Happy Days! (From Bucks Free Press)
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My blog has no particular purpose- it’s just a snapshot of the things that happen in my life and the thoughts those events trigger really. For the last ten years, I have worked as a teaching assistant at a junior school, and recently I started studying for a degree with the Open University. Couple this with the fact that I have a daughter studying for her A levels, and a son for his GCSEs, not forgetting a husband working towards yet another qualification in insurance, and you’ll begin to understand why my random jottings are largely about education. Through my writing, I hope to raise a smile, and will welcome complaints should I fail!
Happy Days!
7:47pm Sunday 18th April 2010
If you asked the majority of adults what the purpose of school is, I think they would almost certainly say that it was to enable children to get an education and gain important qualifications for their future. I’m not about to disagree with this, I’m a parent and I want my two to leave their schools with some good results. After all, I left with very few O levels and no A levels at all, and I can testify just how demanding, not to mention expensive, it is if you have to rectify that wasted opportunity.
However, although academically challenged, (and I blame my rubbish memory for that), I did actually love school. Despite the mystifying maths, the unfathomable physics and annoying needlework, to name but few, I really did enjoy my days there. I’m not even sure that I was aware of it at the time, but the reason I liked school so much was because I had so much fun there.
Now, I may seem to be travelling off track here, but do bear with me. A little while back, I wrote a short story for a competition, the theme of which was laughter. I decided to base it around my work as a teaching assistant and typed the question ‘How many times a day do children laugh?’ into a well known search engine. I found some variance in the answers, but all of them were in the hundreds. The same enquiry but regarding adults, throws up an average answer of less than twenty!
I found this information amazing, but it also helped me to understand why I have such great memories of school. Yes, I laughed at home, and yes I laughed when I played with my friends from down the road, but the times I laughed the most were those that I spent with my companions at school.
So, this poses the question; when I return to work this week and I am on playground duty and some of the children come up to me and start to complain about their friends, do you think they will believe me when I tell them to chill because these are the happiest times of their lives? No, I don’t think so either!
Bye for now.
Tania Greenwood
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My blog has no particular purpose- it’s just a snapshot of the things that happen in my life and the thoughts those events trigger really. For the last ten years, I have worked as a teaching assistant at a junior school, and recently I started studying for a degree with the Open University. Couple this with the fact that I have a daughter studying for her A levels, and a son for his GCSEs, not forgetting a husband working towards yet another qualification in insurance, and you’ll begin to understand why my random jottings are largely about education. Through my writing, I hope to raise a smile, and will welcome complaints should I fail!
