Today I did my first Teaching Observation at a local Secondary School. A very beautiful and interesting experience. I basically sat in amongst the class and assisted the teacher to clarify to the students some of the work they were doing. In my first lesson I seriously wondered what I was doing there not least because they were doing histograms and data-handling and it has been a very long time since I have done that part of GCSE. On the other four classes I participated in all of the subjects in mathematics were ones I was very strong in and and I really revelled in assisting the students understanding. Good buzz.

Because I get out and about in my own community and Fiona is a teacher in Darlington three students came up to me and asked if I was related to Mrs Saunders-Priem who had taught them at primary school, to which I said I was her husband and I was in the school as part of becoming a mathematics teacher. They thought that was cool! So do I! I then assisted a lad who appeared to have very little interest at all and it turned out he had seen me down in RKade skate park in Redcar so I related some of the maths he was doing to the latest developments in Rkade with it all being remodelled at the moment and he perked up a bit. After helping this lad for a while I then moved onto another young man who seemed even more disenchanted and then he said his name and I realised it was a kid that we took down to Rkade several times over five years ago. He gave me an interesting argument about why it was pointless doing equations because the variables can take on any value to which I countered with the whole point of doing the equations is because the variable can take on any value and that every computer game and programming in a car would fail completely if it did not have variables which could be assigned different types and values of data. That seemed to catch his attention and he did some work.

Many years ago when I did Teacher Training to be a Nursery and Infant teacher several of the teachers and Headteachers always said that I had "good manner with children" and I sometimes think I just relate the task to the big picture which may seem a very tenuous relationship but is actually quite important because education is vital not only for fame and prosperity but more importantly for the general well-being of society. My old skills came out today. It was not all good because I had some very informative discussions about the amount of keyboard input that I would have to do in order to be a teacher and it may be that there is just too much for my remaining good left-hand stricken with RSI but on the other hand I am so enamoured of getting into the classroom and running my own class that I am going to follow the advice of a friend of mine, Caroline Murphy who knows a lot about pharmaceuticals, and get down to my doctor to try out the very sophisticated and powerful range of anti-inflammatories that can be used. I cannot believe that for some reason I should not be in the classroom and it will be good for me, my family but most importantly of all it will be handy for a lot of kids to improve their maths skills which will help them to further their interests in vocational as well as academic qualifications. So, if you are godless beam some good thoughts my way please, and if you are godded say prayers that I can further my intention of becoming a mathematics teacher in the North East of England.