Snapshot Week 2

Goals:
To make time for my mental and physical health. 
To carry out all my roles (teacher, HSA director and Across Schools CoL) to the best of my ability. 
To support staff wellbeing. 
To actively maintain a positive personal outlook. 

Here is the snapshot update on how week 2 went:

• Visits to the gym this week: 0
• McDonald's eaten: no McDonalds! Improvement.
• Casual sports games played this week: 2 games of touch, 2 games of tag, a run up a volcano with another teacher, Kalesha, and a fitness class on Saturday with friends.
• Books read: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (given to me by Vaughn at last weeks book swap).

• Teaching highlights: 
• This week in Y9 science we conducted a few investigations, and my favourite was one that I didn't know the answer to. Science is all about wondering and then trying to find an answer.
• I wondered if commentators speak about male and female 7's players in different ways.
• To try and make the science valid I picked both games from 2017, and both games were finals. I thought the games were also from the same tournament but Taniela (a boy in 9PKr) informed me they were not, which makes results slightly less reliable! 
• In class we watched 7 minutes of a women's final, and 7 minutes of a men's final.
• We wrote down words the commentators used to describe the players, the team, or the play.
• Unfortunately, the men's game was a little hard to hear over our speakers, so it wasn't the most successful classroom activity BUT the results were interesting. 
• We found that commentators were more likely to offer extra information about women players, e.g. "the flyer from Taranaki," "basketball convert," "Mother-of-Two" or "from a touch background" or "loves surfing." 
• Wouldn't it be hilarious to hear a commentator say "And he scores! Father-of-two Sonny Bill Williams touches down for his third try of the season!"
• Women were called "big" once and "strong" twice, but also had their legs described as "little pistons." 
• The theme of car-related analogies continued stronger in the men's commentary; "red-lining it" and "firing on all cylinders."
• Men were more likely to be called "powerful," "monster" and the words "lethal" and "outstanding" were both used twice.
• Some of the women's play was described as "beautiful," and the kicker as "class" and a play as "classy" while the men's play was "frenetic," "unstoppable" and had "flare".
• Both teams' players were described in terms of their positions, e.g. captain or winger, and also their stats, such as "top try-scorer if the season" or "Gold-medalists."

• CoL things: I spent an hour manually writing down the NSN numbers for all of Year 9 off KAMAR and another 30 minutes typing them into a spreadsheet to share to Woolf Fisher, so we can have data on only the Year 9's who have arrived at Tamaki College (as opposed to the results of all year 8's in the cluster, many of whom head off to other schools). This will help give an indication of the abilities of our current students.
• Teacher wellbeing support: organised Karen to run "Colouring In With Karen" in the staffroom on Friday afternoon. 10 people came along this week, up 3 from last week! 
• Gratitude emails sent: only 2 :( Must pick up my game!