First Day Back – Verdict Ugh!

Just as expected, the students were absolutely horrible yesterday. As we walked into the centre and saw them all, my heart sank. Jackie said later she felt exactly the same way.
 
In some ways, the students are like this at this particular centre, because the co-ordinator there has had several weeks off sick. The workers that have been left to keep things ticking over are new or inexperienced in working with AltEd groups and all things considered, they’ve done reasonably well. However, the voice of authority has been missing and these young people reacted as they do. Horrible attitudes and they care about nothing that doesn’t directly affect them.
 
The co-ordinator (who incidentally is still in pain and you could see it) tried to tell them that playtime is over and they’ve now got to turn themselves around. It sounded good, but didn’t work and the whole day was a vertical slog. For Jackie and I, it was a choice of either A) skim through the work we’d planned and get the minimum of folder work out of them or B) try to stick with our original lesson plan and try to engage them a bit more.
 
B) failed immediately, so we moved back to plan A). The young people now have minimum outcomes with disgustingly poor presentation and their lack of caring shows in every badly formed mark (hardly good enough to call letters) on their work. The thing is, it was an interesting subject – about ethical working practices – and a lot of what we were trying to discuss with them, such as skin care products, animal testing, child labour making trainers, etc. should have been something they could relate to and talk about.
 
Anyway, we’re running the same planned lesson with one of the other groups on Wednesday. The Wednesday group are the best one, so hopefully that’ll make us feel a bit better. Yesterday, I felt like saying F*CK IT!” and giving up. It really was that bad.
 
I had to come from that to thinking about the celebration evening on Friday for the youth councillors (who are mostly lovely to work with). Talk about a quick shift needed! The meeting and planning with Diane went well and we went out for a noodles dinner afterwards. Yet again, I’ve overeaten…
 
Today, I need to put together some equality and diversity stuff for a group of volunteers I work with in one of the schools. I know I’ve got the resources as they were given to me at a training event I went to before Christmas, but can I find them? Dilemma – whether to spend time searching, or just rewrite them.
 
What’s needed is for training facilitators to get up to date, to stop handing out trees to delegates and to give us all a disk of the “handouts” instead. Then I could file them on my computer (which is a horrible mess in itself, but the computer mess doesn’t take up physical space and the search facility works better than me sifting through big piles of paper (yes, Icklewriter, I bet I have bigger piles of paper stuff than you!)).
 
I want to join a campaign to ban paper handouts and make them a hanging offence or something.