Conseil de Classe

Back in London, several light years away, I pulled a little desk and chair from the classroom and sat under a pear tree in the Jesuit priests' garden  to hand write my reports on carbon paper.   That was summer time.  The end of the school year. 
It's now three times a year, direct onto the school's computerised platform.  Computer screens don't take much to the sun and the pear tree has probably been cut down.
It's taken me an age to figure out what conseils de classes are all about.
We sit in a room looking at a projected screen while the head scrolls through each pupil, one by one, and every one puts their tuppence ha-penny in.
If the head is half decent, we can rattle through them at the speed of knots.
There have been several this week, eating into cold winter evenings which you'd rather spend at home by the fire.
I've found displacement activities which allow me to listen but not get frustrated by the meaningless of it all.
And I keep the tuppence ha-penny in my pocket for a rainy day.