my name at the office, I was introduced as 'Mr Read' (rather than the combination of the two), a kid looked up at me in the most innocent way and said "so I guess you like books then". It's amazing how clever some kids can be.