*Oink*!

So as it turns out the PD shop wont be next week but in fact the first week back on the Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. Supposedly not all the teachers have their pig stamps yet so come Monday most people wont be able to use the PD store. However as it turns out some tutors do have a pig stamp.

Well for starters, the first key issue is that the page is titled "PD voucher Stamps" although these don't look like vouchers, they look like pigs. Well that's what most people would say. But to me it looks like it has a testicle for a nose. Secondly, it's not exactly pink. It looks more like a red to me. And in the land of TMHS what does red mean? Underachievement. Fail. Awful. Get it away from me before I gouge my eyes out with a history textbook. How ironically fitting.

We'll do a poll for the colour. Let the Templars as a whole decide on the vindication of this fail. Also, if you have an opinion on the stamp, e-mail us it and we might post it.

Email contributions

We've been getting emails again! Not just complaints, either. One reader - we won't name them - has found a huge flaw in the Sixth Form planners.

Having read your piece on the 'mistakes, blunders and printing errors' which appear in the Key Stage 4 version of the Temple Moor Planner, I was prompted to inform you of a disastrous fault with the Sixth Form version of the sacred text. As you and your readers may or may not know, the Sixth Form at Temple Moor is twinned with the Sixth Form at that other guiding light in the world of education... Brigshaw. As a result, the same planner is used by the Sixth Forms of both schools and many Templars find themselves regularly commuting between the two for their lessons. As you can imagine, this can be quite confusing, arriving at another school with no idea of where to find your next lesson. And so those clever boffins behind the construction of the planner have helpfully provided maps of both schools. 'GENIUS!' I hear you cry, but wait, on closer inspection these maps are nothing but an emalgamation of random lines strewn accross five pages...well OK, maybe a slight exaggeration, but I defy you to find your way around either school using them, whilst the map of Temple Moor seems to overlook the fact that indeed both sexes have a requirement to urinate, by only featuring girls toilets!

So it's not just the Key Stage 4 planners. We've found a new mistake in them as well: check your credits pages, in between 68 and 70. What number's there? 79! If I didn't know better, I'd swear this was a rubbish attempt to stop smutty jokes.

On to the next email, then:

I feel I must write and complain about the shocking standard of grammar and spelling in the latest 'news items' on your site. It seems to me that the 'writer' must be in one of the bottom Year 11 sets.

In fact the writer ( and also other people involved with this website) must have very sad lives to spend so much time writing so much rubbish. I feel sorry for them in fact just one comment to make

get a life!

you sad people!

Indeed. Now, we could sit here and pick fault with your email (there's a few mistakes), but we're not going to bother ourselves. Instead, we'll just say that your email address is anon61@hotmail.co.uk. Whether it's your real address or not, everyone at Templar Truths invites every reader to send abusive text, images or, better still, viruses, trojans, spyware or other malicious code.
Templar Truths Top Tip: to prevent anon61 sending bad stuff back, go to your options and set him as a "blocked sender" or use some sort of filter.

School Website: A Review

"All the latest news and information as it happens" is what you'll get from the official Temple Moor website, according to the latest planners. Now, we know - from a previous post - that the school planner is hardly likely to contain the most reliable information. But does it in this case?

No. The planner is totally wrong.

The scrolling "latest news" headlines declares its latest news: the Ofsted report...from October 2006. In terms of news, it's as up-to-the-minute as the news that Princess Diana is dead (I'm looking at you, the Daily Express). In fact, click on "latest news" and you'll see that the Ofsted news is the only news on the website. Really.

The site's homepage has a few paragraphs summing up why the school has bought the domain name and set up the website. It's finished by the head...sorry...the principal writing his name. Amazingly, the words haven't changed a bit since the principal swap. Odd, that...

One of the website's more ingenious functions is providing copies of the newsletter - which, as you may know, never tells you any real news - and Tempo (a magazine which doesn't so much inform as back-pat). The last Tempo is from February, and I'm fairly sure there's been Tempos since then. As for newsletters, the "latest" one is from September 1st, last year. It's over a year old!

Everything else seems to be in order, and the site is fairly well designed. Not by pupils or staff, but by some unrelated company. The copyright, though, is for 2005 - hardly regular updating, eh?

Thinking ahead

As well as the many problems the planners contain, from first glance at the pages, it seems the school has gone all out to fix any problems with the last planner. Here is a few of the mistakes they fixed with this one.

1. The cover and colours pages: To stop the "loseage" of pages from the planner this year. The school have seemed to have replaced these pages with a stronger plastic similar to that found at the bottom of drill bits. In fact if you had a ravenous, ten tonne, Bengal tiger and let it loose on the planner, it would not break its cover. Even with a lack of thumbs, the tiger would have destroyed any previous puny planner covers.
2. "Miss, I've forgotten my ruler!": So many times a teacher would be haunted by that phrase, but not anymore. As well as being used as bullet proof armour by the Royal Marines, the back cover of the planner is printed an 18 centimetre ruler to aid you where ever you go. Though we reckon some teachers will give you a comment then add, like an afterthought "oh, use the one on your planner".
   
3. Forgetting planners: No more will pupils forget their planner. Thanks to new technology, the red strip on the front of the planner, which seems pointless at first, in fact contains a microchip that will constantly remind you that you need your planner.

That is just a few of the improvements the government wasted the tax payers money on to make your planners even more unbearable.

Planner Troubles

That essential bit of kit for a Temple Moor student (or Templar, as we like to call them on this blog) is the planner. Lose it and you have to buy a new one, for £5. So they're not especially cheap. But are they any good? There seem to be some mistakes, blunders and printing errors in the Key Stage 4 version. These are:

1. "Inapprpriate" instead of "inappropriate" written on the Computer Access Policy page, rule 3.
2. "Parents/Carers signature" lacking apostrophes.
   
3. Left-hand-side pages for weeks beginning 15th October, 22nd October and 29th October have no subject names on them (in my planner, at least).
   
4. "Learning styles" text blurred and nearly unreadable.
5. "Sanctions For Misdemeanours Committed Around School" chart says the orange triangle is a "Pyramid" - it is not presented in a 3D way and is so a triangle, not a pyramid.
6. "The Rewards System - Individual" states 400 credits earns one a "Titanium" award, when the green credits pages say it's a "Certificate Of Achievement Award" - which is it?
7. Like point 4, the Periodic Table is hard to read. The one last year was of much better quality.
   
8. "Where In The World" pages have country and city names that are blurred like points 4 and 7.
   

That's eight mistakes. Which, for a school, is really eight mistakes too many, don't you think?

Contribute: if you've spotted any mistakes in the planners, leave a comment.