Week 7, half term...

After 2 weeks in a school I got a week off, the joys of being a teacher! I did have a lot to get on with however so after a really fun weekend in Lincoln saying goodbye so some great friends of mine who are moving to Australia it was time to get on with things. Once up from a much deserved lie in I got organising my folders and all the paperwork I have collected over the past few weeks.

Tuesday morning I was back at Goldsmiths for my first tutorial meeting, it was good to speak to someone about how the past few weeks have been going and we made sure I had been doing everything I should have been doing and flagged up any issues. I definitely felt a lot better after the meeting, I was feeling a bit lost and confused for a while thinking I was doing quite well but not really sure I was actually doing well, I at least now know I am on the right tracks and know what I have to do in the next few weeks.

During my week off, my boyfriend and I took a trip to the design museum; there was a couple of really good exhibitions on. ‘Kenneth Grange – Making Britain Modern’ was quite inspiring, he is one of Britain’s leading Product Designers and has been designing for over 50 years. He has designed such a vast variety of products from food processors and razors to London’s Black Cabs and trains. My favourite item from his exhibition was probably ‘The Really Useful Bookcase’ from his one of his personal projects as it really shows his fun side amongst all the clients, briefs and restrictions. The bookcase doubles up as a coffin with removable shelves and a lid stored at the back, he really has fun with the clarity of functionality. 

Another exhibition showing at the minute is ‘This is Design’ and is definitely worth a look. Some design classics are on show such as the anglepoise and the red phone box. I was easily pleased as there was a pretty big collection of chairs for me to gaze at, chairs by Charles and Ray Eames, Marcel Brueur and Ron Arad amongst many others. What I really loved about the exhibition though was the really overlooked design objects such as British road signs. The amount of work that goes into designing them down to spacing of the letters was pretty inspiring and with Design and Technology really struggling in the curriculum at the minute it really made me think all the politicians should come and see this exhibition to see how much Design effects everything we use everyday.

For the first time I really found myself looking at the exhibition and only really thinking about the students at my school. I kept taking pictures to show them for inspiration, thinking how things I had seen could really help with their projects and what they could learn from the exhibition I had a really nice moment of contentment that this is definitely a career I am going to love.

Pritt Stick...

 When I decided to go traveling I was given all sorts of information and lists of essential travel items, one item that kept popping up on these lists was a Pritt Stick. My boyfriend found this hilarious so bought me one for Christmas as a joke. I then decided that I would take the Pritt Stick with me and take photos of it where ever I went which I then put together in a book for him as a present. So the Pritt Stick did end up being quite essential.

Week 6, starters and alluminium...

 

Monday morning, back to school and back with the year 8s pop up book project. During their double lesson I had a meeting with my mentor, we discussed me doing a starter for one of Yazz’s year 7 classes this week and she showed me how to change the blades on some of the saws in the workshop. I spent Monday night putting together a worksheet for the year 7s as a starter. The worksheet is a picture of a workshop with lots of health and safety hazards going on, I want the students to circle the hazards. 

Tuesday, Miss Milne the form tutor of the form I am with at Davenant was not in first thing so I had the form on my own for the first time. It is assembly for year 7s on a Tuesday so you are supposed to get them sat down in the form room and take the register before they walk over to the hall for assembly. I got to the room where the students where noisily waiting outside, the door was locked and I don’t have a key so I had to improvise, gain control of the form and take the register in the hallway, this went surprisingly well and was quite proud of myself. Whilst the students were in assembly all the year 7 form tutors were brought back to the staff room for a meeting as there was a year 7 parents evening on the Thursday. We were given sheets with student’s names on outlining those students’ special educational needs. We were advised we might need to check up on these with the parents on the Thursday. 

Onto Yazz’s year 7 class. She told me to bring them in from outside and take the register, this way the students would see me as the teacher rather than her doing this then handing over to me. I explained what I wanted them to do for the first 10 minutes of the lesson before they got on with their practical. When handing out the sheers I had made I was explaining what I wanted them to do and told them they were welcome to discuss their answers as a group on their tables. I gave them 5 minutes to do this then asked students from each table to give me an example of a hazard they had circled and challenged them by asking why this was a hazard. The students did very well, Yazz and I both praised them then let them get on with making their boxes which they had started a few lesson ago. Yazz told them that after doing my worksheet there should be no excuses for poor health and safety in the workshop now.

