I am glad that we had a good Easter holiday, it was essential to decompress after hitting the ground at speed in early January. The two weeks spent with my family were full activities I’ll cherish, especially the increasingly complex Easter Egg hunts and our visit to Milan. However it was time to go back to the day job this week, being the thing which gives us the opportunity to spend time together making these awesome memories in the first place, and support the senior students in their final week of N5, Higher and Advanced Higher courses.
As I’ve been more involved in delivering NPA courses since 2019 and was working at NESCol last year I’ve forgotten what it was like to have all your senior classes end in April.
That doesn’t mean that the work has ended until summer. I’m still restructuring the department course plans and resources and hopefully May will be the time where I get to spend my working day improving resources, creating Edpuzzle exercises and reflecting on student surveys to ensure that any gaps are addressed for next year. If I’m able to find a quiet space to work, that is.
This week the Esports club began. 46 students duly signed up for Wednesday and Friday lunchtime clubs, with the majority selecting Fortnite as their first title. I’ve said this previously, but GE Force Now and XBox Live has made this club possible. I’ve got to thank Mitch Whitehead for highlighting this in his earlier weeknote and, after a lot of stress testing and conversations with IT support to make sure we weren’t destroying the network capacity, it works well enough to allow students to work together on improving their rankings in order to qualify for online tournaments and practice towards the planned friendlies in May and June. After summer I hope that a few teams can be entered into the British Esports League, although that would mean changing game of choice for a while, and gain further experience of teamwork and leadership. Already I’ve noticed how good some of the students are at sharing strategies, supporting progress of their peers and, at times, cheering on as I attempt to keep up with them. It’s funny to observe how outside of formal class structures, these clubs can quickly develop into supportive surrogate families.
My son and over 50 of his peers are preparing for their practice Bronze Duke of Edinburgh excursion, something he is really looking forward to but wasn’t possible at his previous school. It means that he will be away overnight camping with a group of friends, something he has been asking to do for years! The house will undoubtedly be a lot quieter without him, and contain a lot more food. Unfortunately my partner and I didn’t get the chance to complete our Duke of Edinburgh awards at school, so we have been taking advice from my mum and her partner Ian. They are far more well versed in hiking, camping and general outdoors than we are, although we are aiming to improve in some aspects this summer, and their advice has been both vital and gratefully received.
We also had some sad news this week as my grandmother Agnes passed away at 89. She filled her life with experiences, including running a sweet shop in Fyvie when my mum was young. She travelled extensively, evidenced by quite a number of her photograph albums in my loft (temporary storage after she moved into a home last year). She loved listening to Andre Rieu. I knew this because she told me this a lot. I took the hint and regularly bought her his music or latest DVD for Christmas.
One memory that sticks with me centres around an iPad she had been given by my uncle to help her keep in touch with family. One morning I was teaching my year 10 iGCSE class in Milan and projecting my iPad to the screen, working through Python code. Suddenly a call notification appears and the class laugh, “Granny is calling you sir”. “Who is Granny?”. When I establish that it’s my nonna, the mood immediately changes: “you HAVE to answer it sir!”. So the class and I have a very brief conversation with Agnes and, after the call ends, they asked me to translate what she had said. It was their first encounter with someone speaking Doric and although I had no issue understanding what she was saying the rest of the class were completely lost.
I wouldn’t say it was a highly informative teaching opportunity, but it was an important relationship builder with my class and strengthened my understanding of Italian family culture. She probably never knew, but it’s one of my favourite classroom stories to share. She also loved to catch up with our stories when we came back from Milan for brief visits and put a lot of thought into where and who we met up with. I was glad I was able to see her this week and say goodbye.
On Friday evening my partner and I cooked Cajun chicken pasta and kept ourselves busy, getting life admin and tidying done in between segments of TV shows. We call this “The Broons Method” after a strip we both read as children. The Broons are a beloved multi-generational Scots family who have been immortalised in comic format in the Sunday Post since 1936. Getting a Broons and/or Beano annual was a Christmas staple when we were growing up, a tradition we continue to this day and fully expect our children’s children to extend into the future as well. My gran had a large collection of these annuals and my sister, cousins and I used to spend hours reading them to ourselves and each other, adding occasional splashes of colour to some of the more worn annuals, absorbing life lessons from a fictional family more close-knit than any other we knew.
Something at the end for you to enjoy, combining my gran’s love of Andre Rieu with Andrea Bocelli, who at times I could just listen to forever.
Thanks for reading this each week. Take care, hug your loved ones, see you soon xx
Love the story of ‘nonna’ meeting your class! What a wonderful thing. Especially for them to hear a Doric speaker. Really pleased that the esports club odds working out too!