2004-10-27 - 10:31 a.m.

Hurray! I've made my peace with Scary Gorgon Woman from the interview. OK, so she still has issues with church, public schooling and people who don't possess regional accents, but she gets excited enough about the history of English for me to hold a conversation with her. She also agrees with me that if 'beautiful' has 7 phonemes (which it surely does), then 'apple' must have four.
Sorry to everyone over whose head that went...we've been learning about methods of teaching children to read, one of which is the rather dubious idea of teaching 'phonemes' (sounds) before letters. There are about 44 phonemes in the English language, and quite a bit of dispute about how many there are in certain words. It's all rather fun really.
I phoned my classroom teacher last night and told her that I really wasn't expected to teach all five literacy hours in my first week, and could she do something about it. She agreed to teach something else for that week and save my planning for another week, but during the course of the conversation I was disconcerted to hear,
"Yes, well, we used to follow the literacy hour but we don't any more because, quite frankly, it didn't work. So you'll have to take either groups or whole classes, because we don't really have part lessons".
I'm not sure whether by "we" she meant "the school" or "I". She also came out with,
"No, I don't have weekly plans, we work from a medium term plan...no, it's not set week by week, it just has objectives and we cross them off as we cover them."
This is all very well, but distinctly unhelpful when it comes to covering my own, university-set objectives that say things like "follow the teacher's weekly plans" and "observe literacy hours with clear guided reading slots and plenaries"!
Ohhh....brother. And I've caught a cold from one of the little brats as well.
Off to have my maths interview now. The fun just keeps on coming...

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