On home stores and more

I love home stores. They make me dream of nesting and hominess, and oh...

We have Paul's exchange French teacher coming to stay with us on Tuesday, so we finally decided to sort the guest cupboard a bit - it only had a sofa bed so far. We opted for a bookshelf, as it would provide surfaces for the woman to put her stuff on and still fit into the room. I was also looking forward to having somewhere to put all the books lying around in piles, but as it is, we bought a 'CD/DVD shelf' and so only the smallest books fit onto it.

Then we did some time killing before going for dinner to Paul's parents, which resulted in the purchase of a wok (yay!) and a couple of little things that make me happy. But as we were browsing through the vast spaces of TKMaxx, I realised that I can dream all I want - some things are just not going to happen.

And so I find home stores highly frustrating - there's just so many things I want, I want, I want, but I can't have as I can't afford, I have nowhere to put, I don't need... or Paul doesn't like...

Yet again...

Excerpts from my year 10 group:
"Of course you 'do' ski, the French do everything!"
"Miss, what are you doing tomorrow after school?" (he meant could he come and work on his assessment script, but it still sounded the way it sounded)
"Vowel clash! I knew I would find one!" (Lovely that he gets this excited about the language, but no, it wasn't a vowel clash at all)

I know I'm not updating as often as I could/should. I blame the little time I have for myself and the lack of own laptop (RIP).
Yet again, I'll try to be better...

A rant

You can only do as much yourself. You can put them on report, tell them off, give them detentions, call parents, but at some point the person above you needs to take over. Who that is depends on school policies and structures, most of the time it won't be the same person for subject as for form etc. Anyway - one of my such people is mostly useless. She is trying, don't get me wrong, but things are not being chased up as quickly as they should if at all.
And of course the little buggers feel untouchable.
So all your effort, the fact that you chased everything up and did everything you could, just gets wasted.
Seriously frustrating.

On top of that, I had a fight in my classroom today. Chairs being thrown onto people, people being thrown onto tables, serious fight, not a fun 'let's-wind-the-teacher-up' fight. And of course, without thinking, I got right in the middle of it. I managed to separate them, they got removed to isolation and higher powers will deal with them now (much higher powers, so they actually will) but I can't help but think: I could have gotten hurt...

Bottom line: I need a glass of wine and a cigarette. Now.

On weights and measures

One of the biggest problems I've had to deal with these days was the problem of what 30g of dry cat food looked like. I settled for 5 spoon fulls, the cat was acting as if he was being starved, friends on Facebook suggested half a glass, failed however to specify the type of glass they had in mind, I ended up buying kitchen scales (a useful item in a kitchen anyway) and found out that 30g of dry cat food were... 3 spoon fulls. The cat was acting as if he was being starved while being overfed.
Moral: don't trust your cat with food measurements.
Quite refreshing not to have bigger problems than that (or to be capable of pushing them away to the very darkest corner of the head where no one can see them).
Good girl.

On furry sausages

Is half term. Brains are resting, bodies are sleeping until undecent hours of almost early evening.
We both brought quite a lot of work to do home this week but so far the big pile of bags has been shifted once or twice for the benefit of visiting friends (so they would not trip on it) but that's where our interaction with it ended. Which is not good really.
But to be quite honest I am much more interested in interacting with the newest addition to our little family - a big pile of black hair requiring regular brushing and stroking and emitting some serious purring. Much more interesting than marking!

On English books

There's a girl in my form who would not respond to me, well, even react to me. As if I didn't exist. She would answer to the register but that's as far as our interactions went. She ignored instructions, left classroom before being dismissed, lost counltess reports, forgot countless detention slips, missed countless detentions and I ended up having to refer the case to the Year Learning Manager and we were seriously talking about having her move forms.
Since Christmas she started taking her jacket off when instructed to do so maybe once a week, then twice a week, by now I still have to ask but she does it.
She does not leave the classroom before I dismiss them anymore.
She actually talked to me about options (probably because I spoke to her and her mum at the Options Evening and then nagged and nagged until she spoke to me) - then she came back cause she changed her mind and asked my advice(?!).
This morning she came in early and said "Miss, do you want a look at my English book? I'm working really well in English."
Of course I wanted.
And it doesn't matter that the book was thrown to me rather than handed over.

On not blogging

I have not written anything in over two months -I'm sorry. Countless times I would think to myself 'I have to blog about this or that' but somehow I never did. It was probably somewhat related to shorter days, general fatigue and the modification of my time allocations and instinctive priorities (as opposed to actual priorities) due to the load of work and to moving in with a boy.
And then there was the NYE and I was not going to blog about any of that - there was no way I could make it sound entertaining.
Anyway.
That's done with, for the time being at least, the days are getting longer and here I am again!