Tuesday, 17/4/12.

I’m getting steadily more and more pissed off with the way my college tutor has handled this TA course. We haven’t had a session for the past four weeks because she’s been ill and then it was the Easter break, and today I get an email saying we’ve finished the taught work and we only need to attend for one-on-one tutorials (should we request them). She’s still got four of my units, or at least I’m hoping she has, and I still haven’t had a date set for my observation despite her knowing I can only do Tuesday mornings. It’s beyond ridiculous now. There’s what, two and a half months of the school year left? And she’s not done a single observation. I was supposed to have mine a month or two back, but she never turned up. She has no interest in the subject and it shows, but if she thinks I’m letting her incompetence ruin my chances of getting a pass she’s sadly very wrong indeed. 

Anyway, I’ll turn up for 6pm tonight and see if she’s marked the four units I handed in a month ago, and when I can book an observation for. If that’s a complete failure, then I’ll have to go over her head. I don’t want to, but this has gone too far. Everybody else on the course feels the same way, so at least I know it’s not just me.

/end rant.

I was back at West Winch this morning, and welcomed as lively as always. The class is learning about the Royal Family in preparation for the Jubilee so I filed some work on that, and then we did some literacy (describing the story of Cinderella) and some numeracy.

There’s one child, who we shall call Child X for privacy reasons, who I just don’t know how to help sometimes. He’s obviously the lowest ability in the class but he’s not special needs and he doesn’t require one-on-one TA support (even though I think he should) but he struggles with everything, even the simplest of sums that a two year old could understand. I think the main problem is that he just doesn’t listen when the teacher is explaining the current activity, and he takes on a very ‘I-don’t-know-I-can’t-do-it’ attitude when attempting his work even though he does know the solution. For instance, children of his age (6 and 7 year olds) should be able to count to 10. He can do it, because I’ve made him count out loud to prove it to me, but I asked him what 9 + 1 was earlier for a question in his maths book and despite wording it in every single way I thought possible, he still thought the answer was 18. In the end I had to resort to using my fingers to show him. It’s just so frustrating, because I know he knows this stuff, but I’m having to dumb it completely down for him so it’s probably not helping him long-term anyway. The piece on Cinderella they wrote today had to be completely their own work, so no help at all with spelling or ideas. He literally had no idea what to do, and I couldn’t help him, apart from prompt him to remember things from the story. He ended up with a couple of sentences which when I asked him to read them back to me he couldn’t do because he had no idea what he’d written, and it was completely unintelligible to me. In the end I worked out he’d written ‘how can be friends’ which I tried to explain didn’t make sense but he just couldn’t grasp how to make it into a sentence, and I felt completely useless to help him. Sigh.

Uh, not a lot else to add. I checked the air in my tyres again today and the rear left was down from 26 to 11 (in the space of three weeks) so I’ll be getting it checked for a slow puncture at the garage tomorrow. More bloody money to fork out!