“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.” Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826); 3rd president of US.

The structure of the school day is about to change in Knox and North Berwick High. What will this mean for instrumental pupils? The new six-period day, each lasting one hour will, for us, be the 12-lesson day, each lasting 30 minutes. Pupils will have to keep one eye on their watch (no change there, then) as there will be no bell half way through the period. Many pupils at NBHS already have experience of this from the era where bells pealed only at moments of glorious release – playtime, lunchtime, home-time. Now, we regularly leap out of our seats as a fortissimo E flat plays “The One Note Samba” over the course of the week. That’s augmentation for you – see Standard Grade Music Concepts!

What will this mean for instructors? Teachers working 5 days in the same school will have contact time increased Mon–Thu and decreased on Friday. Instructors who do not spend a Friday in one of these schools will miss out on the latter. While this is a matter of minutes – and we all know that the McCrone 35-hour week contains a zero in invisible ink if you really want to do justice to the job – it could be imagined that this fact may have gone unnoticed.

In session 04-05 my weekly orbit consisted of 45 lessons per week;
In 06-07 this will become 50.

Should this continue exponentially, my age will never exceed my weekly lesson count and, as a result of the looming pensions crisis, I will retire aged 68, my sprightly brain toned by 200 nano-lessons per week.