Central training overview

Ok, so now that I've completed the whole week, what did I learn from foundation subjects training?

• Half a day without time to reflect and observe afterwards is not enough. It's almost not worth doing, although you do get some interesting online references so that you can follow things up.
• I'm going to need to be careful about how I teach subjects that I don't really like, like PE. Actually, in my current school, I'm going to have very little need to teach any PE anyway because most of that is taken care of by AG, who does some PPA cover for everyone by taking games lessons. Still, I should remember that I can find *parts* of the subject that I like (e.g. country dancing) and try to arrange with other collegues to cover those rather than just soldiering through on pretending to be fireworks or other bits of dance which don't work for me.
• The history curriculum seemed a lot less varied than I'd have liked, which means that some of the more adventurous history lessons I might like to do on periods not often covered will have to be re-thought. Not neccessarily removed, but rethought, definitely.
• Given half a chance, we're dashing through the ICT curriculum at top speed and then getting on to interesting stuff. There seems to be loads of stuff there that kids can already do (I saw bookmarking websites on a Year 5 weekly plan!) and it's wasting the opportunity to get them excited about technology. It'll depend to some extend what sort of school I end up teaching in though - at the moment I think all the children in my class have at least one computer at home and often one of their own separate from their parents but that won't be the case everywhere. Also, we will have computers in my classroom, damn it! I liked the idea of getting a visualizer (as suggested by the geography tutor :))
• I need to have a think about drama. There's a tendency for drama to devolve into playing drama games and just "come up with a scene about x" and I think that can be quite disengaging. I'm not entirely sure what the best way to deal with that is, but I'll have a think and see what I can come up with. It would help if there were more playscripts for kids that didn't make me cringe though.