Diet Day 3

I'm doing well. My lack of sugary foods has helped me to 'get the bloat down' and my stomach muscles already seem to be shining through!

I had a little setback yesterday when my boy and I had to go to our storage container. It's located right next to a KFC, and after half an hour o moving things we stopped off for lunch. My fillet meal added 700 calories to my daily count, a fact i'd never noticed before. Normally an additional KFC wouldn't stop me from eating my normal three meals and snacks, but armed with the knowledge i'd eated a third of my daily calories, I adjusted my subsequent meals, eating a chicken breast and jacket potato for my dinner.

Wednesday

100 cereal
70 yoghurt drink
200 chicken salad wrap with cheese

Diet time!

I had a bit of a health scare last week. I have a couple of long-term chronic illnesses and recent blood tests indicated that they are getting worse. As such, i'm here to document a month of examining my diet and trying to improve what I eat. I promise I will tie this into education!

Monday

70 yoghurt drink
40 half pack kooks crisps
100 bread roll
10 salad
50 cheese
165 cookies
300 cookies
150 croissant
200 sweets
600 tea
100 corn bread
300 croissants
160 kooks crisps

2245 calories. I went over as I snacked; but having said that, my normal intake compared to this must be 3000 calories a day! My god i've been eating too much.

I've never counted calories before and am approximately a stone and a half overweight. I believe that I exercise enough, although having arthritis means that I cannot go to the gym regularly to do anything bar lift weights. As my lad gets older we're cycling more frequently, and he loves neing out on our bikes. We cycle at a slow pace but as with education, pointed results come only with time, and so although we only cycle a couple of miles at a time now, in ten years we will be making regular thirty mile excursions up the coast.

But damn, getting rid of these snacks won't be easy!

Skills for Future Leaders

Another excellent Quora question today:

What are the necessary skills for 21st century students and future leaders?

Critical thinking and higher order skills seems to be the one from bloom's taxonomy. What does the research from educational psychology, learning sciences etc literature tell us about all the other required skills ? What does other experts, teachers etc tell us about it ?

Answer from Jordan B Peterson, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto:

The most important skill is the ability to write. There is little difference between writing and thinking (at least verbal thinking) -- so, to write is to think. To think is to avoid obstacles and capitalize on opportunity. To think is to set things straight. To think is to convince and explain.

What you write, you remember. What you merely recognize, you are merely familiar with. Multiple choice tests generally reward recognition memory, which is much shallower than recall memory (which writing facilitates). If you write something, then you know it well enough to talk about it, so you can then speak -- even publicly.

To write well, you need first to know what you are talking about. Thus, you have to do your research. To do that, you have to know how to read, what to read, and where to find it. Then you have to be able to generate information, so that your writing is creative, and edit it, so that you separate the wheat from the chaff. Then you have to be able to organize your argument, at the level of the word, the sentence, the paragraph and the essay itself. If you can do that, you can organize your thoughts and, in consequence, your brain. Then you can help organize other brains, and other structures.

http://www.quora.com/Education/What-are-the-necessary-skills-for-21st-century-students-and-future-leaders

This is great. It fits in exactly with my teaching style- I ask the children to focus on developing GCSE standard writing and analysis skills by the end if the Prep (age 11). Having reviewed our progress on the www.ixl.com maths website last night, I found that the entire Reception maths curriculum can be completed by an astute child in less than three hours. Assuming an hour of maths a day- both in structured lesson activities and open play scenarios- our young pupils are effectively spending 197 hours in their first full-time school year completing supporting activites rather than actually learning!

We are now three and a half weeks into our Summer holiday and i've spent 15-20 minutes with my lad on ixl.com each day. He'a about to start in a Reception class in September, and yet he's now completed most of the Reception activites and many of the Year One assessments too! We've had to pause at times and practice- scaffold- his new knowledge, for instance we spent a day talking about 'left' and 'right' and practicing them in different situations before he grasped the concept.

What i'm saying is that much of the Primary School curriculum is really simple. Giving children the prompts to write and explore via writing can help them to progress quicker and more effectively and build important 'independent learner' skills.

For me, this Quora post has impacted on my planning for the next school year. When i've taught something, the class will write it down and try to express the concept to each other in different ways. Making films producing songs, and plain essay work will help my charges to develop into future leaders.

Save yourself £145.50 a year... ditch the TV licence!

