I was doing the weekly shop today. Supermarket shelves full of stuff to strike dread into the hearts of teachers and parents alike. “Back to school”. Seriously, folks, it’s only just August. Cut us some slack! I know the supermarket calendar goes something like Christmas -> Easter -> Summer (during the coldest, rainiest days of the year when you can’t buy a coat but you could get swimming trunks, sun screen, and buckets and spades for the beach) -> Back to School (in August, when you need the swimming trunks etc. but can’t find them on the shelves)-> Halloween -> Christmas -> Lather/Rinse/Repeat but c’mon. I don’t need to be reminded that it’s inset in 4 weeks and then the grind starts again. At least let me get past the results days!
Normally by this time in the school holidays I would’ve penciled in the first half term of my timetable into my shiny new school-issued planner, got an idea of which classes I’d need to keep the pressure on as they’re going to be hit by Mondays and Fridays, that sort of thing. Not this year. This year my planner is currently completely blank. There are 2 reasons for this…
Firstly, they’ve not finalised-finalised the timetables as yet. We’ve seen versions 1 and 2 but we’re not getting the finished article until GCSE results day – so that give us, at best, a shade under 2 weeks to get our heads around what’s actually happening, which classes we’re teaching, etc. And secondly, no planner on earth would fit what we’re moving to as a timetable system so I’m using a blank notebook on purpose. Hell, even Trello is looking at what we’re moving to and giving me strange looks. Notion’s calendar view has taken it in it’s stride, mind you.
For a start, we’re moving from a 2-week alternating timetable to a 1-week continual. I’m sure the Powers That Be have done the maths on this one, but past experience has shown that those classes who have their lessons on a Monday or a Friday are going to be adversely affected by every start of term, every Inset day, every bank holiday, every end of term… Especially the Monday morning and the Friday afternoon. Spreading things out over 2 weeks mitigates that a little. But I have had classes that over a year were 10-12 lessons behind their peers precisely because I only ever taught them on a Monday or a Friday.
And then we get to the actual construction of the day. I’m reminded of a line from Nick Hornby’s “About a Boy”:
I find the key is to think of a day as units of time…
And that’s what we’re doing. A day is constructed of 21 units of time, each lasting 20 minutes. Year 7 lesson? 2 units. Year 8 lesson? 3 units. Year 9 lesson? Depends. Could be 2 units, could be 4. And so on. Year 13 lessons, almost certainly 4 units but you might only be teaching 3 of them as you could be crossing from one side of town to the other in the remaining unit. Yep, all those 60 minute year 7 lessons you’ve got? Rewrite those to work in 40 minute slots…
I’ll give it this, it’s a flexible approach. Apparently it’s called the “gunnery” approach (or is it “gunnary”? “gunnarie”?). Which has made searching for information about it somewhat confusing. I can tell you all sorts of interesting things about military munitions and artillery timetables (with brief diversions down into EDVAC, ENIAC, and other such incredible machines and the ladies who worked on them). I can tell you about rail timetables. I can tell you about a wide variety of timetabling software. But not one single search result about taking a day and chopping it up into tiny pieces that can then be reassembled at will to make your timetable.
So the first step for this stationery geek was to track down a journal stencil with a suitable number of “slots”. This one from Stencilini turns out to be perfect:
Look at that! 27 slots available, so that’s plenty of time for pre-school-day, form sessions, breaks (should such things exist), lunchtime (a number of units, variable, depending on the day), and after-school co-curricular activities. 7 boxes to put more notes in should they be needed (Think I’ll use those for a quick lesson reflection). And it comes in both A4 and A5 sizes. I’ve gone for the A5 as it’ll fit nicely in my bag. When planning out a day I just need to mark in the lines that refer to the lessons I’m teaching. Perfect. Bit of annotating with a marker to add the gunnery times to the stencil and it’ll be golden.
And then that left the planning notebook itself. Can’t be a dot-grid, the dots and the stencil don’t line up. Can’t be lined, same problem. So it has to be a plain notebook. And that fell in to my lap at the Jodiworld convention earlier in the year. A blank, hardcover notebook. Perfect. Cover was a shade dull, but that’s what stickers are for…
So now all I have to do is combine A with B and work a couple of weeks in advance… Once I’ve got a page or 2 completed I’ll update this article.
Will it work? Not sure. Got to say the Powers That Be aren’t confident it will be right first time, they’ve been very open about that in their communications with us They know there will be problems. Ask me when we’ve made it to the October break. By then we’ll have had 6 or 7 weeks of the new system and we’ll know where the problems are, and whether they’re going to be tweaking it or just letting it run through the year, binning it, and getting us to remake all of our schemes of work to another new timetable system.
And who knows what our timetable will look like next year. It might well be yet another new system just to keep us on our toes. Sooner or later one of the systems I’ve worked with is going to be repeated. Isn’t it? I mean how many different options can there be?
