What's our job again?

I've mentioned in the past the wide range of extra curricular activities that we do here in the physics department - trips, astronomy, solar car etc.
Just lately though, it's feeling like we're starting to forget that the main focus of our jobs is supposed to be the teaching of physics!

The solar car project is having a big launch event on saturday. We've got Cambridge University coming along with their car as well as potential sponsors including McLaren and Jaguar. It's a really big deal and if it goes well then the project will really take off. It's a lot of work though. My HoD has been running around like crazy for the last couple of weeks putting arrangements in place. Meanwhile the organisation of the 2 overseas trips that are happening before christmas has mainly fallen to me and I'm worrying that it's all going to go wrong.

Lesson planning is virtually non-existant right now and last minute requests are becoming the norm. It's as if they've all forgotten that lessons are happening because they are so caught up in other things. I really hope that once this weekend is out of the way we can get back on track, or I'll be heading for a nervous breakdown by new year.

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.