On Sunshine

The spring is now officially here. We’ve changed the time, the sun is shining, the birds are singing – although none of them are coming to my brand new bird feeder Paul got me cause the goldfinches in his parents’ garden kept stubbornly refusing to feed when I was watching.
Last weekend we’ve spent a few glorious hours in the garden playing Scrabble – the initial plan had been to go fly our kite, but Paul’s foot does not yet allow for him running.
And in just 5 days I will be in Aix, sipping Pastis on Papi’s balcony warming my bones in the Provencal sun.

In the meantime, however, it’s the last week of school and last week of school means that try as you might, they will not co-operate. My lovely year 7s today were totally appalling when all I wanted them to do was a brief exercise summing up the most frequent mistakes I found in their books, which was supposed to be followed by a film. Yeah right. The film didn’t happen, cause the exercise didn’t either. I ended up going with them to their registration after school and having the Head of Year give them a proper bollocking. To my lovely year 7s. Seriously.

But then in my Year 9 Spanish group I have this boy with ADHD, whom I used to be sending with work to the Behaviour Manager every lesson, cause he made it absolutely impossible for me to teach. And lately he’s been just lovely. Yes, still fidgeting and still problematic but doing all his work and nothing compared to what it had been before. The Behaviour Manager would not believe me when I told him how good he’d been. And today they were doing posters about Spain using words of their choice and he came up with this absolutely amazing piece of work that I’m definitely going to laminate and put up on my wall. When I told the Behaviour Manager, he said that I must be doing something right, cause he gets just complaints from all his other teachers. That’s a lovely thought and it made me feel really good about myself for a while. But then I realised that Spanish being their second language, I have 15 of them, not 30, so I have time to give the boy all the attention he needs. But then again – it’s probably also because it’s the right kind of attention. So it could be not only about the group size. Maybe I am doing something right!