Speculation that Ken Muir is in line for the top job at HMIE reminded staff at one Edinburgh school of the time when the inspector came to call.
As Muir was carrying several bulky ring-binders along a narrow passageway towards the staffroom, some wag in a lab coat called out: “Oi, single file in the corridor”.
We wonder if the eventual report flattered the chemistry department.
Making a boob
We haven’t finished with Paisley Grammar. Another reader recalls famed heidie Robert Corbett speaking to the sixth year before the 1974 election of prefects.
In his desire to ensure that only those who were sound school ambassadors should be elected, he explained to the students that they should not vote for people who would “do the school down, people who would criticise the school, and always be knocking it”. After which, he came out with the immortal proclamation: “There’s a place for knockers - and it’s not Paisley Grammar.”
SPICe of life
Proof that the critics of the Scottish Futures Trust are right has emerged at last from an impeccable source. The Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICe) has prepared a briefing on the trust’s involvement in school buildings and one of the SPICe girls tells us that part of its role is “co-ordinating the pound;1.25 building programme for 55 schools announced in June 2009”.
Quite a bang for the buck.
Unlucky for some
The NASUWT’s Scottish conference was much exercised this year by the teachers’ 35-hour week. But its UK general secretary Chris Keates urged her members not to keep on saying it was impossible to do the job in 35 hours, because it was undermining the union’s drive to get a similar deal down south.
Alas, she’d not read the motion: “This AGM instructs the Scottish Executive Council of the NASUWT to find a teacher who works a 35-hour week.”
And the number of the motion . 13.
Them’s the breaks
Edinburgh’s evening paper carried an “explosive” report the other day, about the demolition of a block of flats. With the help of Lord Provost Jenny Dawe and a local resident, Kaimes School pupil Robert Millar (p16), pressed the button to reduce the buildings to rubble. Young Rob came up with the immortal line: “It’s the biggest thing I have ever broken without getting into trouble.”
A small matter at the end .
Cate Middleton, a biology teacher at St Margaret’s School for Girls in Aberdeen, brought her appendix to work to illustrate a lesson, as part of National Pathology Week - well, slides of it. Now her pupils really know what made their teacher tick.