Wednesday I decided to stay with Miss Milne, my form tutor, for first period so I could observe a Drama lesson as Drama was not a subject at my school and I was interested in how the subject is taught. Her first lesson this day however just happened to be our form group. Despite them already being in the classroom for form she made them go outside and line up as they would for any other lesson. They were quite disruptive for the start of the lesson and Miss Milne had to keep explaining that now she was no longer their form tutor she was their Drama teacher. The year 7s seems to have a hard time understanding this difference and acted very differently to how the would in any other lesson. They were working in groups on some drama pieces and had to perform short acts at the end of the lesson. They were very good, I was really impressed.

Thursday was spent in the conference room at the school as we had a day of SEN training. We covered Dyslexia, Autism and ADHD in great detail and were told about students in the school who are very high up on the scale of these and how to include them in lessons. Stemming from this we were given an in depth talk about Teachers Assistants, how vital they are to a classroom, how to make effective use of them and to make sure we include them in every part of a lesson. I know sometimes TA’s can be overlooked in classrooms; I have friends who have been TA’s so I know how hard they work for very little recognition. After school it was parents evening, after spending a couple of weeks with the year 7s in form in was really nice to meet their parents and let them know how well they were all settling into secondary school. 

 

Friday as always was spent back at Goldsmiths and I was very pleased to be back having a session in the workshop. After spending a couple of sessions working with wood we moved onto metal. I don’t know too much about metal so found this workshop really helpful. We were first asked to make a tea light holder out of aluminium sheets. We cut the sheets to size using the notcher which cuts small notches out of the metal meaning your sheet stay straight whereas the guillotine which you could also use tends to slightly bend the sheet. After watching everyone use the notcher and seeing all the tiny scraps of aluminium just being dropped to the floor I had to ask Richard, the guy who runs the workshops, what happened to all the little scraps? After he gave us a 6 hour-long lecture on sustainability I was pleased to hear that they get swept up and melted down to be used for aluminium casting. We used Arba files to cut a hole out of the sheet for the candle to sit it then added a slight curve with the sheet bender and finally added feet with the box bender. A lot of stuff I had never used or even heard of before. We also got to use pop rivets to hold the parts that the candle will sit in together, I knew about pop riveting but had never physically done it before and my lack of strength meant I still nearly hadn’t but with a bit of help it worked. Later that day we were shown how to silver weld, again something I was aware of but had never tried.

I feel much more confident in my knowledge about metal now, shame the school I am currently at does not really work with it due to lack of funding, maybe I can put my knowledge into practise in my next placement.

Week 5, paper mechanisms and PARPA...

This week I felt like I had started my placement at Davenant School properly. I have been given a year 7 tutor group to sit in on where eventually I will be able to take register and organise activities for their morning sessions. First lesson of the day I observed one of my mentors classes, a year 8 class doing a ‘pop-up book’ project. It is a mainly Graphic Design based project where they are asked to design and make between 6 to 8 pages and eventually the book cover. In previous lessons they had been shown how to make various mechanisms out of card which they could use in their books. My mentor told me that when the next year 8’s come  in after finishing with textiles in November I can take this class so I will be teaching them for this project. The next lesson I observed was my mentor’s year 10 class doing a tea light holder project. All of the students are using wood (pine), some added acrylic. Health and Safety was stressed a lot throughout the lesson which was useful to me, this was the first time I had seen students using the tools and machinery. I had a short meeting with my mentor after this where we discussed what I will be doing in the next 2 weeks, we came up with a timetable and talked about when I might start doing some teaching. Last lesson of the day was with the year 12 and Yazz, the department Head. Her students are designing and making drinks holders for festivals and for use at the Olympics. This session she was running a Dragons Den and asked me to be one of the dragons. The students took it in turns to present their projects whilst us the 3 Dragons (me, Yazz and an English teacher) ask questions, make notes and score points. I was really impressed with the work. When I got home I tried out some paper mechanisms in preparation for the year 8 class I will be taking.

