Interesting Facts

9th May National Teacher Appreciation Day I'd like to thank Mrs Hunt, who was one of the few teachers who tried to inspire her pupils to bigger and better things.

13th March The Dunblane school massacre took place. It is still one of the deadliest firearms incidents in UK history, when a gunman killed sixteen children and a teacher at Dunblane Primary School near Stirling, Scotland on 13 March 1996, before killing himself. With the consent of Bob Dylan, the musician Ted Christopher wrote a new verse for the song "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" in memory of the Dunblane school children and their teacher. 

According to the TUC (Trades Union Congress) 5.3 million people in the UK work an average of 7.7 hours of overtime a week. (Chief executives topped a list of those doing the most unpaid overtime, at an average of 13.2 hours a week, followed by teaching staff (12.1 hours), finance managers (11.3 hours) and managers in production and health care workers (10 hours). The TUC has called on people to take their full lunch break and go home on time, asking managers to set an example by leaving on time too. Oh dear, I never leave a session on time, but then I don't get paid either. The TUC would hate me.) Source

Maybe the title of this should be boring people, as Ms Scott, an English teacher, has been struck off the teaching register in Scotland for two years after pupils and parents complained about her “boring” lessons. (She has been removed following a seven-day hearing in Edinburgh where it was reported that she had spent three lessons reading a novel to one class without allowing them to ask questions, set the same essay task - titled "what I did in activities week" - for several different year groups, and shown one class a clip of Jurassic Park before making them copy what she said about characterisation in relation to the film. Pupils at the school dubbed the lessons the "puni class" due to the disproportionate number of punishment exercises handed out. To be fair, her lesson plans sound very similar to the ones I had to sit through in English literature.) !Note - if you are struck off you are removed, from a position of power or responsibility after havin...

A teacher has become the first person in the UK to be turned away from MacDonald's for failing a breathalyser test. (The tipsy 25-year-old teacher was refused entry to the fast food outlet in the early hours of a Sunday after failing a breathalyser test at the door. This is all part of a scheme funded by Cambridgeshire Police. I would think they'll be turning away a lot of people.)

A teacher in a Berkshire school was told by Ofsted inspectors to ditch her Northern accent and speak with a more southern one. (The teacher, from Cumbria, has been set this by her school as one of her "targets" to improve performance. Luckily they don't have a leg to stand on if they attempt to enforce this, but it is part of a worrying trend: A school in the Black Country, gave its pupils a list of ten banned regional phrases which, it said, could damage their prospects. These included "ya cor" meaning "you can't" and "ay?" instead of "pardon". The headteacher said: "It is about getting them ready for job interviews." They shouldn't want to work for companies that require poncy accents.)

According to a survey conducted by Mothercare, when British children were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, more boys than girls dreamt of becoming dancers, the girls wanted to be footballers. (Children aged between two and 12,were asked what they wanted to be, and the following careers proved most popular:- Doctor (9%) Footballer (8%) Teacher (8%) Dancer (6%) Police officer (5%) Firefighter (4%) Scientist (4%) Musician (4%) Actor (2%) Nurse (2%) The top 5 jobs for boys:- Doctor (11%) Footballer (10%) Dancer (8%) Teacher (6%) Police officer (6%) The top 5 jobs for girls:- Doctor (8%) Teacher (8%) Footballer (7%) Dancer (5%) Police officer (5%) What? No lawyers? The future is looking bright.)

According to a study commissioned by Littlewoods.com, mothers are the most quizzed people in the UK. (Mothers are asked about 300 questions a day, in fact they are asked more questions per hour than a primary school teacher (19) even doctors and nurses only have to cope with 18 questions an hour. The study also discovered that girls around the age of 4 are the most curious, asking an incredible 390 questions a day; that's about one question every 2 minutes. From breakfast at 7.19am to tea time at 7.59pm, the average mum faces a testing 12.5 hour day of questioning - working out at one question every two minutes 36 seconds. The toughest questions asked are:- 1) Why is water wet? (35 per cent) 2) Where does the sky end? (34 per cent) 3) What are shadows made of? (33 per cent) 4) Why is the sky blue? (20 per cent) 5) How do fish breathe under water? (18 per cent) Maybe I'll ask these in the next LEN Quiz session on Kitely.)