Open evenings. Let’s be honest, probably not the highlight of the school teacher’s year. Let’s stay really late at school, showcasing all the very best things, and smiling a lot and having the same sort of conversation on repeat with cute Year 6s and their slightly nervous parents. I mean, it’s fun meeting people, and the families where you’ve already taught the older siblings are normally very friendly, plus there’s a nice sense of camaraderie amongst a team of teachers all in the same room instead of just working in parallel as we do normally, but still, it’s a long old day at work, when who wouldn’t rather be at home watching Netflix? At least the VERY BIG PLUS to the last two schools I’ve worked at, has been that the next day was a disaggregated training day (ie a day off) so you mostly get a day without talking to anyone to recover.
The last open evening at my previous school, I was too pregnant to fit in my suit, had fat swollen feet after a day of teaching, plus I had evening morning sickness (?!). My current school is less suit-y so luckily weight doesn’t matter so much. Another year at my previous school I was put in Drama, so that was actually pretty fun, because we basically played drama games all evening whilst parents came in and watched. And by ‘we’ I actually mean, the sixth formers ran it all. At one point, I remember the Head of Drama came in and complained I’d left the house lights on as well as the stage lights, but I somehow managed to pass that off on the sixth formers too, and kept smiling benignly at parents who came in and commented on how much fun we looked to be having, as two Year 13 boys got all the Year 7s bouncing round like frogs on the stage in some game I didn’t even know the name of.
This year, my school open evening felt different. Mostly because of having a Year 6 son. Also, as the result of being a fairly gregarious person who lived in catchment for 14 years.
I expected to spot my own family (obviously) and most of my son’s classmates (I’d even done a sneaky plug at the SATs information evening that day). I hadn’t quite reckoned on my whole antenatal class being in attendance. I really should have done the maths. And then there were a whole bunch of people I kind of recognised from toddler groups and church clubs and stuff. Really, it was practically the social event of my year. One colleague asked, “Why do you know EVERYONE? You keep hugging people!” Which was a far cry from the online ‘open evening’ (now there’s an oxymoron) of two years previously.
This year there was also some unexpected schmoozing. You can spot the teachers by the questions they ask. One lady quizzed me on reading policy, and it turns out she's a local trust literacy lead, and I’ve just tracked her down to request a meeting. One pair of English teacher parents asked a bunch of probing questions, then almost literally had the tables turned when I arrived at their school a week later to do the same.
Yes, this year I have been doing open evenings as a punter, not as a teacher, which is different. Significantly more getting lost, and picking up handouts, and sampling food (obviously a highlight). You’d think being a pair of teachers ourselves would make things easier; I suspect it makes us more critical, and harder to impress with a whiteboard game. Although there are of course some very impressive things on display in Cambridge secondary schools. My son was mostly impressed by proximity, how nice the buildings were, and the lists of school trips, and recipes to cook in food tech lessons. You’ve got to go off something, I suppose.
Anyway, the tours were done, the decisions made, the application stuff filled in, and now we have to wait. And wait.
October till March seems a jolly long time.
More on decision making here: https://sarahhadfi.wixsite.com/website/post/on-decisions
And on why I really do love my job so much here: https://sarahhadfi.wixsite.com/website/post/on-danish-whales-and-quantitative-easing
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