Tuesday, I got to sit in my first assembly with my new tutor group, some 6^th formers gave a presentation about the Olympics with the overall message being about respect, it was quite interesting but mainly interesting to see how teachers control such a large amount of students in the hall. Chrissy, my mentor was off sick so I spent the day with Yazz, the first class I observed was year 7. They were making boxes out of plywood, using tenon saws and coping saws to make the joints and using files to get the edges straight. A great thing I got out of the lesson was being able to tell some of the students off, I have been worried about not being able to discipline a class and I was able to ask some of the students not to sit down on the stools while they are sawing and they listened and stood up, this felt great. Next lesson was the year 12 I had seen last week working on their drinks holders, Yazz introduced me and told the class I had a degree in Product Design so they were eager to talk to me about what I had learned at uni and were asking for advice about their uni and course choices. It was really interesting seeing the contrast in teaching and attitudes from the year 7s to the year 12s. In the afternoon I met the year 13s, their project can be whatever they want it to be so I took the opportunity to sit with a few of the students and talk through their projects with them. Last lesson of the day was a year 9 group working on a toy project, this lesson they were working in groups coming up with ideas. One group spent most of the lesson arguing but the arguments were about the design aspects of their project, they seemed to be getting frustrated with each other but for me and Yazz it was great to see as their arguments showed real knowledge and passion. At the end of the day I sat in on my first staff meeting where we were told about recent Ofsted changes and showed a video of some of the schools 6^th formers giving their opinion good and bad teaching practice which was really interesting.

Wednesday I observed a year 10 class taught by Yazz (Head of Department) they are also doing a tea light project, I got to talk to a few of the students about their ideas and how they had come up with them. In the afternoon we had our first professional studies session at the school, first topic; stress management. We were asked to voice what caused us stress, it was nice that we all seemed to be worried about similar things, I felt less alone. We were given advice on time management, organisation and relaxation methods.

Thursday, I shadowed a year 10 student for the day, this was really fascinating as I got to sit in a variety of lessons; Maths, English, Science, R.E. and French, until then I had only observed D and T lessons. Maths was interesting as the teacher had a meeting so there was a cover teacher, the students were asked just to do revision for an exam. It was good to see how students interact with a cover teacher. English was another interesting lesson as a huge wasp was flying around the classroom and obviously the students were freaking out and not really getting any work done. It was good to see how the teacher handled this and regained control of the classroom. The Science lesson I observed was good for me in a different way as I found the teacher to be well…pretty bad, I took from this lesson how not to do things. After lunch I sat in on R.E. the teacher is high up in the school and the students obviously knew this as the students who had been misbehaving earlier were now as good as gold. Last lesson of the day, (I was knackered and ready for a sleep by this point, I’m not sure know the kids do it) was French. The teacher was really fun and the students clearly learned a lot and were more willing to listen and be involved, she was the best teacher I had seen that day and have noted down some of her tactics to use when I start teaching.

Friday we were back at Goldsmiths where we had a really interesting presentation about ‘handling collections’. Her example of this was she asked us all to pick a clothes peg from a bag and first write about what we can learn from our peg and then as a group compare our pegs. I didn’t realise how many different pegs there are!  We were shown how using a collection like this can open up a student’s imagination and widen their design ideas. They can design a pill box by looking at how a cocktail umbrella opens. It is about taking inspiration from different places. Through this you also have to be careful not to put too many obvious solutions in as this may cause students to become fixated by something, copy it and then what has happened to their imaginative design ideas? In the afternoon we were told about how the presentation we had in the morning was part of our first assignment. We are to develop our own handling collection and test it out on some of our students, the whole report is in in January so for next week at least I am not going to look too much into and stay focused on my school experience.

Week 4, boats and first day of school...

I had a great start to this week as we got to spend Monday in the workshop making things. We first made a small boat using chisels, rasps, disc sanders, drills, we are able to set up and use the ban saw and pillar drills, things I hadn’t used in a very long time. In the afternoon we made a box using a desk router and a mitre guillotine, I had never used on of these before, it was quite a scary looking thing. I found pretty hard to use, fortunately they don’t really have these in schools.

After spending the day playing with wood we had a small workshop about dyslexia, what it is and how to spot it in students. The following morning we had our final GPS lecture of 2011 about behaviour and classroom management. We were given a few ideas and tips, making sure you know the students names is really important as when you need to discipline a certain student your words will sink in more if you call the student by their name, it shows respect. Permanent exclusion was also discussed and the affect this has on a student. From this I have been reading about how schools are starting to illegal exclude students who are preforming badly to keep their league tables up, terrible! There is so much I am learning about the politics revolving around schooling systems that are destroying my soul a little bit.

