L33T Samurai Teachers

A recent attack by a knife weilding nutter in Japan has led to Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi suggesting that teachers should be trained to deal with armed attackers, and should be provided with wooden swords or similar defences in case of emergencies.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?nn20050226b4.htm

I wouldn't mind a little professional development in how to crush my enemies with a wooden sword, but on the whole not-being-stabbed working conditions would be best. I guess WINZ staff are in more danger in NZ than High School teachers.

I have occasionally wondered what the best thing to do would be in a violent situation at school. I think my number one priority is to keep myself safe, then to stop whatever's happening. A stern word has sufficed so far, even when breaking up fights. I can only hope that the activities of psychotic nutters remain outside the school grounds, or at least happen on days when I'm safely inside running lunch-time detention (because obviously it's only the nice kids who come to detention...).

The Long Day Wears On

This morning was Junior Athletics, which involved a lot of standing around in the sun and yelling at kids (for me - the kids were playfighting and squirting water and texting, and occasionally running, jumping and throwing things). It was fairly pleasant for the first hour and a half, but by the end of the third hour with no break in the sun, I was more than ready to call it quits.
We started at about 9am, finished at 12:40. I consumed a pump bottle full of water, but no foodstuffs or anything stronger to keep me going. Many students complained of empty stomachs and fatigue - at least I'd had breakfast, unlike many of them.

Lunch-time was all too brief, and was followed by 2 afternoon classes. They turned out to be very easy in the end, mostly due to the loveliness of the students (a Y9 extension class, who were happy to write in near-silence for an hour, and a Year 12 English class, who are grown up enough to act like human beings).

Sadly, I have a meeting in about 3 minutes, which may go past 4 o'clock, which is pants considering that I have to be back at school, looking alert and respectable, at 7pm tonight for a meet-the-form-teacher evening. Ugh. The last thing I want to do at the end of a long day is come back to school and have to make nice. I'm sure I'll manage somehow...

Bring on the weekend I say.

More Strange Dreams

I'm not sure what it is that's making my dreams memorable of late, but there was more weirdness last night. Sadly much of it has faded, but what I can recall is:
Debbie and I were at the beach, on a coldish, windy day with the sky a churning grey mess above us. We were actually up on top of the dunes, which were very steep and about 40 feet high. There were paths down to the beach, with most of the dunes being impossible to climb safely. It was a slightly rocky beach, not the most pleasant. We were in a car, and were about to go for a walk on the beach in spite of the poor weather.

In a car next to us there were a few loutish beach-bums, laughing and lounging about and looking untrustworthy. They started smoking something suspicious, and Debbie and I locked the car carefully before heading off along the tops of the grassy dunes.

At this point there was a lot of screaming, and a storm raced in from out at sea. There were massive waves, people running for high ground, and general panic. We were pretty safe, being 40 feet up from the beach, but we could see a few people down on the beach getting pounded by huge waves. Someone got swept out into the water, only to reappear a few seconds later trying to stoically walk up the beach to safety, Terminator style. A second massive wave crashed over them, and they disappeared.

We ran back to the car, and decided to drive out and save as many people as we could. We careened along the top of the dunes, looking for people in the water, and spied someone. I was driving, and I jerked the steering wheel right and flew off the dunes and into the water. The car seemed quite happy to hydroplane about, in a kind of boat/hovercraft way. We managed to pull one person through the window to safety, but in doing so we got swept side-on to the waves. A huge wave lifted us up, and flipped the car. We pretty much drowned at this point, though in a 'damn, game over' way rather than a wake up screaming type scenario.

I've died quite a few times in dreams, but it hasn't often freaked me out as I usually work out that if I've died, and I'm still thinking about it, then it's probably a dream.

The worst feeling I've had in a dream was when I was a teenager, and I dreamed that a zombie apocalypse had started. I was at a friend's house, everyone else was dead (and coming back to life to eat me). I knew it was a dream, and I really wanted to wake up. I started scratching a rough wooden post to hurt my fingers and make me wake up, but all that happened was that 2 of my fingernails snapped back and started bleeding all over the place, and the zombies that were shambling towards me got even more excited. That pretty much freaked the bejeezus out of me, and I woke up with my heart pounding and my fingers tingling.

