A rod for my own back

When I took on the TA thing (which is going pretty well and is mostly good fun), my department agreed that in order for me to manage my increased work load I should drop a lot of the admin stuff I do for them. This term I have had very few photocopying or data entry requests which is great!


The annual trip to CERN is upon us again and of course my HoD has dealt with all the paperwork and admin himself. Wait, no sorry - I got confused for a second there. What I meant to say was that I have done all the paperwork and admin yet again. This morning I did the final job, which was getting the bus timetables for the various journeys we'll be making in Switzerland. Maybe I should have insisted that HoD deal with it himself for once. On the other hand I know that if I don't do it then it won't get done or at least not properly, and then once we are there HoD will utter his usual plaintive cry of 'Labtech666, Help!' and I'll end up sorting it out anyway.


I grumbled about this exact same issue a year ago and of course nothing has changed. By being generally pretty efficient and helpful (unless you catch me on a bad day) I have made it very easy for the teachers to get lazy.


Still I get a free trip to Geneva out of it, so it's not all bad!

Trips

The annual trip to CERN went off this morning. I'm not able to go this year, but as usual I have been heavily involved in the planning and organisation.

As I was dealing with last minute paperwork yesterday I got to wondering whether I am too much of a pushover. Surely the teachers should be doing this stuff themselves? I know that my HoD panics and flaps and is not the most organised person in the world, so I do all this stuff for him because at least that way I know it will be done properly.

For the CERN trip I have:

* Organised getting the passport details from all the students (making photocopies, recording info in a spreadsheet)
* Booked the flights
* Liased with the school transport manager to book the coach to the airport
* Printed out the boarding passes
* Arranged the groups for the guided tour
* Organised which students are sharing which rooms at the hotel (HoD booked the hotel)
* Downloaded and printed out maps of the hotel, highlighting where the nearest bus stops are
* Printed out timetables for all the buses that the group will need to take between Geneva airport, CERN and the hotel
* Organised all the above paperwork in a file for HoD to take with him

Genuine question to any fellow technicians reading this - Am I an idiot? Should I have said no a long time ago to doing all of this?

Once they get back from CERN we start all over again, as it's only 7 weeks until the trip to Rome and the Vatican Observatory. Arrgh!

'It's broken!'

How often have you heard a student claim that a piece of equipment is 'broken' when in fact they just aren't using it properly? Maybe they've turned the dial on the multimeter to the wrong setting, or connected up the oscilloscope incorrectly, but in my experience at least 60% of 'broken' equipment actually works fine if you know what you're doing.

Yesterday the physics trip to the Vatican observatory headed off. They don't come back until friday so there are quite a few lessons which need to have cover work set. The trip was booked months ago, so naturally the teachers had prepared everything well in advance - yeah, right! With an hour to go before departure astroboy was still sorting out all his cover work. He came into the prep room looking really stressed and said could he e-mail some of the work to me to print out for him because, and I quote, 'the photocopier is broken'.

Once he'd sent me the work, I headed off to the copier room to see just how badly 'broken' the photocopier actually was. 30 seconds later I had cleared the paper jam and it was working again.

*sigh*

Trips

The CERN trip went very well, all things considered. Travelling abroad with 30 teenagers is rather stressful, and feels a bit like herding cats at times, but to their credit they managed to be at all the meeting points at the right times and we didn't lose anyone.

Next on the agenda - Rome. The trip to the Vatican Observatory heads off in under 3 weeks so we have to finalise the paperwork for that.

It never ends!

CERN here we come

Tomorrow we head off to Switzerland for our 4th annual visit to CERN. I'm looking forward to it, but as always I am at the stage now where I am terrified that something will go wrong and it will be my fault.

We started booking flights etc pretty much as soon as term started, in September, but it's really difficult to pin down some of these kids and their parents. One lad's family seemed to feel that his passport was in some way classified information and were incredibly reluctant to give us the details we needed to confirm his flight. Another lad has decided that, even though his parents filled in all the paperwork, he doesn't actually want to go on the trip.

My eternal nightmare for every physics trip is that we will turn up to the airport and find that not everyone has a plane ticket, or that I've booked it for the wrong day. At least I'm not responsible for booking hotel rooms. HoD dealt with that, so if we don't have enough beds it's not my fault!

Requisition sheets

The concept of the requisition sheet or book should be one familiar to all senior school science teachers. It's the method by which they let me, the technician, know what equipment they need for each lesson.

My requisition book

There are various methods that I have heard of, but the one I prefer is for each teacher to give me a copy of their timetable with their requirments written in for each lesson. I then take the sheets and transfer all the information into my requisition book which is a day to a page and I can see instantly what the days lessons are looking like.

I like this method because as I'm transferring the information into my book I can see where there might be clashes or rapid turnarounds and it helps me plan my week.

This only works though, if the teachers get their sheets done in time. The official science departmant policy is that all requisitions should be handed in by Thursday lunchtime of the preceeding week. I give a little more leeway than that and have told my guys that Friday lunchtime is ok. But how many of them manage that?

Well, I have 4 teachers this year. 1 of them doesn't do much practical, but when she does, she manages to plan well in advance. This week she came and wrote in my book on thursday. NQT did his sheet on friday with a number of trips to the prep room to check what we have available. This is great, because it means that he has only asked for things that are actually possible. HoD did his sheet some time on sunday and emailed it to me. Not a huge amount of help since I didn't see it until this morning.