We moved house about a month ago, and at the bottom of my list of things to do was to change our TV licence across. Nobody likes paying for their licence, and most people think that subsidising the BBC when there's not all that much on the box is a bit of a liberty. After all, if the licence was split between all of the tv channels it would represent phenomenal value for money, but in just supporting the BBC it seems like a really outdated tax on entertainment. My main irritation has always been that I regularly buy dvds and more recently blu rays of the programmes I like; indeed, i'm happy to wait for a disc version of programmes such as Wonders of the Solar System, Planet Earth, and favourite sitcoms that i'll watch again and again over the next decade. I'm happy to pay the BBC for permanent copies of entertainment I will enjoy watching, and annoyed when My licence fee pays for presenters and programmes that make me turn the television off!

So having had two 'reminder' letters (both openly threatening fines, prosecution, and doorstep visits in a horrific manner) I had a bright idea. I've recently taken apart a netbook to connect to our telly to stream programmes from websites; the keyboard was faulty so I took off the screen and mounted the unit underneath the TV unit nicely out of sight. It's a really nice setup, I can pick and choose TV from a wide number of nations to watch when the children have gone to bed, and i'm using a cheap ipad app called Splashtop to control the netbook wirelessly.

We've not really watched tv since I set up the netbook; the children watch cbeebies on the iplayer, and have loved watching childrens channels from France and the USA (all legally, too!) it has been so successful that i've cancelled Sky, and the final step happened today. I researched iplayer online, and found out that we do not need a tv licence to watch programmes on the iplayer, or any other web service that is not streaming live. My children don't mind watching Waybaloo from the previous day, and i'm sure that the next time a new series of The Apprentice or Dragon's Den are announced i'll be happy to watch these an hour or two after they are broadcast. This is really going to change how we watch tv.

Indeed, I think this is morally acceptable to be avoiding the licence in this manner. I love 'Sherlock'; in my opinion it is the best TV programme I have seen in my entire life. The scripts are brilliantly clever modern adaptations, Martin Freeman seems to have found a role that really uses his talents, and Benedict Cumberbatch is a superb Sherlock Holmes. I bought the blu-rays of series one and two as they were released and i've watched each episode half a dozen times. My purchase has provided income for the people involved with making this great modern drama, and i've rented dvds with Freeman in as watching Sherlock has reminded me of how much I like the bloke. I'm going to see the new Star Trek movie when it comes out as Cumberbatch is in it- and I was sufficiently underwhelmed by the last film that I probably wouldn't have bothered if he wasn't playing the villain. My appreciation for the programme means I am providing more revenue for the actors based on my appreciation for their talents. In short, I love the programme and am happy to pay to see it. This will continue; the kids love In the Night Garden and as such we have DVDs, toys, a duvet set, a lamp shade, and many other items of merchandising. I'm now not paying for the children to watch it live on tv, but the people involved with making our favourite programmes are still getting paid.

I've had problems when i've not wanted to have a tv licence before. We've always had a tv and I love buying 10p videos for the kids, but I have always ended up getting a licence as our tv or video has a tv tuner built in and the authorities could presume that we were watching tv illegally. Today, this is different. My tv hasn't got a a Freeview tuner built in so it can't recieve any signal; our video player is the same. Our DVD players and my PS3 and Xbox 360 can only recieve 'catch up tv' which does not need a licence. I've cut off the sky tv cords, taken the ariel down from the chimney, and stuck my Sky box and old Freeview recorded on a website and sold them earlier today (earning £100 to spend on some good Blu rays!) my Sky subscription will continue for another two months and i'll have to find another broadband provider at that point, but I reckon i'll eventually be saving £30 a month by not having Sky. This totals £500 a year including the tv licence! I can't see how we will not be able to watch the tv programmes we like, although with no Sky I may miss out on a few of my favourite Quest programmes- Salvage Hunters and the like. I'm off to browse YouTube to see i they end up on there :)

With one less remote in the house, i'm going to leave you for today. My Great Uncle used to call TV 'the idiot lantern' so it's going to be interesting to ser if we watch less tv and what we do with the time saved by not having to sit through endless adverts for products I don't like!

Trickle Economics

I've started posting on this blog again, and i'm firmly focussed on the future (in so many ways!)

So what is my next step? I've stated that I plan to achieve sixty blog posts on www.powerparents.co.uk this year, and i'm now on fifteen, including this one. My next natural step after achieving 25% of my aim would normally be... to give up.