This week we started our first school placement, me school is Davenant Foundation School in Loughton, Essex. I had heard great things about this school and was pretty excited to go. It is a teacher training school so my first 2 days were spent with 4 other PGCE students in the training room where we met the Head, got to talk to a previous Goldsmiths PGCE student who is now dong his NQT year at Davenant and were given all sorts of information about the school and in the afternoon we were treated by 2 short plays from the year 13 drama students. They acted out 2 classroom scenarios where the teacher lost control of the classroom, it definitely showed us what not to do. I met my mentor on this first day too, she is brilliant, really nice, helpful and knows what she is talking about, I think I will learn a lot from year. Day 2 we met with the Deputy Head, her presentation was quite hard to sit through. She spoke to us about cases of child abuse and times when child protection has to be called, we had to discuss how we would handle these situations, what signs to look out for and who to tell. We then learned about our legal rights as teachers and what you can and can’t do in schools. As luck would have it, that day there was also a fire drill so we now know what the protocol is if a fire should occur. The school closed early that day as there was a parents evening that night. I went over to the Design and Technology department where I got to meet Yazz the Head of the department and John the technician, I helped them set up for the parents evening, asked some questions about my time here in the next 2 weeks and then headed home.

Friday was spent back at Goldsmiths where we all discussed our experiences in our new schools; it was great to hear how everyone had been getting on and how different all of our first 2 days had been. We had a lecture in the afternoon from Steve Keirl on Design Ethics, it was great. We spoke about the comparisons of right and wrong, morals and values, and how these are different to different people and cultures. We spoke about how species and technology and connected and what this means. He told us about how the design process comes into ethics and how problems only really come out when things are tested and there are consequences and the whole design process starts again to resolve this.

Information overload this week, relaxing weekend to be had!

Rediscovering Hackney...

Last weekend when the weather was strangely hot we decided to take a walk along the canal towards Hackney and found some really cool little places, galleries and coffee shops we didn't know existed, I forgot how much I love Hackney. Thought I would put up a few pictures I took that day.

Love...

At my recent trip to the V & A Jessica Palmer, an artist and illustrator, held a paper cutting workshop where we were given some paper and scalpels and told to draw whatever we liked. It was a lot harder than I thought as you really need to think of the negative space, what you want to leave and what you want to cut. This was my attempt and a present to my boyfriend. She does not seem to have a website but she does have a blog: Jessica Palmer Illustration

Spoons...

Early this year while I was away travelling the world my boyfriend, knowing my love for teaspoons, decided to pick up my (probably bad) habit of stealing them from cafes. However he had good reason, he had been collecting them from significant places or at significant times while I was away and then put together this lovely display for me. It reminds me of the old boxes with butterflies pinned in, I love it! It now hangs proudly in our sitting room.

Week 3, the doodles start...

We started our third week with an all day workshop on sustainability, a subject I know a bit about and a subject I am fairly skeptical about, when the day was over I came out knowing a lot more and was even more skeptical! Amongst the new things I found out was how bad the production of cotton is for the environment and how 100% organic cotton isn't really any better as all it means is that no pesticides are used on the crop. 'Green-washing' was a new term I came across; when big corporations put all these 'eco labels' on products so you think by buying them you're helping the environment when really it makes little or no difference. A lot of the logos used on products eg. the triangle of arrows recycled sign don't mean a lot either. On a positive note I found out that the horrible carpet tiles which are used in schools and offices are actually pretty sustainable as companies lease them out and when that school or office no longer needs them they send them back to the company to get cleaned and fixed up and leased out to someone else.

We finally got into lesson planning this week and paired up to plan a lesson and present it to the rest of the group. After much confusion I think I managed to get the gist of it and really liked the lesson my partner and I came up with. The rest of the group had some pretty good ideas too, the session really made me feel more confident in planning my own lessons when in my school placement. I am now collating ideas and am looking forward to putting them into practice.

We had quite a few GPS lectures this week and was quite disappointed by them. Until now I have found pretty much all of them interesting and have learned a lot from them, this week however we had some fairly boring lecturers who I struggled to listen to which then lead to doodles not only from me but from a lot of students, I ended up spending most of the lectures admiring other students illustrations. One of the only quotes that really sticks in my mind from one of the weeks lectures was when someone said; 'education is like a big quacking duck...' what they meant by this I have no idea??

We ended our week again in the workshop with our first real practical lesson. I really felt like I was back at school in a D & T class sawing, chiseling, sanding. A few of us did end up with minor minor cuts to our fingers, not really an issue but definitely got me worried about if we are injuring ourselves what are they year 7s likely to do to themselves??? Must really focus on health and safety!