The Grassy Knoll

Well, its that time of semester were we are obviously nearing some bigwigs visit or a football tournament.

Why do I know that? Well, they are relaying the turf on the pitch. Again. At the start of the year, it was in pretty good nick but of course with all the games and functions on it, it started to go bare down the middle. Would they returf or reseed the whole pitch? But of course not.

The solution was to returf the middle bit. So, afterwards you had this green strip of grass down the middle of the pitch and then the semi bare wing areas. The trouble was the sods they were laying looked as though they had been stolen from a public park a lot of the sods were dead before they had been laid, the actual sods were maybe about 3 feet by 2 feet big, the depth of the sod was barely an inch. This meant holes started to appear when they were being transfered. As well as that you had the usual high tech approach of the workers, instead of putting the sods as closely togther as possible like a jigsaw puzzle they left quite big gaps. The end result was that after only a month or so - which in itself is far too short a time for the grass to lay proper roots - they were playing on it and pulling the grass out. Not only that they had only lightweight rollers which gave the nominally flat surface the same gradients as Nepal.

Within 3 months the effect was that the newly turfed pitch was bare and the original side area still had grass! DOH!!

So they are now returfing it again. Watching the process, you can see why the grass cant hold, the underlying soil is not soil, it looks like either hard compacted earth or an earthy clay combination. I would imagine that to get the pitch right, you would need to import proper soil to get decent drainage and then look after it properly etc etc. Which means obviously it will never happen.

As you can guess, not a lot else is happening just the same old same old.

We are starting to get the papers ready for the final end of year exams that we wont let the kids fail and doing finishing off the weekly tests. One of the kids got my special attention today as I discovered what he did with his test paper. After the class he scrunched it up and left it in the desk. Wow, big deal you think.

Left at that I wouldnt even have blinked but combined with the fact that he had scored out my corrections, marks, and awarded himself full marks just pushed the wrong button. Its bad enough that we have to let them pass - which we think the kids know - but when they display such a total lack of respect in rolling up a test into a paper ball, changing a teachers comments and test score then it just goes beyond the pale, actually beyond the trough and small lake as well.