And then there's astroboy. Just lately he seems rather more interested in the observatory and astronomy club than the mundane business of teaching physics. It's currently half way through lesson 1 on monday morning and I have yet to see any sign of his requisition sheet. I guess this means he doesn't want any equipment this week?!

PDR done

I had my suspicions that doing my PDR might bring me to the verge of tears, but I thought that would be due to frustration or anger. I never dreamed it would be as a result of people being nice to me!

I filled in the self review parts of the form, being as honest as I could about what I see as my strengths and weaknesses and then turned it over to my HoD and the Head of Science for their comments. When i got it back for signing I could not believe how much praise they lavished on me.
HoD described me as 'one of the best' and 'incredibly supportive' and Head of Science said I am 'exemplary in all areas of work' and 'proactive in improving the department'.

I knew that my HoD values what I do, but it is so nice to hear it from elsewhere and it is a massive boost to my confidence to find that people think I'm doing a good job. :)

PDR

The last time I had a Performance and Development Review was 8 years ago - not at this school, or even at my last school, but at the first school I worked in - so frankly it's about time for another!

I was informed today that PDR for support staff is going to be happening some time during the next month, and the Head of Science has sent us a copy of the form that we'll have to fill out. I don't exactly find PDR a lot of fun, but I do believe that if done properly it can be a worthwhile exercise. My heart sank then when I looked at the form. The very first 'Area of Work' on which we are to be reviewed is headed 'Customer Focus'.
I do hope someone will tell me who exactly the 'customer' in this scenario is meant to be! Is it the teacher who orders the practical equipment from me? Or is it the students who benefit from carrying out the practical activities? Or is it the parents who pay to send their kids here? And how am I supposed to be focussed on the customer? I do my job to the best of my ability at all times. What more do they want?

Why do I get the feeling that this is going to be another pointless box ticking exercise and that this form was just borrowed from somewhere else without considering whether it's actually relevant to the types of jobs done by the employees concerned?

Travel chaos

It's nearly time for this year's trip to the Vatican Observatory and as always I have been acting as travel agent. I'm not even going on the trip this year (to find out why, see my other blog) but I've still booked all the flights and sorted the paperwork.
It's seemed a little more chaotic than usual this year. I think the recession etc has made itself felt, as a lot of kids just couldn't afford to come and those that are going have been quite slow to confirm. As a result I've had to book the flights in about 6 seperate batches. I just hope I've got it all right or there will be trouble next thursday when they get to the airport!

I don't want to hear it!

There are certain words and phrases that I really don't want to hear uttered by a teacher when they walk into the prep room. Sadly I hear most of them every week!

1) Help! - usually cried out in anguish by my HoD as he charges into the prep room. This generally means that he needs some last minute photocopying or that I'm going to end up doing a lot of tedious paperwork which is probably not my job.

2) Could you just.... - I HATE 'just' jobs. They always take 5 time longer to complete than the teacher concerned has estimated.

3) Can I do the ISA? - first things first. Which ISA? Are we talking GCSE, AS or A2? If GCSE then do you want P1,P2 or P3? If A level then do you want P or Q? And anyway, no you probably can't because they take far longer to set up than any teacher realises.

4) Are you busy? - You're about to make me far busier.

5) Can you just sit with my class for 5 minutes? - I'm not meant to be left in charge of a class at all, and 5 minutes has a nasty habit of turning into 15 minutes.

6) At my last school... - You aren't at your last school, you're at this school and we don't have the expensive piece of equipment that you are asking for. No amount of pouting or puppy-dog eyes will cause that piece of equipment to miraculously appear.

Inspection - Day 1

All quiet on the western front - so far!

It snowed over the weekend, so everyone was a bit worried as to whether we would all make it to work today, but thankfully the roads aren't too bad and we all made it in 1 piece.
This morning we're expecting a Health and Safety inspection consisting of 2 inspectors, the H&S manager and the Estates Bursar. I spent some time last week making sure all my paperwork is fully up to date (especially the radioactive sources file) and I'm wearing my white coat so I at least look professional.

Fingers crossed!

An inspection looms

The fear of inspection is most definitely growing!

Last week I did a lovely notice board display with the photos from the most recent CERN trip. This has apparently indicated my supreme skill at putting stuff on the wall so I've now been asked to do another board highlighting all the extra-curricular and enrichment activities that we are involved with.
Once we started making the list it was actually quite an impressive array of stuff!

The latest big idea is to design and build a solar powered car with the ultimate aim of competeing in a race across Australia. It's a huge project and it'll be amazing if we can pull it off!

Sadly that is somewhat in the future and for now I am helping my HoD sort out the schemes of work so we've got something tangible to show the inspectors. No one will ever actually work to the scheme, but management want them done, so we have to do them. Lots of photocopying, laminating and organising files involved! Remember what I said about stuff that isn't my job? Yep, lots of that.

Trips

.. as in visits, not accidents.

We're taking a group of 20 sixth form students to Rome on thursday to visit the Vatican observatory. Should be a great trip and I'm looking forward to it.

Drowning in paperwork though!
We've got everyone's permission slips, copies of passports, all the flight info printed out, info about the hotel, copies of the school's insurance policy, risk assessments, all the info about getting to and from the observatory and probably a lot more besides that I've forgotten about.
Before we leave it'll all have to be photocopied half a dozen times because all the staff on the trip need a copy, and there are a couple of people at school who have to have it too.

I can't wait to get on the plane and forget about paperwork for a couple of days. Until we get back! :(