Is new building worth trouble?

Guest writer Zrawchs' previous post was a marathon of writing. Now a fully-fledged writing team member, is the new building worth its trouble?

New, expensive buildings for schools will always raise the question Is it all that neccessary?well personally i think the idiot who asks that question about our school needs serious help because clearly they have some sort of mental retartation!

The question they should be asking is in fact.. is it worth the trouble of having new buildings be built by the walking disaster that is the work force being payed to systematically try to kill us. I may seem a little harsh on the builders but please allow me to explain, there has been many an occasion in which their sheer stupidity has been blinding. For example i was quite happy walking around where art meets p.e, the site of ridiculasly expensive building 1 and they were using a crane to pull rolls of loft insulation onto the roof, sounds simple no? well they managed to drop one of those rolls off the crane sending it tumbling into the metal frame of the building and crashing to the floor in a heap of dust next to a group of rather scared looking work men, i know for a fact they are bloody heavy (the insulation not the builders, althought im sure there no bag of feathers) or another example when the art rooms flooded what did they see fit to do? well thats just it they did sweet F.A, and thats not to mention the wonderful demonstration of brains when they thought "oh look a chlorine tank, lets bust it open and see

what comes out..... oh no deadly gas who'd have thought?"

So i conclude that yes the new buildings are worth having but probably not worth the risk of having those half witted,
shovel happy builders around unless they start teaching "duck and cover" again in the classroom.

Credits Error/Cafeteria/Revision

Whether it be websites, computers or the prone-to-failure BSF project, there seems to be no end to Temple Moor's stupendous ability to turn every aspect of school life a farce. Except the Stock Market Challenge, where the Temple Moor team managed to finish second. Bravo!

Look in your planner. Go. Now. Check the amount of spaces for credits you've got in those green pages. It goes all the way up to 800 credits. How anyone is supposed to get there I don't know, but that's not the point. The SIMS.net database that's used by the school to centralise every bit of data - target grades, achieved grades, attendance records for every lesson and even photographs - has a space for teachers to input credit amounts during Guidance or registration. The maximum amount you're allowed to put in? 700. So if you reach that number of credits, just give up.

It may be over-priced, over-healthy and packed to its capacity, but enjoy the cafeteria while you still can. See, over Easter, it's going to be demolished. But don't worry! They'll build a new one. The new cafeteria will take the same spot occupied by the current cafeteria, so they need to knock one down before they can even start on the next. And they've got two weeks to do it in. What could possibly go wrong?

Apparently, those on "amber" for History (using everyone's favourite system, traffic lights RAG) get more revision sessions than those on "red". We're not sure if this is true, but if it is, then Temple Moor have royally screwed up their own ridiculous system.

What we really want from BSF

So our school is being mutilated as it's reinvented, costing us valuable space. The sound is atrocious, too. In fact, the only good things are that the end result might be good and it gives the Templar Truths staff something to write about. So if billions are being spent making our school "ready for the 21st Century", what do pupils really want?

Because the school doesn't care, here's what pupils really want (all real suggestions):

• Better music and art facilities
• A school network that actually works
• A proper auditorium
  
• That will be used as a stage for, say, Little Shop of Horrors
  
• Proper lighting rigs
• Clean toilets
• A Greggs bakery
  
• A lift
• A "kissing corner" (because some people really do need to get a room)
• A cinema (no, really - it'd keep pupils amused, wouldn't it? It may even make assemblies less boring)

If you're reading, BSF builders, maybe add these to the plans? We'd love you.

Anything we've missed that you'd like to see? Comments please.

All about BSF

Not to be confused with BSE (Mad Cow Disease), though that surely can't be far off the school agenda...

BSF stands for Building Schools for the Future (not Bible Studies Fellowship) and it's a government plan to rebuild nearly every school up and down the country. It will bring said schools right into the 21st Century, modernising them and making them a much better learning environment.

If only.

While the end result may be something that looks very modern (read: "like a new shopping centre without shops") and have large open spaces, the road there is a long and troubled one. Pouring billions of pounds into a project doesn't mean it'll work smoothly. In fact, the current state of Temple Moor is a very bad one for pupils and staff alike. PE fields have been cut down, so the two indoor spaces - the Sports Hall and gym - would be packed, wouldn't you think? Not so. The gym's been knocked down and the Sports Hall is used mainly for exams. Why not just take PE off the timetable? Oh that's right...every child's getting fat. The statistics say so.

Education Leeds says Temple Moor is a "Phase One" school - which we think means it's one of the first to be completed...if it's all on schedule, which it isn't. And to make matters worse, The Times says the whole BSF project ignores the most frequently preached and holiest message to the youth of today: environmental friendliness. Clever, huh?

BSF: a brilliant idea to enhance the school or an utter shambles? Post your opinion in the comments.

Network Failure

Isn't it great when a school runs a fast network capable of transferring files quickly and easily? well, it might be, but as we go to temple moor, we have no access to such a privileged thing.

we were in IT today, and we were trying to put videos into a website we've been creating over the last few weeks, a simple task, one would assume. All we had to do was copy the videos to our user area, then use something called "Serif WebPlus 10" (more on that in a later blog) to add the videos to our website. Like i said, simple. Alas, no. Each user area has a size limit of 40mb imposed on it meaning, because of the file sizes of some of these videos - the largest one was 68mb, and there was about 5-7 videos - it caused us to go over the allocated limit by 200mb. This caused a major strain on the network, as did all the file transfers going on, leading to the entire student network grinding to a painfully slow halt. Simple operations such as clicking a button took upwards of 10 minutes, and this wasn't just affecting our ICT class. School wide, the network ground to a halt.

We spoke to an IT teacher, and he said "The network just can't cope with what we need to do."
Temple Moor is hoping to upgrade the network if when the BSF project is ever has finished

How fast?

As everyone will know, the school is undergoing construction work. What some people wont know is, nine weeks ago a school in a town called "Toll Bar" was flooded and the school today isn't fit for education. However the pupils of that school now learn in a new school built over the nine weeks the other school has been drying off. Now what I don't understand is, it takes those builders to build a whole primary in nine weeks, yet all our builders have managed to accomplish is gas us all, knock down two parts of the school and then set up two huge metal frames with a ridiculously high crane in about nine months. Our builders must really be crap.