Usually, it's not so bad.

Who Can We Squeeze?

It's about time to get the requests for Kapcon prizes going, and I'm pondering who would be good people to ask to support us. I know that Luke has already begun sending requests to a number of games companies, which is awesome. It occured to me last night that there are some gaming-related things that would make excellent prizes - like Citadels last year. I have sent a request off to our mail-prole to forward an enquiry to Chessex, a dice-making company. I would love to have a Pound-o-dice as a prize for next Kapcon.
Actually, I want to get a pound-o-dice just for me too, though I have absolutely no use for one. It just seems like a cool idea. I also like the convention practice of giving out dice in scoops and buckets. Heh. A bucket of dice.

So, the idea of Chessex, though it may come to nothing, seemed like a good one. Are there other places we should be looking?

A Cold Night In Front of the Fan

I had strange dreams last night, because for the first time in ages I was actually a little cold. We'd gone to sleep with the fan on because we were very hot, and then it got all chilly in the early hours of the morning and I had odd dreams. There was running around on a field, with the sprinklers on, in the nude. Then other people started to follow the nude trend (in particular a crazy old teacher guy, who decided to do a naked lap of the school field just as lunch was ending).
Then my brain started actually thinking about it, and I got worried that people would find out that it was me who'd started the fad for naked running about, and I might get fired. I wanted to go back and change things, but then I started to wonder if maybe I didn't have to, as I recognised that I was in fact dreaming.

I woke up about then and was quite cold. Iswitched the fan off, pulled the blankies up, and went back to sleep. There were no crazy nude old teachers at school this morning, nor any nude joggers on the way to work.

I think I might have gotten away with it.

5 Lessons Plus Department Meeting!

Wah. Now I am all tired. Of course, my day still finishes before 5pm so I really shouldn't complain. But wah!
Anyhoos, the weekend was fun, and filled with stuff. There was the excitement of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which I really enjoyed. It was so gleefully pulpy and 30sesque, with some fantastic (and iconic) images. Neat. The sound was well buggered though, dropping in and out of digital like crazy. I went and informed a ticket-monkey and they dropped it into analogue, so no surroundy goodness, but no warbling and volume changing either. The analogue sound was set at a very comfortable level too, so I didn't have to wear ear-plugs during the film. Yay!

There was also boardgamage with friends, and shopping for new sheets - mmmm, new sheets. We got nice cotton sheets, as our heavy wintry sheets were a little too hot. Sadly we don't get to sleep in every day for the rest of our lives, but the time that we are in bed is now nicer.

Now the day is over, and I must rush home. I flee the school, with its wretched classes and students. FLEE!

Massive Kapcon Email

Well, OK, it wasn't that big an email, but it was way bigger than most of the messages I write. Then again, that wouldn't be hard - I tend not to write long emails anyway. I wrote a briefish report on the status of Kapcon from my point of view, mainly to let all the people who I want to help know that they have officially been asked, and to set down in writing as much of the stuff that I'm currently thinking about.
Many other things will come up over the next 11 months, but it's easier to add to a list than it is to keep it all in my head. Especially as my head is rapidly filling up with school related stuff - including about 70 or 80 names so far, which is 50 more than yesterday morning. 2 PAT tests was enough for me to learn the 29 names of students in one of my Y9 classes - just wandering around and reading their names off their answer papers, and occasionally consulting the class roll when their handwriting was too messy to read.

This reminds me of a mildly amusing incident which occured yesterday afternoon. My year 12 students were doing a speech warm-up activity where they had to give a 30 second speech advertising themself to the class, as a friend, or an employee, or a role model, or a sports captain, or a cult leader, or whatever. They had to use the whiteboard during their presentation. The last student, a slacker who had just returned from photos and hadn't bothered to write anything down, got up and wrote his name on the board in big messy letters. He then proceeded to say what each letter stood for:

D is for David.
A is for Awesome.
U is for... um... Unique!
I is for Intelligent, and
D is for David.

