Summer holidays day 1 - paperwork and birthday parties....

Day 1 of the 6 week holiday. We all got up late, had a lazy breakfast and settled down for a first day catchup sort of day.

Louise is currently downstairs sorting through a pile of cookery mags taking out interesting recipes, Molly's very excited and waiting impatiently for later on when her advance birthday party happens. And I'm (thinking about) catching up with school paperwork.

At work I have many, many systems for keeping track of what they hell I'm meant to be doing. All the staff know by now that something has to be written down somewhere to have a chance of me doing it - not that I'm pedantic about it, just that my poor, pathetic memory is such that I shall immediately forget something if it's just told to me in passing one day in the corridor.

So the two main systems are a clipboard with a regularly changing DO TODAY list. Then there's the invaluable REMEMBER THE MILK, a computer application I just couldn't do without.

And then there's the piles of paperwork. Again, these have a hieracrhy. First there's the pile of things under the clipboard. That's must do or needs doing today. Then there's a slightly bigger pile sitting on top of the computer next to the admin laptop. And then there's the boxfile.

The big boxfile with all the things I really need to look at - AT SOME POINT. Things that aren't necessary for either day to day or term to term. Similarly there's also a Remember The Milk tab labelled TO LOOK AT, which I routinely add websites and applications that should be really good if only I/the teachers ever had a moment to look at them.

The big boxfile was my final day job. Instead, what happened was that, as usual, I finished with no time to spare, grabbed all of the paperwork outstanding and threw it all into the boxfile and took it home. Which, if the holidays go exactly like last year and the year before, it will sit on a shelf until it's time to go back, unopened and unlooked at.

Well not this year, this year I shall do things differently. This year I have the boxfile on the desk. This year I shall be opening it up and working through it (using the paper bin a lot I imagine).

Or at least I intend to. Right after I finish blogging about it. Then I may make a cup of coffee. Thn I think the office could do with a dust. Then it's probably around lunchtime.

Is it Easter yet?

Oh my word, I'm tired. Candle burning at both ends and all the way through the middle. A combination of a long, involving term since Christmas and a desire to write more and more things down has left me with the sort of tiredness I usually have at holiday time.

Unfortunately I've managed to skip a week. I'm in holiday tired mode with a whole week left of school. Arse.

Smarter people than I would spend the week being careful and getting to bed early. But not me. Oh no, I have a list of things to do this week, both school and writing, that means early nights are something I can only imagine once the holidays start.

Oh well. Could be worse. I could have a real job that didn't give me school holidays off. How do you people do that?

Should have deleted that email...

Oh, what a great day. All went well until an email from someone in council ICT that just happened to mention, in passing, the new BECTA guidelines for schools and data. I should have just deleted it, seeing as it doesn't come into effect until later in the year, but oh no, I read it, I clicked the links, I tried to decipher my way through page after page of BECTA guidelines and all the way through I just felt my mood getting worse and worse and worse. The work involved is overwhelming, bogglingly so.

The good news is that it doesn't have to be done all in one go. The bad news is that now I know it has to be done it's going to be at the back of my damn mind. Should have just deleted the email. Damn.

E-mail and tab closing......

The last few nights have been absolutely fantastic. Instead of feeling wiped out and lethargic and then finally getting bits of things done in the early hours I've actually been able to get myself motivated, organised and productive to the point where Sunday, Monday and Tuesday saw me just plowing through stuff, head down, fingers tapping, Kraftwerk on the i-pod and loads of things being done.

Reviews are written, Thought Bubble has been written about, people I had to thank for stuff at Thought Bubble have been thanked, people I had to say sorry that I missed you have been apologised to, school work has been done. In fact, everything's gone really well. To the extent that, each night, I've sat and worked at my desk and been surprised to look and see it's not yet 11 o'clock. Normally, if I've managed to get some stuff done, it's at least 2am and maybe later. Of course, realising it was 11pm meant I then had at least 2 and a half hours extra. But surprisingly, I used this time well as well.

However, tonight has been a bit disappointing.

My mistake was sitting and watching the England v Germany football. Feeling increasingly sleepy all the way through the second half I nodded off to miss the end and woke with a horrible headache and feeling really out of it. This has only really worn off in the last half hour.
So tonight has been spent trying to clear a bulging email inbox, writing replies and messages to folks and then dealing with trying to close a huge number of tabs that Firefox has open at the moment.

That done, I can now settle down and start working.
Or I could go to bed.
I think I know what the answer to that conundrum will be. And I think you do as well.

The Current state of my workload......

Not bad at all as it happens.
Having half term to really work hard on a load of things has really helped.

School - pretty much everything on the looooong to-do list at school has to be done in situ at school. Which is very, very good because that means I can't bring it home.

Teaching Assistant's course - I have to get 7 modules done by July to hand the pointless waste of time in. I have now completed 6 modules. The 7th one shall be completed before this time next month. But don't tell anyone, I 'm siure I'm not meant to be able to finish that early. Of course, it helps to have stuff to crib off and it really helps that I don't have a problem with, shall we say, adjusting the actuality to fit in with what I need to have achieved.

Reviewing - all is going well. Joe at FPI has 5 waiting to put up and there's another 15 on my computer to go to him.
This is the current state of the reviewing shelf:

Very scarily though, if you compare it to this from June 2007, you'll see that there are some things I just can't seem to get my arse into gear to review. Including, terrible to tell - Alice in Sunderland. I really need to lock myself in a room for a weekend to just read and review it.

But all in all, life on the workload front is very good. Ta for asking.

Of course, I'm still exhausted at the moment, and staying up late all the nights this week haven't helped much either. To bed.