The grind starts…

So I had some feedback from people¹ reading this and as a result, I’ll do less footnotes this week, promise.

Okay, with that out of the way, let’s get on with the grind. You’ve been back in school three weeks. What’s that? No, really, you have. The summer seems a lifetime ago (and it was), your tan has gone, you don’t know what it’s like to have free time and your life is ruled by bells. The bells, or whatever horrific siren type thing a nice traditional bell has been replaced with in your school.

Welcome to teaching!

Most schools run a two-week timetable (another statistic I have zero evidence to back the claim up with, but every school I worked in had a two-week timetable, so that’s 100% of my sample, stats fans. Hmm. Maybe this should’ve been a footnote) which means we are now either halfway through the second cycle of that or have just finished the first. It all depends on how your school ran its first week.

You know now that your year 9 class Friday period 5 are a bunch of shits. They’re great period 1 on a Monday, tolerable period 3 on Wednesday but feral cosplayers of The Lord Of The Flies by Friday. I’ve taught many year 9 groups over the years, and they are always the most challenging. Bodies flushed with hormones, brain activity telling them they are the centre of the universe, all emotions at a level most first year drama students would be embarrassed by.

A long time ago, we were told on a staff training event (calling it a day would be taking the piss) to find out what students know before jumping in and teaching them. Solid advice, so I took it with my new year 9 class. For some unknown reason, we had started with equations and were now doing inequations. For the non-mathematical amongst you, these are equations with less then or greater than instead of equals. Anyway, in this lesson, which we’ll pretend was Friday period 5, I decided to start with, “Who can tell me something about inequalities?”

A lad, known for being a bit of a pain in the arse, but he was okay really, just bored, piped up with “It’s the stuff inside us that’s good.” I mean, fair play, he’s not wrong (and if you don’t get it, read it out loud. If you still don’t get it, message me) but this was a maths lesson, not English.

I had a tutor group in my first school who were lovely little year 7 kids. One of them had a fight with a year 9 boy, and so my tutees dad came into school to sort out the year 9 lad. When me and the head of year met him, he asked if I was the kid who’d beaten up his lad.

“No sir, I’m his tutor.” These days I’d be made up if someone thought I still looked that young.

Here’s another Friday period 5 story. A kid, who we will politely describe as not that into education, spent a good five minutes covering my board rubber with super glue. As a first year teacher, I hadn’t even seen him take the board rubber, so whilst I was looking for it I was a little surprised when he said, ‘here it is, Sir”.

Now, obviously, there’s lots of parts to that story which don’t make me out to be a great teacher and I will freely admit I wasn’t at first. Why didn’t I notice he knicked my rubber? Why didn’t I notice one of my students was doing no work? Who the hell brings superglue to school? And finally, and this is the crucial one, why did I take it?

Look on the brightside – assuming your other period 5 is a different class, maybe a nice A-level one – you only have 19 more of those lessons to go.

There we have it. Until next time, and I only managed one footnote² this week. Hurrah.

1. My wife. ↩︎
2. Apart from this cheeky little number. Thanks for checking it out! ↩︎