I blogged in November when I started this site, I blogged a little in December, and posted a single article in January- and then I gave up.

Yes, we moved house. Yes, I got a new job. Yes, we have a baby on the way. But these are all excuses that I let myself believe to be the true reasons for my halted productivity. Truthfully, the events of those lost months would have provided me with a number of excellent posts tied into the Power Parent concept- but my innate laziness and reliance on excuses let me down.

Power Parents is a truly awesome concept. Do this, teach your child that, earn money in this way, and you end up with clever kids who are going to be happy, successful adults. I may only ever get one hundred regular readers of this blog; I may only ever sell one hundred copies of my book, but if I do nothing, not only am I passing up the chance to achieve these numbers, i'm also negating any possibility that I could potentially turn this into something revolutionary and life-changing- both for my family and yours too!

So this is where the trickle economics comes in. Knowing that I put off paying the bills regularly just as I put off pretty much everything, I decided to change my perspective on my finances.

I looked at what we spend, considered what posessions I truly value, and thought about the money i'd need in the future to buy my children a house each.

One of my favourite buys ever is our projector. My middle room (between the front room and the kitchen) has a pull-down projector screen, surround sound amp, and projector in it. The kids sometimes watch films and music videos when they are eating their dinner, I play on the PS3 in there, we all have a blast on our favourite Xbox Kinect games in there (helping us to keep fit and the kids to develop their physicality) and we occasionally pull the sofa out and have a family film night. The only problem with the projector is the cost of a new bulb. Every 4000 hours a new bulb needs to be purchased- costing £200. Now £200 isn't much, but as I pretty much always spend my 'spare' £200 a month the new bulb cost usually comes out of my savings.

So I got my calculator out. £200/4000 hours gives us an hourly cost of 5p- an insanely small amount of money! Heck, these bulbs are ridiculously cheap compared to what you get! But we don't usually see things in terms of cost per hour- we focus on how much it costs to buy in the first place, and how much it will cost to replace ignoring the years of use in between. This is illogical, and unless we do something to plan for the gradual costs of our 'bulbs'- be they laptops, electrical appliances, new beds, a new car, or any other irregular and costly purchase- they will end up costing us a bomb.

So every time we watch a film I chuck 10p into my 'bulb fund' jar. When the bulb eventually blows, I have the cash there and ready to go. 10p is nothing to watch a film on a 92" cinema screen in my lovely home, and i'm pretty keen to ensure my children get to see lots of great films through their childhood in addition to the vibrant cartoons they are so fond of. The projector was a great purchase, and we use it most days.

There are two great things about trickle economics (it's a concept i've invented and named myself, by the way!)
-I usually put in more than 10p. The film was good? I dig a pound out of my work trousers and chuck it into the fund. Play a game and have a bunch of spare change hanging around the mantlepiece? Heck, chuck it all in, I don't need it! By doing this, the last time I needed a new bulb I found that over £1000 had trickled into the jar! I treated myself to a new HD projector and Onkyo amp, seriously upgrading my setup whilst spending absolutely nothing from my bank account, and I still had a spare £250 to add to my savings account.
-I never take from my various funds that are scattered around the house. If I have cash in the bank, it gets spent. If I fancy a six pack of beer but have no spare cash in my account, I won't take from a fund. It wouldn't seem right. The money is there to replace things we use regularly and really enjoy owning- but by the same measure, if there was ever an emergency, I usually have a couple of thousand in change around the house in jars labelled 'projector', 'washing machine', 'new mattress', 'car fund' and 'laptop'.

Can you grasp how useful trickle economics is? As the money is pretty much always there when something breaks or needs replacing, it's almost like I never actually need to buy any large goods. It rarely costs me more than a couple of pounds (although driving holidays in Europe add a good couple of hundred pounds into the new car fund as I try to put in 20p per mile).

Education works in a similar way; learn one new word a day and you'll be an assured linguist in just a couple of years. As for me, i'm going to use trickle economics to work towards my goals.

Home Tutoring

About six months ago a job vacancy arose in London. Millionaire celebrity couple Gwyneth Paltrow and her husband Chris Martin were advertising for a private tutor for their children "... who can teach Greek, Latin, French, possibly Japanese or Mandarin, and give sailing and tennis lessons."

