Toward School With Heavy Looks

In twelve hours' time I'll be back at the chalk face. I don't have any classes until 12th September (although the students are in for induction from 7th September), but until then I'm preparing for the coming year and enrolling new students. I have a brand new lab to set up, and I'll be going around the biology and forensic labs doing the poster-hanging equivalent of shouting "Mine mine mine mine":


I have a load of lovely laminated posters that I managed to squeeze out of our budget when we were panicking about Ofsted, and I'll be supplementing these with some other posters created by Ian at Teaching Science. I'm wondering if I can get away with putting the following up at the entrance to my lab:

"I have a policy about honesty and asskicking, which is: if you ask for it, then I have to let you have it."

It's from "What Teachers Make" by Taylor Mali. Although it probably goes against all sorts of equality and diversity guidelines, not to mention contravening safeguarding regulations by implying that I'll be giving out asskickings in my lab.

Today I packed my "school bag", and have decided that life is too short to have expensive bags that fall to pieces (j'accuse, Julien Macdonald...), so it's the trusty Gap record bag complete with my offensive badge collection.

And it was time for the annual Cleaning of the Dissection KitTM. This year I did three heart dissections and a kidney dissection. Heart smells meaty, being muscle, and I and my students often admit to feeling a bit hungry after a heart dissection. Kidneys are completely different, and utterly vile. They stink to high heaven. No one wants to eat anything ever again after cutting up kidneys.


So now I'm ready. I have a new diary, a clean scalpel, and pristine walls in my lab. Bring it.