Always Look on The Bright Side of Life; Five Things That Made Me Smile in October.

October was a bit of a funny month. While there was plenty to keep me optimistic and to make me crack the odd smile, it also signalled the closing weeks of that tough first half term of the academic year. So even smiling felt like an effort! Anyway, here’s what made me make that effort last month!

A groundsman’s pitches go viral. As someone who used to coach football teams, this one caught the eye. I never had to cut the pitches, but was responsible for marking the lines out every once in a while. However, this was a story about Joe Mecke-Davis, the groundsman at Westfields Football Club in Herefordshire. Because his club isn’t professional there are no rules as to how he cuts his pitch and so Matt has let his imagination run wild over the years. Now, his designs are in the running for an international award after images of his pitches went viral. Have a look for yourself…

The joy of a free book and a writing workshop! Every year at the school that I teach at each student in Year 7 gets to choose a free book. It’s a sponsored thing designed to promote reading. And if you didn’t know, reading figures are dropping fast. Obviously, as an English teacher and a fairly prolific reader, I find this trend really worrying. Naturally then, I think the scheme where kids get a book for free is just a fantastic idea. But the thing that made me smile more than anything this year was the enthusiasm of the my students who were desperate to get a look at the choices and haven’t stopped asking when they’re going to get their book ever since! Alongside this, recently I had to nominate 5 students to take part in a workshop with a visiting author. I decided to nominate a couple of really shy, quiet boys because I thought they might benefit from working with a writer for the day. We had to give out little tickets to the event as well and so I kept my group of five back at the end of the lesson to give them their tickets. Both of my shy students looked like they thought they had done something wrong, but the smiles on their faces and the expressions that said ‘Me, really?’ almost made the whole slog of an 8 week half term worth it!

Dinosaur Discovery! I read a brilliant story concerning a discovery of dinosaur footprints last month. They’re part of the longest trackway site ever discovered in the UK. They were originally found by a farm worker driving a digger and since their discovery archaeologists have been excavating the land bit by bit. Now, they’ve unearthed five different trackways of massive footprints that go on for 150 metres and are thought to have been made by both sauropods and a Megalosaurus, the largest predatory dinosaur known in the UK during the Jurassic period. I find things like this fascinating!

Divers discover $1 million worth of treasure. Another article that I read last month told of the discovery of treasure found on a centuries old Spanish shipwreck off Florida. It’s thought to be part of up to $400 million worth of treasure that was lost in the same hurricane, which divers are now frantically hoping to find more of! I used to collect old coins as a school boy and loved finding rare ones, so this story couldn’t have failed to make me smile!

Finally…half term! I’m writing this after work on the final day of the first half term of the academic year. It’s been a long, gruelling 8 week stint, marked particularly over the last two weeks by massive bouts of illness across the school. On at least two days this week we’ve had over 100 students off ill. So partly, I’m happy that I seem to have avoided it and also I’m just thrilled to bits that I now have a week off! The next one leads us right up to Christmas; something else to smile about!

I hope you enjoyed my reasons to smile this time around. There’ll be more at the start of December. Hopefully November is full of positives!