Tuesday 26 February 2013

Busy afternoon ahead

Around a month ago, we got an email asking if we could come up with something to occupy 13 children who are coming to the college today to try for an academic scholarship. They'll have a day of tests and then we are supposed to keep them entertained for an hour. My HoD cheerily said yes, and then promptly forgot about it until yesterday!

Since this is now going to be a rather last minute event, I foolishly thought we'd do something simple. After all we don't know the students involved, althoough as they are scholarship candidates they must be pretty bright. Also they have never used our equipment before. HoD however had grander plans. He insisted that the activity for them had to involve dataloggers so we can show off just how technologically advanced we are. This could cause problems on its own. There are a wide variety of dataloggers used in schools and the ones we have are certainly not the most popular, so if the students have used dataloggers before they may well not be familiar with the ones we have. Of course, they may not have ever come across dataloggers at all.

So use of the equipment might prove to be an issue, but at least they'll all be doing the same thing right? Wrong!

HoD has decided on a circus of experiments. Each pair of students will have a different experiment to carry out, two with light gates, two with temperature probes, one with a position sensor and one with a light sensor.



 Apparently he also wants to take them to see the observatory.
All in the space of an hour.

It's going to be an interesting afternoon.

Friday 15 February 2013

Tuesday 12 February 2013

All change (again!)

It's getting on for that time of year - teachers who want to be in a different school next academic year are busy filling in applications and going to interviews.

We already knew we were losing the Head of Biology who is heading off to Australia at Easter, but this week already 2 more teachers have announced that they have found new jobs. Yesterday it was a chemist who is moving on to become a HoD at another nearby school and today one of the biology teachers revealed that he is also becoming a HoD and relocating to be nearer to his partner.

It's fab news for both of them, obviously, but as always they will be sorely missed. Since I started here just over 5 years ago all but 2 of the science teachers have changed.

I guess change is necessary. New people bring new ideas and enthusiasm to the department. After all, without astroboy we probably wouldn't have got the observatory up and running and our NQT is proving invaluable in pushing the solar car project forwards. Change scares me, but I will endeavour to embrace it, and at least this year the physics dept should be staying the same. (Fingers crossed!)