Staff Room

`Specificity" - now there's a word with attitude. We heard it used at our recent in-service day for the revised curriculum. We also heard words like "strands" and "strand units", "exemplar" and "collaborative learning".

We had two days away from the classroom in a three star hotel, where we listened to tutors, and shared our views and read excerpts from some of our new glossy magazines. In our group we had some shared singing and a tune on the whistle. Our tutor had a wonderful facility for remembering names, he was a splendid wit and raconteur and he had an endless supply of amusing anecdotes. We were all very chummy and relaxed and enthusiastic. The cigire sat in on one of our sessions and smiled benignly at us and praised us fulsomely. We were advised by the tutor not to be fearful about the extra workload, and he used analogies like "Rome wasn't built in a day", and "The best way to eat an elephant was to do it one bite at a time" and we all laughed and chuckled, and some people wrote them down. He read excerpts from books by teachers to us and they were all hugely entertaining and delightfully absorbing.

He gave us observation tests and alerted us to the fact that our environment is like an unexplored territory just waiting to be reconnoitered. He showed us some works of art by Monet and Warhol and we contemplated them at length and discussed them at length and discussed the feelings they evoked in us. We built free-standing towers from A4 sheets of paper. We studied an exemplar of a Science lesson for Infants on the feeding habits - both nocturnal and diurnal - of the caterpillar. Most of the time we listened attentively to the tutor, but often we all became animated and wanted to tell our own story. Sometimes people whispered and laughed mutedly to each other during the lecture. We were a carbon copy of any group of pupils in any class in any school in the State - some pensive, some loquacious, some dreamers, some rascals and the inevitable whingers and complainers.

I found the two days considerably enjoyable, I learned some new ideas and a host of new words, and above all I realised that plus ca change, and despite all the cosmetic dressing - there's nothing new under Heaven.