Day 342 - Killer Smarties

Wednesday March 24th

Final observation today and then it's all downhill. The boys are getting end of term fever so I decide to do a functional maths activity with my Year 8 class. This involves doing loads of different Maths around a tube of Smarties. They then get to eat the Smarties. It's bribery of the most heinous kind.

Everything is going brilliantly until the observing teacher asks whether I have checked with the nurse on allergies. I have not and on checking it turns out that 3 of them cannot handle or eat Smarties.

"So, Richard, how did your final observation at More House go?"
"Well....I was really pleased with the plan as it focused on building functional maths skills and included some excellent visual and kinaesthetic activity."
"Sounds great. How did the class enjoy it? Did they demonstrate any progress?"
"Well.....they really enjoyed it until three of them went into anaphylactic shock. Fortunately two of them had Epipens but we lost the other on the way to hospital"
"So you'll be resuming a career in Marketing then....."

All of them regularly ate Smarties at home so were utterly confused but we had to adjust the activity. Point taken on needing to check on this kind of thing but it's a little "world gone mad". Didn't seem to affect the observation as I got a Very Good!

Day 112 - Green & Black's Day

Thursday August 6th

Two runs this morning, one at pace and then one with Mrs N. She has a point about the route I have found for her. Narrow, deserted paths are fine for me but for running on her own in the early morning, probably not such a great idea. I will re-route.

Spent all morning earning some money, doing some desk research on Green & Black's. I was on my own in the house and did about 3 hours solid reading and referencing. I really enjoyed it and came to some immediate conclusions about the state of the business in the UK. Later, I went off to JS and bought loads of samples. Ellen was very excited about the whole thing, probably because it involved vast quantities of chocolate.