Wednesday, 13 February 2008

Schools TourContinued

Schools Tour Continued
I have now done six visits and it is getting amazing. Apparently, my publisher was contacted last week by the mother of one of the children who’d heard me speaking. This lady runs the Holloway Arts Festival and wants to book me for that.
The kids are great in all of the schools and the teachers are mostly nice, though there have been some oddities. I drove over 150 miles to one school. I arrived at 9.45 for a 10.00 start. I was greeted with “Oh, I wasn’t expecting her until 10.00.” Well, what did they want? Did they want me to risk being fifteen minutes late instead?
Sometimes the staff seem to have their own agenda. At another school I kept being interrupted so that the teacher could tell the children how well they were doing. It seemed to be more about whether the children could behave well rather than what I had to say. They were well behaved and the odd one or two who lost concentration were not disruptive. More disruption was caused by the teachers trying to discipline them. On one occasion, I was left to find my own way out of the building. Thank goodness my own teaching experience made me confident about what to do.
But these are the exceptions, and on the whole, the teachers are lovely, too. The interaction with the kids has been amazing, and do I now have a title for “The Veiled Princess”? Veiled Dreams? Courtesy of Brookfield House School, where I was yesterday.
All of the children have been well behaved, though I have seen one or two examples of boredom. Time to up the game, I guess. I think I need to teach all the primaries how to make a Lombardy knot.

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