The Adventures of Dysfunctional Dan

It has been a couple of weeks since I last wrote, which was somewhat inevitable over the first few weeks of the academic year. It’s always challenging coming back to work after the summer break and the new class I’m working in is hard work. But actually, it’s good hard work. Yes, readers of this blog are no doubt used to me complaining about feeling miserable and generally unhappy with the way my life has turned out. But that’s changed, for now at least. Am unfamiliar but warm, satisfactory feeling has suddenly appeared. I’m enjoying my teaching assistant job more than ever, with a lovely set of children and a strong staff team. It also helps that we’ve been fully-staffed and the staff team is not going to change, which is the total opposite of how things were last September. I still feel I should be earning more money but living with my parents means I don’t spend very much at all and after a year of earning I’ve already got a reasonable amount of money saved. Having spent some t...

I have  talked in the past  about the relatively recent discovery that I have dyspraxia. It’s not something I really think about every day but having a special need which has affected me all my life feels like a big thing. Every now and then I discover that dyspraxia explains yet another small part of my life. I thought it would be interesting to take a dyspraxia questionnaire I found online and see just how much of an impact it had and has on my life. As a baby / young child were you aware of any problem in the following areas : Milestones: Crawling, Walking, Speaking: Nothing significant has ever been told to me about this milestones, that they were late or anything. Dressing for P.E, managing small buttons, fastening zips: I can’t really remember as a child but I do have difficulty with these things now. I work with young children who often need these things doing for them and I find it really difficult, especially because I am doing it from a different angle to the ...

It’s another dark time for Europe. Thousands upon thousands of migrants are travelling into the continent, mostly Syrian, desperately trying to escape the horrors that their home country has become. It’s been constantly in the news here in the UK as groups of migrants desperately try to make it into the channel tunnel at Calais and boats full of barely alive people are found by various authorities. And then there was this photo, which is devastatingly sad: Immigration was a big issue in the last election here, and I found that a bit strange. The idea of people owning a country seems ridiculous. I really struggle to understand that people don’t like foreigners and think Britain should be for the British. We’re a country that has constantly evolved from waves of immigration, right back to Vikings, Saxons and Romans. Why on Earth have we suddenly decided this should stop? My experience of what people in other countries believe is limited but I suspect there are foreigner-haters pre...