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/katharinebirbalsingh/100090645/chris-martin-and-gwyneth-paltrow-pay-60k-for-a-private-childrens-tutor-meanwhile-in-the-real-world/

Why?

The Telegraph article suggests that celebrity parents find our educational system 'restrictive' and indeed it is. Our mathematics curriculum is structured in a way that even if a pupil understand the concept of multiplication at age six- and many do- they will still have to sit through a handful of lessons each year teaching multiplication. Assessment for learning is supposed to remove this wasted time, but in practice I bet there are classes in each school containing bored children who are sat there thinking "I already know this!"

Private schools such as the one I teach in are better equipped to handle this situation. I write my own curriculum, and having under fifteen pupils in my class allows me to work far more intensively with each child, ensuring they grasp concepts quickly and can apply them appropriately. I presume celebrities sometimes choose to avoid private education due to security issues, but the Martin/Paltrow children issue indicate something that is beyond security or personal choice.

Let me tell you a bit about yourself. You're on this blog as you want to ensure your children grow up with every advantage. You are willing to commit time and money and to make sacrifices to achieve your aims for them, and your deepest worry would be that any of your children end up unemployed and unable to find work. You'd like your children to become well rounded individuals who don't struggle with money and who marry well, finding partners of an equal or higher social status. The Martin/Paltrows want this too. Celebrity kids can be bratty, demotivated, party animals, unemployed, or absolutely normal and well-adjusted. Which would you want?

So, to the heart of my post. The specifications of the vacancy- to teach multiple languages, sailing and tennis- are really interesting. Your children learn the basic subjects in school and probably have some sort of extra-curricular hobby (gymnastics, music lessons, karate) to balance out their experience of being children. But would it be worth teaching them sailing, tennis, Latin?

I believe that without £60,000 a year for an advanced tutor, there are a number of 'advantage giving' things we can do for our children. Giving our children a balanced world view is key to their future development, and as such I believe that they should learn about:
Countries of the World
The history of business
Famous scientists, mathematicians, and writers
Roles in the media
Starting a company
Notable artists
Architects and famous buildings
Classic drama and comedy
(i'll add more as they come to me)

One of the things I want to spend the next five years doing is to create an online sequence of lessons for children presenting these additional learning points. I'll use them in school, use them with my children, and hopefully make some advertising revenue- perhaps even achieve a book deal based on my structured planning. As always, I am putting the time in as I want to change education for the better; but this time, I also want to offer our select bunch of Power Parents a real way to add value to preexisting education.

Essentially, I want to become your £60,000 a year home tutor for free. So stick with me, bookmark my blog, and the next few years will revolutionise the lives of your children. We have ten, fifteen years to ensure our children find their ways into amazing careers and happy adult lives, and it all starts here, with this offer to you.

Note:
Since writing this article i've researched the Martin/Paltrows further. Chris Martin graduated from University College London with a first in Greek and Latin. Their desire to produce children who are erudite, educated, and enlightened will surely come from the fact that he knows his success and career has come about from his excellent education. He clearly thinks that his knowledge of Greek and Latin is central to his world view. Indeed/ he's right. Getting his children into UCL would be a great end to their education, as UCL has produced the following alumni:
All of Coldplay
Alexander Graham Bell
Gustav Holst
Christopher Nolan
Mahatma Ghandi
Junichiro Koizumi (Japanese PM 2001-2006)

Fantastic use of your fortune Chris and Gwyneth!

Back in School... so what do teachers do during the summer holiday?

Our term ended with a triumphant and joyous speech day two weeks ago.

Now i'm back in class. Drat!

A good teacher needs to work an additional three hours a day by my reckoning. Good marking, planning, assessment and putting together amazing lessons are all lengthy endeavours that cannot be rushed or skipped through.

I like to compare teachers to film makers. An amazing film maker- for example, Ridley Scott, will spend a decade or so practicing his techniques, making films that aren't quite perfect, and learning from the more experienced cinematographers, sound engineers, and casting directors he/she works with. It's possible for a first-time director to come out with a crackingly good film, but in general they will achieve repeated success fifteen to twenty years into their career. The years pass, their body of work accumulates, and they become a legend.

Teachers follow the same career path. Young teachers can be enthusiastic, creative, and fresh but on balance they will make mis-steps every term. Missing out children in planning, teaching to only the middle level of ability, concentrating on their strongest subjects- all beginner errors that I see repeatedly as I observe other classes. For this reason Newly Qualified Teachers (NQTs) are assigned an experienced mentor teacher- although in reality i'd assert that the majority of good teaching is learnt through interaction with the children; essentially, experience makes a teacher experienced!

