What a massive week.
Tuesday night was Open Night - I used to have a short PowerPoint quiz with ten questions about the subject of English but they reduced the time they wanted parents and prospective students at each station so my team rallied and put together a little display and I basically yelled at bunches of parents who tried to listen over the fray of other faculties. I had no idea just how many people would attend - in my before stint as HT there would be about 20 people in a large group but the groups this year were around 40+. I should have set up on the other side of the Library instead of across from another faculty because it was wild. I noticed some lose interest and walk off which is really disheartening and possibly problematic for the school. I did have a few good conversations though. I spoke about the daily poem in Year 7, the focus on giving time to reading and writing, opportunities for students to engage in writing competitions, extra-curricular activities such as debating and public speaking. I had a whole bunch take one of the poetry booklets I had put together for parents to peruse which is cute - poetry should be in everyone's life! I got home from the evening and proceeded to bag up 80-cookies for the professional learning session on Wednesday. It was a huge night. 
The professional learning seemed to go well - the coffee van arrived on time, the catering was adequate (we did ask for more sandwiches because they catered for 38 instead of 75), I had the sign on sheet ready, stickers and a marker for name badges, Twitter signs, spare note paper and pens, water for our guest speaker (and cute and colourful Ikea cups for her to drink from!), the lucky door prizes, and aforementioned cookies. I wrote a short speech to introduce the afternoon and well, it fell pretty flat - I acknowledged the difficult start to the year - heat waves, fires, floods, and panic buying toilet paper and how all of these things impact us as well as our students and one way to reflect is to write and what a good opportunity for us to engage in our craft before sharing the activities with out students. I feel like maybe not everyone wanted to attend the professional learning so I am very glad I wasn't getting up to speak about a literacy initiative. I am glad I provided some space for staff to engage in their writing - something different, something fresh, something to engage us in our subject area in a practical way. Personally, I loved the workshop. I will write some of the things we learned in another post.
The rest of the week flew by with more things being added to my to do list than getting done but with two massive tasks ticked off the list the relief was palpable.
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