Bagshite

Labour's Phil Hope has lost the Corby constituency to toff-nosed Conservative candidate Louise Bagshite. The succinct nature of this blog should hopefully communicate how horribly disappointing this is.

Faimly

Deliberate misspelling there. Say it in a Glaswegian accent should make it make sense.

'Twas my birthday yesterday, was a really good day, not because I got lots of presents or money or anything but just a generally great day spent with great friends and family. I woke up at 7 and opened my presents to start with. From the family, just clothes but lots of them, and bloody hell I needed them! I was going through my wardrobe the other day and out of the 14 T-shirts I had, 7 were grey! Very depressing but thankfully it's a bit more colourful now.

School was awesome for a few reasons, first and foremost it was Wednesday which means no Sociology or Geography and two IEC lessons. Got loads of birthday wishes off people which I reckon is better than a card or a present or anything. Will I? Ham? bought me a box of chocolate which I shared with my Humanities class who were surprisingly well-behaved for a change.

After school the usual birthday drill which never fails to get tiresome and was actually the highlight of the day. Basically my extended family plus family friends came round at essentially the same time as each other and we spent the evening playing football in the garden. I love my family, even though we don't see each other very often, we're all very close and always have a great laugh. Since I've started at BW and getting stick for being Scottish it always makes me laugh when my family get together and the air turns blue and people get drunk, but hey, it's who we are, and if you've got a problem wi' that you can get it right up ye! :P

My Kids

People always look at me really funny when I refer to the kids I spend my IEC with like that, although the funny looks I get from that pale into insignificance compared to the funny looks I get from people when some of my kids run up to me in the corridor and hug me or stand uncomfortably close to me and things like that.

But anyway, even if sounds perverted, I genuinely feel attached to my kids, I feel responsible for making sure that they pull through what can be a horribly difficult year OK, and now as they approach the end of Year 7 and I see that they're (mostly) maturing into a bunch of really great people, it makes me feel immensely proud. And for the ones that aren't quite adjusted to the secondary school way of life yet, I kind of feel compelled to make sure that I have a laugh with them as much as I can to get them a bit more acclimatised to getting along with people, as if it's my duty to make sure they catch up with the rest of the pack.

My mentor for IEC is involved with the pastoral care side of things so she tends to find out about some of the personal difficulties that these kids are going through, and there are a fair few of them. When I find out that X's mum is dying of cancer or Y's bad behaviour is really an attempt to cover up the fact that he's practically illiterate, it affects me horribly, it plays on my mind for days and it actually keeps me awake at night sometimes. People are often quick to dismiss Year 7's as blank canvasses but some of these kids are experiencing difficult personal lives on a scale which most people will never know at that kind of age, and they manage to hide it during school time impeccably.

So that's a post about my kids, the kids who've managed to wean me away from chasing a hopeless dream of a career in the aviation industry and towards what might just be my true calling. This whole post is probably a bit incoherent and poorly structured but that's exactly how I want it to be because it reflects how mind-blowing this whole experience is.

Until next time.

PMTP

PS- Actually teaching them isn't that bad either! :P