Work - The pros and the cons... - The Bear and Badger

tigersgogrrr

If it's anything like last Friday I'll spend all day being called upon to help with behaviour issues. Bleugh.

The key success is never having to mark / take books home at the weekend.

Tempy

Stopharage wrote:

I'm the only fucker that teaches last lesson Friday so all the colleagues who I share my block with spend the lesson walking past, grinning and generally trying to gloat.

Tempy, I'm sure they'll be able to rectify prior to placement. Worst comes to the worst, I'd let a trainee do lesson planning for a week until they could be in classes.

I shouldn’t have to do any actual lessons on placement one, so now i’ve highlighted the issue we’ll see how it goes.

three1ne

Gamermike wrote:

Oh man, I’m having big regrets taking this new job on. Only 4 days in, but it’s been a slow week.

Sorry to hear that mate. What's your new position?

I'm finding my job slow at moment too. We've taken on a lot of retainer work which is great for the company but means work is becoming boringly repetitive.

Plus side is ill hopefully be shooting my 2nd mini documentary in december as my personal work becomes more of a focus.

Gamermike

three1ne wrote:

Gamermike wrote:

Oh man, I’m having big regrets taking this new job on. Only 4 days in, but it’s been a slow week.

Sorry to hear that mate. What's your new position? I'm finding my job slow at moment too. We've taken on a lot of retainer work which is great for the company but means work is becoming boringly repetitive. Plus side is ill hopefully be shooting my 2nd mini documentary in december as my personal work becomes more of a focus.

I've got a Head of Media and Marketing position for a directory magazine that basically sells ad space for local businesses in different areas in the south of England, this is a new/small segment of a bigger business. But it turns out theres just one guy doing the selling, they are bringing another guy in next week to help out, and there are 5 magazines to churn out between October - December.

To put it politely, in an ideal world, if I had all content for all mags, I could put them all together in 2-3 weeks. Which begs the question - can they really afford me? Is this sustainable? They want to expand it all, which is why they brought me in but its been massively over-sold to me, and i'm kicking myself this week that I've been sucked in.

I'm just reconsidering my options at the moment, can't go back to my old job, could potentially go back to freelance but I hate the risk, could just sit there quietly doing freelance while at work... hmmm.

Tempy

That’s me unable to do placement one. Which may jeopardise placement two, which may have ruined the whole course.

mistercrayon

Goddammit.

tigersgogrrr

That's bullshit.

Dark Soldier

Fuck's sake Temps write some racial slurs on their windows.

Anyone have any experience in the role of real time data analyst? Gonna apply at work as sounds a piece of piss.

Stopharage

Tempy wrote:

That’s me unable to do placement one. Which may jeopardise placement two, which may have ruined the whole course.

Is there no way to do a fast track PVG? If not, I'd be putting in a complaint to the uni as that is some poor administration support. How on earth has your uni mentor not mentioned it previously or even bothered to check progress.

Tempy

My English tutor is baffled by how badly it’s all been managed but he’s brand new to the uni. I have managed to get time off for the meeting, but I can see the response now: “everyone else managed it” to which my only counter is “yeah so maybe you should have checked why one person hadn’t?”

EvilRedEye

UK unis are supposed to be ensuring equitable access to HE, not leaving mature students experiencing financial difficulties etc. in the shit by tripping them up with poor admin processes. Don't let them gaslight you Temps, it's not good enough.

Stopharage

Tempy wrote:

My English tutor is baffled by how badly it’s all been managed but he’s brand new to the uni. I have managed to get time off for the meeting, but I can see the response now: “everyone else managed it” to which my only counter is “yeah so maybe you should have checked why one person hadn’t?”

I've emailed a couple of people I lecture for who are responsible for overseeing all the PGCE courses at Kingston Uni and at the Institute of Education (LSE) to see what they suggest. Not sure how much help this will be seeing as it's England rather than Scotland but hopefully they can give some insight.

Tempy

Cheers man. I doubt anything can be really done, unless my tutor can figure out with the course leader if a conditional placement is possible. I've completed the form, I just need to fish out two more forms of ID - you need three to process the form. Not sure why a valid passport isn't enough.

regmcfly

Stopharage wrote:

Tempy wrote:

That’s me unable to do placement one. Which may jeopardise placement two, which may have ruined the whole course.

Is there no way to do a fast track PVG? If not, I'd be putting in a complaint to the uni as that is some poor administration support. How on earth has your uni mentor not mentioned it previously or even bothered to check progress.

