Skip to main content

Back to work..

Well there's nothing like a plunge in at the deep end!
I should have realised when I walked into a classroom and there were only girls there, but it took me a couple of minutes to register. Yes, on my first lesson back it was a double group of year seven girls for the PSHE lesson on puberty! They had had the session with 'the tampax lady' (a new superhero?) and now it was my turn to put them at ease and answer all their questions about growing bits!

I had this odd emotional mix of amusement, and real sense of responsibility. It suddenly hit me that for some of the students, I was their main source of information about all the weird stuff that they were feeling and going through. What I was going to say mattered. It would influence how they felt about themselves. Much more scary and mich more of a privilege than telling them about old dead people.

My friend Christine wrote this amazing piece on influencers.

It came home again to me today that the role of the teacher really is a responsible one (wonder if that means I shoudn't have told the story about the reputable Christina leader getting kicked in the groin when he was eleven... twas a cautionary tale!)

Comments

rach said…
I'd like to see Tampax Lady's superhero uniform. And what are her secret powers???

I've changed your "Where Am I?" so that it doesn't say November anymore. Says February now though so you'd better update us!! :o)
12:12 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Week Today

A week today, when all the furore has ebbed and the markets have bottomed out, our nation will awake to the sounds of bugles and church bells as we commemorate 100 years from the start of the Battle of The Somme.  I am an historian by background, and the Somme for me is emblematic of a human tragedy that need never have happened. My reading of it is this: we began a war from a variety of odd alliances and murky motivations, capped off finally by a sense that no-one had the will to stop it.  In order to give the war effort impetus, posters, propaganda began to be bandied around about the enemy, about what they would do to children and how they needed to be stopped. It worked as a recruiting effort- young men, boys, and women all joined the war effort. They joined as an act of patriotism, tinged yes with fear, but also a sense that it might be the right thing to do. They joined from across the country- but at the heart of the front line forces were thousands and ten of thousands...
1 comment
Read more

Remembering What I Enjoy..

Occasionally I forget things. Some stuff like birthdays, names and stuff is a normal human thing, and I don't sweat it so much. But I also forget some other stuff which is not so good. I forget what I enjoy. I don't know how it happens but it does from time to time. And its at these moments that I need a bit of help remembering. So- this is a request for help. What do I enjoy doing? What gives me joy? Leave me a comment.
12 comments
Read more

What is your gospel?

So I'm meeting the DDO again tomorrow, where we will look criteria G: faith. One of the questions is; 'what is your gospel?'. Its a really interesting question; one that I have probably answered in many ways through the last 16 years. Today I think it is.. 'God made humanity to live in relationship with him, we chose to wander away from that and so the world has ended up essentially still good but just a shadow of what its meant to be. Thats true both of us individually and humanity in general. God has made a way for us to restore our relationship with him, and to become agents in restoring how things were always supposed to be. That way: is Jesus. As part of God, he lived on earth modelling the way that God chooses to change things. He kicked out demons, healed the sick, dignified the poor, and chose to subject himself to a world that hated him. He invites us to live like him- and gives us hope of doing just that through the Holy Spirit. The Bible uses the im...
9 comments
Read more