So here I am, at a point in my career where I have made an impact (Alien, if you will!) and this has gotten me a job in a fine private school. The next two years will be my Blade Runner- creative, different, and offering a revolutionary new approach that will change things in my school- and hopefully beyond- for years to come.

So that is why I am in school today, and why I will spend much of my nine week holiday either here or at home working on school matters. Teaching isn't like most other jobs; you can't really turn up and do it if you want to be successful. If Ridley Scott came to my house, sat me down in my cinema room, and played me the greatest hits of his career i'd be astounded, entertained, educated, and enlightened. As an individual who wants to become an amazing teacher I have to put together a body of work that will impress and amaze my pupils year after year. Each presentation I create, each classroom resource I design, each book I choose for my class to read is a part of creating the perfect curriculum.

Many teachers won't set foot in their school this summer. Many will only begrudgingly start planning for the winter term a couple of weeks before the new term starts. If you ask your child's class teacher what they are doing over the summer and they enthusiastically talk about redesigning the classroom and their exciting plans for the new term you can rest assured that you are talking to a great teacher.

I'm off to organise my new guided reading scheme- catch you next time!

Updated Aims

Okay, so i've updated my aims based on what has happened in the last six months. It's not always been good, but I've still moved forward with my plans for the next half decade, a time which should see me move into a new era of my adult life.

2012
So far I've:
-got my dream job
-arranged private education for my children (in the future, via my job)
-moved into a lovely house and put together the family cinema room that I'd put as an aim for 2015
-put together a website at www.mrhalton.co.uk

I still aim to:
achieve 60 blog posts on power parents, help my lad to complete his Year One assessments on www.ixl.com maths (he'll be two years ahead when he starts school full-time in September), and get the new house looking perfect for Christmas, sell £100 worth of hand made goods on www.etsy.com, have my carpentry featured on a blog

2013
sell 100 copies of my book, teach my son to read to a high level, teach my daughter to count to 20, buy a MacBook Air, expand my Summer School to four weeks with ten pupils attending each week, sell £1000 of hand made goods on www.etsy.com

2014
Upgrade my car, take a fantastic holiday to Japan, make £3000 from my blog, sell 500 copies of my book, take my son to karate lessons once a week, design and build a dream bedroom with my daughter, save £10,000 in a year, ensure that every piece of furniture in my house is a piece I'll want to keep for the rest of my life

2015
buy and restore a camper van with my son, take a camper van holiday every weekend during the summer, move house to a larger property with potential for a games room and home cinema a jacuzzi and a swimming pool, gain a promotion at work, employ a member of staff for my Summer School

All of these are broadly things I believe I could do in the next year; but I'm realistic, and an adult, and I know that my timescale has to relate to what I can reasonably expect to achieve.

I've already had successes this year, and this list of aims has helped me more than once. Money is still tight and a while back I saw a reduced MacBook Air in John Lewis. The old me- the me with no real plans for life would have bought it, and indeed I came really close to doing so. But I walked outside the shop, came to this blog on my phone, and reminded myself of when I had aimed to buy that specific gorgeous piece of technology. I'm £699 better off because of my plans as laid out here, and my wallet is thankful!

Make yourself a plan today. Work on each micro-step carefully, and achieve more than you originally set out to do. You'll be a great role model for your children and you will be successful.

Believe and achieve!

A Special Breakfast to Encourage Learning

I was overjoyed this morning to get a lie-in til 9.30, and even more impressed that my lad (he turned four last week) had served up his own breakfast- cereal and milk. I came down to a tidy kitchen, his dish in the right place for washing, and just a few milk drops on the table.

Knowing that he'd made an advancement in his personal capabilities due to my laziness (!) i thought i'd push it and get him to put his own socks on. He's been dressing himself for a good year and a half, but hadn't mastered socks. I'd not asked him to try for a long time, which is clearly a mistake by me as he did the job well.

This was complacency on my part; I could have asked him to try dozens of times recently, but as a busy parent I will often just do whatever needs doing to progress the day quickly. I had forgotten that young children will take four or five times as long as an adult to complete a basic task they are still mastering. This has a parity with the classroom- I have observed many teachers telling off pupils for taking five minutes to write the date and title/ learning objective in their book when actually this can be a complex procedure for a young person.

