This is Omar’s blog

Today the agency gave me two jobs. One school in the morning covering PPA (planning, preparation and assessment) and a whole other school in the afternoon covering for the deputy head. This was a first for me, I mean in itself it’s not that difficult to do. It’s just that in some regards it makes doing supply even harder. You can’t build any rapport with a class over a couple of hours, anything you build up in the morning you can’t carry through to the afternoon. It is hard enough as it is, trying to build up something approaching a relationship over a day.

So first school went ok (well? horribly badly?) I think. It was strange because the classroom had doors to adjoining classrooms - which leads you to wonder when they are working if it’s too noisy (what is normal)? Whether they are on track and so on. Also most of the classrooms had doors leading to the hall and I was doing P.E. Hmmm, no pressure or anything. It just meant that my P.E. lesson was observed by everyone and there were people coming in and out all the time. Before of the time constraints I had to mark books at breaktime (only one set thankfully) and go through the rest at the start of lunch and then rush off to the next school.

First schools lunch started at 12:15, so marking books took me to 12:25 and then 15 minutes across town (oh how I love you learner driver…) to arrive at the next school. Except their lunch started at 12:00, which meant I had 10 minutes to learn what to do and I was out on the playground meeting a new class. Also, it meant I just didn’t have any time to eat lunch. So we did literacy (again, fine) and then they made cards and that was the 2 hours flying by. 32 more books to mark and I leave at 4.

I don’t think I like it. The first school is good in that you have more time to go through plans, get yourself a little settled in and bad in that you have no time after - I don’t know what I would have done if I had to mark literacy as well. The second school is good in that you have time to look through work afterwards and bad in that you have no time before hand.

Pros and cons.