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Well Christmas is finally here. I made it. A very festive end to the term too with snow and ice and mince pies at every turn.

There were also flurries of amusing moments to cap off the year which was much appreciated.

I made up a couple of quizzes for the last lessons with certain classes. One on food that I did with year sevens and eights and one general knowledge that I did with year nine and ten. Like most of the anecdotes in this blog their answers are half funny half terrifying.

"Who was the second man to set foot on the moon?"

"Steve Martin" was one guess.

I also overheard another boy in year ten say...."Oh I know this one. It's that Muslim guy. The terrorist......Osama Bin ladin!"

I suppose it would have been a reasonable hiding place for him.

The marathon has also apparently been re calibrated and is now set at a challenging 2400miles. Phew. Best get in training now.

Frankly their general knowledge was appalling all round. One boy said "why on earth would I know the capital city of Australia or Argentina or wherever. That's a stupid question. I would just have to remember them all!"

The google generation have no use for memory it seems.

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More food lesson mirth this week. Students need to bring in some ingredients from home to cook with when we do practical lessons. We were making french bread pizzas and I had the ingredients on the board for them to write in their homework diaries and then bring in:

"Half a baguette
A small block of cheddar cheese
Tomato puree
2 extra ingredients eg. sweetcorn, mushrooms
I container to take the food home in"

The class were all filing out after having written in their diaries but one boy remained and was still writing in his diary.

"Sir?" he said.

"Yes Ahmed?"

"Do I need to bring in an egg?"

"It's not a normal thing to have on a pizza but you can have it on Pizzas. I don't think it would work in this circumstance though."

"Oh. It's just that it says it on the board"

I looked again at the board confused. "No it doesn't"

"It does. Look" He pointed at the board.

"eg."

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We have lots of teaching assistants (TA's) in our school and they do an amazing job for bugger all money. We have one in particular who helps in the technology department more than anywhere else. He is great with the really needy troublesome kids and knows our subject very well.

The nature of his job means that he is much more in amongst the kids and gets to be much closer to them every day, often following one student round all week. He has some brilliant stories about what the kids are really like and one that he told me last week cracked me up.

There is a boy in school (who I will call Jurgen) who has a great deal of special needs. He is almost completely mute in most of his classes and only nods or shakes his head or points at things. He is very creative in technology and is good at making things. However in private with our TA he doesn't stop talking. The problem being that it's an endless stream of lies that leave his mouth. Stories of blowing up car tyres with cd lasers and other tall tales.

In one of his citizenship lessons the task was to create a story that could have been frontpage news, write the article and draw some pictures to go with it. Out TA had to spend ages coaxing something out of Jurgen.

"Come on. What could be a big story that would get onto the front of the paper?"

Jurgen picked up his pen and wrote...







"DOG KILD"


"Erm...I'm not sure that would have made the front page of a national newspaper Jurgen. Try something a bit more serious.




The pen came out again.














"BOY KILD"



"Ok that's a bit better but we still need more of an attention grabbing headline."







The pen.





"HAIRY BOY KILD"




Thinking he better quit while ahead the TA went with that headline and Jurgen wrote the article. It told a tragic tale of a hairy boy. A boy so hairy that when he spent an afternoon licking his own arms he eventually choked to death on a hairball.

I really wish I could have seen the picture that went with the story.