Breakfast is a similar 'rush' in our house. "Here's some biscuits/cereal/whatever kids, cmon we need to go shopping."

It stops here. Due to my new job being in a private school, I am now on the second week of a nine week summer break. I'm not going to France this summer, I have a whole curriculum to plan as well as a new car to buy, but why are we still rushing breakfast?

My boy and I grabbed a slightly out of date pack of gingerbread dough from the fridge (the sort of product I buy, chuck out a week later, and resolve never to but again) and we spent ten minutes making a 'lad and dad' pair of gingerbread men. We made them in the garden, getting us out in the sunhine for a while, and the once baking he went off to his ipad 'work games'- more on those soon- and I came here to blog.

Our day started quickly as we did something creative rather than passive and we furthered our bond beautifully. This fun start to the day also ties in wonderfully with my boys education. I'm forever asking pupils: "How can you improve your work" and they will rarely offer suggestions without me prompting them. Today, Charlie sat with his gingerbread man and said: "Next time we could put chocolate eyes, sauce for the mouth, and a belly button!" He's moving in the right way, building those advanced learner skills.

Our children shouldn't be held back by our essential laziness. Aim to do one thing a day that takes that little bit more effort, and they will grow exponentially. We want our children to grow up to be exciting and creative individuals who do great things. To achieve this, we must mentor them appropriately.

Guess what- the gingerbread men were plain, tasteless (possibly because they were out of date) and we will end up feeding them to the birds. Still, we got our value out of the pre-made mix using it as a toy!

Back! and on holiday :)

Well, a lot has happened since I last posted. I'm now employed again, in a fine boarding school, of all places! I have a new baby on the way, due Sept 29th of this year, and i've moved house to be closer to work.

I've lots of new ideas, theories, and examples of cracking work to share, and i'm keen to hit my 'sixty posts this year' target. Indeed, i've created a website for the parents of my children at work containing twenty three pages of relevant activities designed to progress their children, and if I repost each of those here i'm already a third of the way to my target!

I've added a few targets to my five year plan, and i've already achieved a few things I hadn't considered.

It's an exciting time and my new job places me firmly at the front of innovative education. I'm happy to be back and writing :)

A riotous class

Last week I did three days supply in a Year Six class. My return to teaching after six weeks off was... interesting.
The school was small, friendly, and well equipped and maintained. The class was... well, I worked Monday, Tuesday, and was asked to work Friday as the cover teachers for Wednesday and Thursday lasted less than two hours each. It's a real skill to take a wild class and get them 'on task' by 9.15, and even though my three days were frustrating, long, and full of difficult times as the class insisted on 'kicking off' at playtime an lunchtime when my stenorian voice was absent, I got twelve good lessons from the class.

There's a problem with supply, and it's not just supply teachers walking out due to class misbehaviour. The class I was covering was in a school with a forthcoming inspection. The teacher was presumed to have gone off in order to avoid the inspection, indeed the staffroom whispers told me, a complete outsider, that the teacher has a 'bad back' that is convenient for lengthy absences.

With supply teachers easily available, pupils are being let down. Teachers can go off at any time knowing their class is covered. The teacher I was covering left no planning, so my lessons were likely to be completely different to the curriculum they were supposed to be studying. This class will have a one-week gap in their knowledge due to a teacher taking time off and not fulfilling their duties. Heck, if I was off and seriously ill i'd always email lesson plans in. Why do some teachers believe that their right to sick pay is a right to drop work completely when they feel like it?

My LEA spent £2 million on supply last year. We paid for this out of our taxes. Surely the best thing to do is to allow Head Teachers to cut the hours worked by teachers with difficult classes? I have every sympathy for the teacher of the hellish class I spent three days with last week, and from what I was told in the staffroom, if she had a day or two a week with a nice class to look forward to she wouldn't hate her job so much, and possibly wouldnt't have felt the need to completely avoid school during het absence. Heck, she probably wouldn't have been off work at all.

If your child's class teacher becomes absent for more than a week talk to the Head Teacher. Ask them how your child is being taught, and if their teacher is still planning the lessons. It's absolutely your right to do this, and if you don't, they may be telling the supply teacher what I was told last week: "Do whatever you want with them. There's no planning anyway." your child deserves more.