i may have cleared my inbox

my schoolbag is no longer filled with papers i need to mark. that is a HUGE breakthrough. it means i have ascended the mountain of paper that we are required to traverse.

we now have the six week check to make sure that all the boxes are ticked. a bit like anne tolley, the current minister for education, and her 'national standards'. we all have to comply with the dreaded 'six week check'. this is where we prove our paperwork is all up to date. a bit more pressure seeing as this year we have ERO (very scary apparently...meh...i know i'm a good teacher so i'm not scared. i can teach dyslexics to read...i'm THAT good).

so...the link with anne tolley...and there is one though i am drawing the long bow a bit...she has said all schools need to do national standards, even though she said 50% of schools are failing and that's why we all need to do them. ERO has a five year cycle for schools who are performing well. the boss wants us to get on that. i suggested to her that the teachers she knows are 'doing their job' should go on to a similar thing. where we (and yes i mean me) go on to a two or three year cycle where we don't get the six week check...cos we can be trusted. it didn't fly.

and on another note. anne tolley has been very quiet about national standards recently...i'm hoping she's ignoring them so they'll all go away.

and on other non school related news. there was no one in christchurch cathedral when the quake hit. which is great. that means the 22 dead didn't eventuate. i want to know where they got that number from. the moon guy, who i think is called ring, is making a lot of people scared. no one can predict earthquakes and if you're so worried about the 20th of march then go hunker down somewhere. this has not been helped by the two recent quakes in wellington (a 4.5 and a 4.7). we get 3 or 4 of them a year according to the scientists. and as a scientist i side with them. the recent christchurch quakes were a 1 in 15,000 year occurrence (the 7.1). wellington's 'big one' is a 1 in 700 year occurrence and we are halfway through that cycle...i'm not running for the hills. i have water and food so i'll be ok. but odds are i'll be at school when the biggie happens. if that's the case then i'm in some serious shit...it's a big hill i have to walk over to get home, that's if it survives the tsunami (my home, not the hill, i'm in the 'red zone').