Doesn't work that way unfortunately. It's not end game, we have a person doing placement 3 right now which may stand them in good places when probation runs out as it's when jobs come up. It's not and end game. Poorly managed, yes, but not end of everything. I do disagree with you on educational theory but that's because I guess my background is in English and Media which as such prescriptive courses.

Stopharage

My issue with educational theory is that far too much time is spent on it at PGCE level. I have trainees coming into placement who have had an afternoons worth of sessions on lesson planning, a days worth of classroom management and 3 weeks on educational theory. The first two are essential for a successful placement and career, the latter less so. For a masters, load it with theory but for folks new to a classroom, give them the tools to plan interesting lessons, manage behaviour, manage workloads etc. The art of keeping sane in the classroom is knowing how and when to cut corners so as to cope with the frankly ridiculous expectations.

I know this may come across as somewhat pig-headed and that some of my teaching behaviour and style could be clearly explained by the main educationalist theorists. I'm just an advocate of devoting more of a PGCE to gaining teaching experience over being sat so much in a uni lecture hall.

regmcfly

I'm with you on hands on stuff, but there's so many students who come by our doors who don't know about four phase lessons, the importance of formative assessment, the basics of Hattie, that they literally can't just walk in and go "awrite troops what we learning." Just saying there has to be a balance

Tempy

The balance is massively off on my course, it's part and parcel of trying to do it in 36 weeks though I guess.

I am thoroughly disappointed so far and honestly feel like every single hour of the course is telling me that I've made a bad decision because everything that can fuck up has fucked up.

Having no alternative is a decent personal motivator at least. It's either this or starve.

tigersgogrrr

Student learning should be focused on modern research and school based work IMO. Its important to have many in schools with knowledge of theory, but most of it is common sense stuff when you take a second to look at it. Zone of proximal development is so damn obvious with some cursory thought. Most theory can be covered when students are reading into research, I'd have thought.

Stay strong, Temps.

The Daddy

If it was focused on modern research they’d have to find new diagrams to replace the Bloom’s taxonomy ones they handout at the start of every course.

Tempy

I know it well

mannaboy

With my new team lead role, for a fairly solid small group, has been a bit more eventful than I expected, I’ve had unexpected parental leave, staff transfer, asked by the higher ups to determine weakest team members, etc.

My favourite though is someone submitting a negative vacation request, basically asking for more time off than they will have by the end of year, this chap emailed the first day of his holiday to ask for an extra 3 weeks off. Company policy is a max of one week. How he thought he could get approval for that is beyond me. He ends up with no pay for two weeks. I should have looked into before he went off, but he’d already submitted his vacation request prior to me taking the TL role. Don’t think assuming my predecessor should’ve flagged it back then is wrong.

I’m likely going to mention to him on his return that staffing levels are being looked at and pulling crap like this puts him in the crosshairs. He’s also the chap that sent an email, described by someone as the most unprofessional they’d ever seen, my follow up with the recipients of the email caused everyone to clam up, presumably no one wanted to officially drop him in it. His end of year review is going to be fun!

Despite all that I’m enjoying the new responsibilities and starting to feel confident in the role.

The Daddy

mannagerboy!

mannaboy

Haha

mistercrayon

If I were to criticise the pgce it’s that, for me, it was fairly easy to pass through because you left a placement at the very point when shit gets HARD. (It’s hard from the start but I think it’s very possible to smoke the candle twice as hard, survive and exit before placement ends).

Such is the necessity for teachers and the shame in fucking things up (no job etc) I ended up doing a job which I had no business doing at that time in my life.

I will agree with reg here though theory is quite important because walking in with nothing except some idealised sense of what teaching is inevitable doom. It’s good to have skeletons and framework to fall back onto when anecdotal advice is only anecdotally useful. There is shit like not shouting, tempering your volume, balancing the content so that the teach does less as possible, focussing on learning outcomes that does not and cannot organically pop into your brain from the heat of actually firing some boring shit about lime stone.

ShabbyMcCrabby

I hope things all work out for you Tempy. That kind of shite boils my blood too but I'd still suggest killing them with kindness and not getting too angry with them. Hopefully it all gets processed soon and it can kick on and it'll all be good.

Skerret

The Daddy wrote:

If it was focused on modern research they’d have to find new diagrams to replace the Bloom’s taxonomy ones they handout at the start of every course.

There's an updated one you know

Diluted Dante

I hate work and want to kill myself and anyone in range.

Skerret

Do it. Wait you work at the Daily Mail right

Skerret

Spare you but take management out

cosmicjellybean

I actually found out when I accepted the job at the new place that it’s owned by DMGT.

No one seems happy whenever this fact is brought up though. So that’s good I guess.

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