Challenging
22 January

Well, life in Year Two is challenging but challenging in a good way.

I feel as though I have turned a real corner in that I am looking positively to try out new things rather than simply fretting and running scared all the time. I still have an awful lot to learn and I am certainly not keeping all of the plates spinning all of the time but I am getting better a spotting the wobbles in advance.

What I would certainly acknowledge is that the tablets I am taking to rebalance my body's production of seratonin and noradrenaline are working. I feel more like me again, hopeful, ready to give things a go, more sunny.

I also feel that I am beginning to teach in that I am starting to prepare material for the children in that class so that they can learn something specific rather than feeling constrained by National Curricula or Longmans Scheme of Work. I'm not simply presenting material and failing to control the troops as I was before Christmas.

As well as four weeks of Maths. I'm now committed to three weeks of phonics! I don't really have a choice about these things as my class teacher is simply ramping things up and giving me the sort of push I need.

Actually, it's doing me a power of good. Since I don't get a choice; I just have to get on with it. I do get support and ideas and suggestions. But I have to make it my lesson.

So, for example.

When I had my planning meeting at the beginning of January, my teacher commented that one of the activities in the data week was going to be really difficult. The bought-in scheme had the children reading texts and counting the letters in words. BORING!!!! However, at that stage, I was still in a mind set of following the textbook because it had to be right.

On Thursday, I was reading another manual - to do with a thing called a Numicom, which is a set of interlocking shapes which help with the visualisation of number - and, in it, there was an exercise to do with counting shapes on patterned wrapping paper. I jumped on this. I've bought several sheets of brightly coloured paper. I'm going to get the children to count hearts and butterflies and flowers rather than letters in a word. Those who require a little more visualisation, I'm going to get them to cover each item with a counting cube and then count the cubes.

When I mentioned all of this to my teacher, she said that I was beginning to think like a Key Stage One teacher. Huzzah!!

However, it must be said that the jury is still out as to whether it is the more difficult to sort out behaviour management issues with Year 2 or to deal with a persistent and hungry cat whilst stuffing a chicken.

And this afternoon, my Rossi and I went to the Phil for our first concert of the year. We were probably among the very few people in the auditorium who had heard John Adams's piece The Chairman Dances in its original setting as part of Nixon in China. Vasily gave it some welly and fairly gyrated his way round the podium. The following Hindemith piece did little for me. It wasn't unpleasant - just not attractive.

But the main event came in the second half with Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony Leningrad written during the Nazi siege and promoted as a tribute to a city's defiance. I'd say that the piece is just as easily seen as one set of brutalities bearing down on another. If Stalin was the answer to Hitler then you would just weep really. Petrenko hammered home the ending massively building the climax from afar and holding the tempi back all the time. It was astonishingly good. Most of the audience stood. I stood too. It would be difficult to imagine a better performance.