Thursday Weirdness

 It has been a very random day today. Well, not random really so much as messy. It has left me feeling somewhat flustered and a little frustrated. Mostly in a blah way but I'm home from school now so things should pick up.

I had my not-so-random-and-becoming-ever-more-frequent surprise relief sprung on me again today. Bother, I say to this business of not getting much desired non-contacts. Hang relief. (I read some Wind in the willows (the bit where Toad has an intervention and the others try to break his motorcar habit) in order to cheer myself up. It made me more jolly but I have had WITW speak running through my head all day.)

The only good thing was that it was running a PAT so I got to do some reading. Unfortunately it was relief for a disorganised person. There weren't enough copies of the answer sheets and there was no roll, so I had to run off and do photocopying and find a roll before I could start. Most annoying. At least I get to feel superior as my classroom is always organised to the point where a reliever could find the roll!

My period 2 class was interrupted by a particularly loud burst of rain. It was weird. The day had been overcast and a little windy but still fairly warm. Then, out of nowhere, it started raining. Not in the short shower kind of way but in a massive storm, ridculously heavy rain bucketing down and thundering on the roof way. Very noisy and fascinating to the kiddies. You would have thought they had never seen rain before.

My seniors seemed to be distracted and particularly dim today. Asking stupid questions and whinging a lot. Not good.

On the bright side of things, I have started re-reading Lord of the Flies. I first read it in high school (I think I studied it for sixth form English) and I don't remember particularly enjoying it all that much. However, I decided to teach it this year with my Year 12s (mostly because I'm enjoying LOST the TV show so much so I wanted to re-read LOTF anyway).

Anyway, I'm immensely enjoying it. Very cool. Firstly, there is the cool Enid Blyton type of speech. "Wizard!", "beasties" and the reference to "lashings of blood" when they kill the pig. Piggy is pretty much a Gamer type and his suggestions seem just like what a certain type of RPGer would do in a scenario. The language is fantastic the way it seems to instantly create English school boys of the era, both Public school types and lower class, through their speech and then has these amazingly beautiful descriptions of the island. It gets dark and gritty very quickly too. I think I missed the whole war-time paranoid atmosphere when I first read it, I think I just thought it was an accidental plane crash. Hopefully I'll get a chance to finish it tomorrow.