Wednesday 9 February

My lessons for the next month are all exam preparation so when a colleague said she'd like to observe me sometime during the next couple of weeks I tried to put her off by telling her that .  It's also true that I don't enjoy being observed but it's something we have to put up with.

The tiler finally came today.  For one reason and another, he's had to delay.  I was horrified at the quote he gave us, thinking that the job would only take half a day.  It turns out, it's very difficult to do and it'll take him 2 days.  At the end of the first day, it's looking good but the whole house is full of tile dust.  Hopefully we'll be able to get back to normal by the weekend.

One of my pet peeves at the moment is the use of 'amount' instead of 'number', as in 'a huge amount of people'.  It should be 'a huge number of people'.  You can of course say 'a huge amount of beer' so the difference is that any word that you can count, ie 265 people, 5 houses, we use 'number' and any word that we don't count, we use 'amount'.  Someone will naturally point out that we do count beers, but it's actually the pints or measurements of beer that we count, not the liquid itself.