Lurking

That's the only adequate description of what I was doing in order to get a blip this evening. I decided to change the settings on my camera to take "in camera" mono shots, rather than tweaking after the fact. I also decided I wanted to play around with long exposure as well, but was too chicken to go wandering too far from home.

So I stood at the bottom of our driveway, walked about four steps away and pressed the remote release, and stood like a statue for 30 seconds or so (possibly longer? didn't check the exif data).

There's definitely a hedgehog in the bushes which is clearly why Sparky goes out and sits and stares at the hedge...I thought he was losing it to be honest.

Super busy day. Quality moments - a phone call from a member of the public, wishes to congratulate one of our students who she had observed helping an aged local resident to cross the road yesterday. Another parent brought in a box of chocolates and a card for two students who had stopped to help him yesterday when he daughter had started to have a serious convulsion on the road outside school - he was panicking, but the two girls calmed him down, rang the ambulance and waited with him until it arrived.

We can improve our results as much as we can, but the things that make people comment about how "good" a school is are not quantifiable like results - acts of kindness, politeness, how our students conduct themselves when they wear our uniform - those are the things that people judge.

Oh, and a group of year 9 students (13 yrs old) who have sat a GCSE paper in Maths and all come out with B, C and D grades (2 years early - it was a practice to see how close they actually are) - and some of those students were coming to find us to tell us - nothing beats taking a young lad in to see the Head to tell him...pride....busting out - fantastic.

So the youth of today are not all hooded yobs, lurking on street corners, engaging in anti-social behaviour...I'm here to tell you that a great majority are actually kind hearted individuals who DO have moral values, personal pride and want to move on in their world.

Tomorrow I am "on assignment" - I have offered to go to the cycling club that we have after school and take some photos of the kids doing their stunts, races and skill trails...you never know, I might be catching the Team GB of the future (it does help that we have strong links to Team GB cycling through one of our staff, who is married to one of the team coaches!)