ABSTRACT
I was teaching about lenses, and I had taken my rather boisterous group of 14- year-old pupils outside on a sunny summer day to see whether they could scorch bits of scrap paper with a convex lens by focusing the sun’s rays. They had a good time, marvelled at the bright spot formed, asked interesting and pertinent questions and, after a while, we went back inside. We talked about how their ideas about refraction, covered in the previous lesson, applied to this shaped glass block known as a lens. As I turned round from the diagram we were jointly constructing on the board to continue the discussion with the class grouped near me around the front, I spotted the Deputy Head Teacher who had just come in and was leaning silently against the back wall. I finished off the diagram, concluded the discussion and wound up the lesson. The pupils left. ‘I came in earlier but it was like the Marie Celeste,’ he said. ‘We were outside,’ I replied. ‘Yes. That lot can be difficult, but if you can get them out, back and settled, there can’t be much wrong. Well done.’ ‘Thanks,’ I replied. He had watched me teach for about twenty minutes; it was the summer term and his only visit. That was it. I had just been assessed and passed my probationary year.
