Evacuation

Hello there. I have to say things have improved for me over the last few days as I’ve been quite social and done lots of things. This is a nice change.

On Monday I went shopping. To most people this is a chore. For me and my housemate Josh, it’s pretty much a day out (well a couple of hours at least). Whilst we shopped we spotted various lookalikes including a Brian Blessed lookalike and someone who looked like the baddie out of Indiana Jones 3. In fact we chased him around the store a little bit to get a good look at him and confirm our suspicions.

^{Clearly this man did not die in 1938 from drinking from the wrong grail…}

I was very excited on this shopping trip to discover something free in a box of cereal. When I was young every cereal had some free toy or other item in a small bag amongst the cereal. Now it is virtually unheard of. Of course I had to pick this cereal and I soon found my free Crocodile clip…

Sometimes I forget I am an adult now!

On Tuesday I had the very rare thing that is a lecture. Due to my school experience and the holidays, I’ve only had one other lecture since February. This was one for my specialist subject, history, though it was led by the drama tutor. We had a few minutes to talk about our assignment and then it all turned a bit crazy. We were suddenly acting as parents in Portsmouth in 1939. Us parents had been called to a meeting in a school to inform us that our children were going to be evacuated. Surprisingly we took this news rather well, but that’s probably because none of us students really wanted to ask any questions.

Next thing I knew we were back home. And I mean our pretend 1939 home, not my actual house. Suddenly my role had changed to a child and in small groups we made little still images. I sat on the floor playing with my train set with my grandfather watching over me as my distraught mother, who looked suspiciously like a man (because she was played by one), and my father entered the house. Then in the next scene I looked up at my father with a worried expression. Then my top acting skills were put up to even more testing as we had to do a transition between the two scenes including some speech. My line “Daddy?” was truly heart-breaking. I genuinely wasn't far of producing tears for this bit but that may have been taking things a bit too seriously.

Things moved along again and I found myself on the train being evacuated to the country. The train consisted of chairs laid out in blocks of four as if they were carriages. I sadly waved goodbye to my mother (who still looked rather masculine) and sat on the train. I ate my lunch and before I knew it we had arrived at our destination. There my role changed again and I was a country gentlemen choosing which evacuees I wanted. As my wife was ill I choose a pair of sisters who claimed they cook lots at home- well someone had to do my cooking! I think my acting of a 1939 farmer was spot on actually!

It was an odd but fun session. That’s the sort of crazy things you end up doing as a trainee teacher. Of course the point of it was that you could do pretty much the exact same thing with a class of children. I’m pretty sure they would love it!

Today has not gone as well. I needed to buy an Ethernet cable to connect my laptop to the internet hub (I’m not going to go into the long and boring explanation why, I just did!). Now you would have thought would have been an easy task. Wrong. Now that the digital shop has closed down there is no-where in the town which sells such a thing. Believe me, I looked everywhere. I had to resort to going all the way up to uni as I knew you could buy them there somewhere. I got very wet on this walk because it was raining loads. On arrival at the IT desk I was sent to the Multimedia centre. I was told this was on the ground floor of a different building, which wasn’t very helpful as our uni is built on a hill and so several of the floors could have been considered the ground floor. Eventually I found this exciting sounding multimedia centre only to find the counter was closed for lunch. They have a TWO HOUR lunch break, which is ridiculous.

I entertained myself for a few minutes and then returned only to be told there was a vending machine with cables in around the corner. So I wasted time waited for a counter to open which I didn’t have to wait for. The woman told me this message as if I should have expected there to be a vending machine with computer equipment around the corner. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a vending machine like it in my life. I headed to the vending machine and then much to my frustration that I was 50p short, because the machine would not accept notes or cards for items less than £5. This meant I had to go to the shop and buy something to get change and then return to the Multimedia centre for a third time. I then finally got my stupid cable by which point I was tired, soaking wet and very grumpy.

During this whole debacle I received an e-mail from the man who is head of school experience at my uni. It was only sent to a small group of people and said that following our recent school experience he would be grateful if we would meet with him to discuss it. I don’t think this is a good thing. This guy is pretty much our equivalent of a headteacher and though he’s a lovely man I still don’t really want to have a meeting. It didn’t say “to congratulate you on how brilliant you were”. I imagine that because my report wasn’t that brilliant he wants to discuss how to make the next one brilliant and send me somewhere to get more practice or extra training. Or it might be something else entirely. I don’t really know but it’s given me something to worry about, which is the last thing I need. I’ll let you know how it goes!

So that’s it for today. I think that was a pretty accurate depiction of my uni life. Hopefully the meeting tomorrow won’t be too horrific. But I have a horrible feeling it might be. I shall post about it soon so stay tuned. It’s like I’m ending on a cliff-hanger!