Help required.....

The pressures of trying to juggle SQH, work, family and A LIFE came to bear this weekend. I juggled my daddy duties, as well as organising an African drumming workshop in Glasgow with my good friend and Senegalese master drummer Mockolo Sawane. By the time Sunday night came around at the end of our rehearsal my arms were hanging off....fast forward to Monday morning and trying to get my head around my re-submission for Unit 1 of the SQH, the critical self-evaluation.

After having got over the 'nose out of joint' feeling for having to re-submit a 300, which turned into around 700, word section(what a powerful lesson that was!) of my CSE I battled on to put something coherent together to match the success criteria. Five hours later I finally sent a draft to my tutor for her to look over before I finally submit. Here's hoping there's not too much more tweeking required.

No rest for the wicked as it has been straight on to preparing my SQH project and discussing my idea for an enhanced curriculum with Willie Innes, our local councillor, this afternoon. Being heavily involved with the 'Pennypit' community education centre he is keen for the school to forge stronger links with the community and vice-versa. The enhanced curriculum seems to be a perfect way to do this. As always, financial considerations and budgets may pose obstacles to getting things 'up and running' but hopefully with the strength of the project and potential benefits to the community as a whole we can find a way around and difficulties in this area. I am keen to involve our local businesses in supporting our youngsters at an early stage, to help forge links which will hopefully bring benefit to all concerned in the long run.

I also had some good news from Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce about a work visit for some of our potential Maths and Science university candidates. Tiso in Leith have very kindly agreed to give a group of a dozen or so S5 students a tour around their premises in November. This is the first of several projects we are hoping to be involved in with the Chamber of Commerce and provides another exciting opportunity for the school and our youngsters.