U is also for awesome!

I'm Sure I've Forgotten Something

Things seem to be going too smoothly at the moment. I am sure that there's some sort of a disaster looming round the corner. My year 9 form class actually seem to behave better for me than for their other teachers, including the very stern Y11 dean. I'm not sure what's going on there - is it just a Y9 form class thing, where they see their form teacher as the font of all wisdom, their 'real' teacher, and their other teachers as mere auxilliary staff? Hmmm....
Debbie and I went out a-wandering last night, and it was most pleasant. It was not too hot, not too cool, and the stars were shining overhead. Lovely. I am looking forward to more night-time walks this week, especially if the temperature isn't too obnoxious.

We used to go for walks at around midnight when we lived in Japan (during Summer anyway). It was the most comfortable time of day, and seeing as how we finished work at 9pm, had dinner around 10pm, and there was often a movie starting between 9:30 and 10:30 (broadcast bilingually!) we ended up walking about Kita-Kogane in the balmy warmth of the midnight hour. We'd also often go for walks when we woke up - there was a temple just down the road from us with large, beautiful grounds, and a field out the back. It was especially beautiful around hanami season, when the cherry blossoms were in bloom. Midnight walks to the old temple to take in the moonlit white blossoms were pretty amazing.

We even saw an araiguma there once - a Japanese critter something like a racoon. It was awesome!

Um, I need a bigger classroom?

This week has been pretty damn tiring, but thankfully it is nearly over (just 2 lessons to go, one of which a colleague is teaching whilst I observe/help out). The crashing change of gears from holiday mode to teaching is not an easy one, especially as the first week is one of the harder weeks as there is a mad amount of paperwork and interruptions and strange bell times and so on. The kids are all starting with good intentions, but nonetheless it's been tough.
I am happy to report that I feel like I'm doing a much better job than I did last year - or at least I'm doing as well as last year whilst feeling like less of a fraud ;)

I am currently a little less than thrilled that one of my English classes has 31 students on the roll. I only have 30 desks and chairs in my classroom, and there's no room for any more (unless someone sits permanently behind the door with their nose against the wall). I only had 27 students on my roll at the start of the week!

My plan is to check again on Monday, see if there are still that many students, and see if anything can be done about it then. My HOD has already talked to the boss, as another teacher had the same number of students in his class, but with the added bonus that he has to teach English in a graphics classroom with funny desks.

So, the weekend is just around the corner, and how I long for it! w00t!

WAY TOO HOT!

I am melting. It is extremely unpleasant. Apparently there is soon to be air-conditioning in the prep room, but it's not there yet. The 2 photocopiers and 2 PCs make it a very hot room indeed, like an ink-smelling sauna. Ugh.
But then, the offices in the top corridor are all wonderfully cool and temperature controlled. I shall have to either get myself promoted very quickly or get into frequent mid-level trouble, where I spend many hours explaining myself (whilst enjoying AC'd-office goodness) but don't actually get fired, and thus lose my income.

On the fun side of things, the many meetings of the past couple of days haven't been too bad - I've managed to get some quite reasonable doodling done during them. And I now have a printed off spiral bound copy of the 2004/2005 SDC entries (all 9 of them), with a pretty colour cover. And as a result I learned to use the school's spiral binding machine, and found out that the spiral combs only cost 35c, and it's a self-service type situation, so I now have access to very cheap spiral binding. It is time consuming though, as she be an all-manual model.

Now I slink off and drink cold, cold beverages, before the long drive to Lower Hutt and Wellington for visitage and WARGs. I am terrified at the prospect of having to open my car, which has been sitting in the sun all day, but there really is no better way to get home than to endure the heat, and to drive with the windows down enjoying the breeze. And some rocking tunes.

PS: I am not doing well on the name-remembering front. I have met only 2 students so far this year, and I have the vague feeling that they are called Beauregard and Jane. I think at least one of those names is wrong...