So that was the week! I don’t know about anybody else but I started Friday and it feels like I blinked and then that was it…
It’s been an incredible week really all-round. I’ve spent a lot of time with our youngest students and the trajectory of my learning is just seemingly infinite. We’ve got such incredible practitioners in the school, not that this is a surprise to me, and so it is easy to see why we have such great students. I have learned so much from the children as well, their capacity and capability for curiosity and interest is seemingly endless. At the same time I feel I have made some interesting connections with our older students as well as I set out on Tuesday as a solo climber on the Everest challenge through global compass. I didn’t do too badly on Tuesday, I think I got to around 45 flights of stairs and thought I wasn’t doing too badly. I’m supposed to be doing something like 140 flights per day over the 14 days, but I thought I would get somewhere in the vague region by the end of the competition. However, then I hit Wednesday with back-to-back meetings and I think I managed about 12 flights of stairs… Which, I suppose given my office is on the ground floor and most of my meetings and now the year groups which I’m working most closely with are also on the ground floor that’s not too bad. Unless I am actively visiting children or adults, I don’t need to go up any stairs.
People keep telling me that there are only eight weeks left after this one and my mind flits between ‘Still eight weeks left, that’s ages!’ and ‘Aargh, only eight weeks left!’. In some ways it feels like we have only just started the year, and then I think back to this time last year and we were just either preparing to open or just starting to open. It was all hands on deck, trying to visualise what school was going to look like, and what state the children would be in emotionally, what will the campus look like with all the restrictions and so on. So now it’s a whole different world quite literally. I was speaking to one of our newly appointed staff after school today she’s in Sheffield where the weather is freezing and they are still only able to socialise outside. It really did occur to me just how fortunate I am to be here. You will have seen Andrew Fitzmaurice’s request for messages of support for our colleagues at the Oakridge schools in India. I know that we have colleagues in school with friends, relatives or ex-colleagues who are directly impacted by what is going on in India. I know that India is the country that is hitting the headlines but there must also be other countries around the world where people are really suffering still. I’m really trying to reframe my thinking to think positively and remember actually how lucky I am and just to remember that it’s not like that for everybody. As you know I have an uncanny ability to put my big size 8 foot in it lots of times, managing completely unintentionally to say the wrong thing at the wrong time! I wouldn’t for the world offend anybody intentionally but I do manage to just come out with some cracking faux pas every now and again and just really say the wrong thing and I just hope people know me well enough by now to understand it’s just me getting it a bit wrong rather than deliberately trying to offend them.
If the worst I am experiencing struggling to get a VPN so I can WhatsApp my parents and my friends, then well I need to get over myself. Certainly the ability to use FaceTime has really revolutionised my conversations with my parents as they finally entered the 21st-century. Roughly eight years ago we gave them an original iPAD (which was second hand when we got it), but this year they they have treated themselves to have a brand-new iPad so they can now use FaceTime on the iPad or on the phone. It really is quite comical because half the time they keep telling me that I’m the wrong way round and then I turn my phone around and then they’re the wrong way round and so in the end I just end up looking at them sideways so that they can look at me the right way up. So it’s all still fun and games in the Hadlington household. The weather seems to be turning as we are entering plum rain season so we will be seeing some more rain showers. I’m really pleased that year 1 were able to go out today after their postponed trip last week. I’m looking at my summer wardrobe and have finally retired my thick black tights which is a good job because some of them are on their last legs (no pun intended!). Well, I hope everybody enjoys the beautiful sunshine and let’s hope it stays over the weekend.
Before I finish, I do want to say what a great job our Mandarin department have done with the speech shows this week. What the children have produced has been incredible. It was just great seeing children who are earlier on in their English language journey confident on stage because they’re speaking in their native tongue. Their ability to be creative with the language was great and their confidence on stage was brilliant, even though I only understood approximately 25% of what was being said!
Anyway, that’s all for today. I’m back listening to music again today. I’ve got ‘Pop Acoustic’ on and it’s currently July by Noah Cyrus. Nice and chilled background music, I can definitely recommend.
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