For all my teaching peeps!!!

Just thought i'd fill you in on what i've figured out with teaching here & what it is like for me.

This is how it goes...
The school works on a 2 week time table (Much like Mt Albert, way back when I was just a young thing, Tehehe), 6 periods a day, although monday and friday have 5 with the fifth being a tutor class for an hour (Form Group) in which they do stuff like health etc... Wednesday 5&6 is an elective short course, anything really from chess playing (For Scoll-dog) to creating a Doctor Who monster, teachers seem to get randomly assigned to these, unless you put your hand up to take something in particular.

I have 10 different classes on my time table to teach. Really i only teach 8, 2 are support (I go support another teacher in their class). So I have 2 x Y13 Phys doing A2 level, 2 x Y12 Phys doing AS level, 2 x Y11 Phys doing GCSE (one doing triple science (more science like doing phys, chem & bio seperate) and on double (doing a more general science course)), 3 x Y10 Science (2 of these are support ones) and 1 Y8 science (School starts at this level i think?). Seems a lot, but My year 13 classes have 6 and 8 students in them, my Y12 have 11 students each i think (haven't seen them all yet because of snow days). Y11 classes are about 25 so a bit more normal.

The Y12's and 13's are in the 16+ unit which runs along side the school, they do courses there a bit like uni work and come across to the normal school to do classes when it fits the teachers time tables.

This is the kind of cool bit, I see most class 2-3 times a week, this isn't all the science they get, they are with other science teachers for another set of periods, each teacher doing their own topics, usually their speciality subject. Even my Y13 physics class has 2 physics teachers, we teach different topics within physics each. Seems an excellent idea to me for general science at least, can't see the point so much for physics only senior course.

Seems we have 5 technicians to a teaching staff of 10 ish as best as i have been able to count so far. Orders must be done a week in advance, but they will come and set things up etc...

Relief is simple, they have a massive independent learning room with about 200 computers in it, you set a research task or something along those lines and they go and do it, so as a teacher you never have to do relief and their are no relievers in the school, just permanent staff in the room. You can also book out some computers for a class if you want. The science department also has a small room with about 15 computers in it.

All staff computers are portals, ie; your "personal desktop" is stored on the server, you can pull that up onto any machine around the school with all your work, email and student management thingy. You can also pull it up at home, haven't tried that yet as i only just got my new laptop.

That's about all i can think of for now, sorry to all my non-teaching peeps, probably wasn't that interesting...