My form had their trip to the local library - or librarary as year sevens pronounce it, in all fairness it is the word in the English language that would win a 'things that sound like you'd find them in the woods but actually wouldn't' competition - this afternoon and I was fortunate enough to go with them.

I'm proud to say they behaved themselves very well, though during their introductory talk when asked what they might expect to find in the library the first reponse was playstation games. Which is true enough but as word association goes library to playstation is a little unusual. I suppose to many eleven year old boys the word playstation could be associated with anything. Football... playstation. Car... playstation. Turnips... playstation. When asked if they had any questions they were interested if the library had any wii games.

I was also impressed with the drivers around our school. On our way from school to the library lots of people stopped to let us cross roads. It was as though I was holding an invisible lollipop. Thankfully with my form behaving so splendidly we probably gave a very good impression of the school too. It was a nice way to spend the afternoon.

I saw one of my year nines topless today.

I should probably explain...

She was just showing me her sunburn on her back

I should probably continuing explaining...

During their lesson this morning she was telling me how burnt she'd got at the weekend and offered to show me the picture of her back. Too much skin makes me uncomfortable, generally I mean. I'm practically asexual. I'd fit in perfectly in the 1920s. I'm not convinced schoolgirls should even be allowed to wear short sleeves so I definitely could have done without having any pictures thrust in my face. I pleaded that I'd go blind if she showed me but it was too late and before I knew it she'd whipped her phone out and I was looking a picture of a very red back with my face turning a matching colour. I'm going to have nightmares tonight.

Nevermind the fact that she had her phone out in class. I could hardly confiscate it anyway. We have to log what the pupils were doing with phones - whether it buzzed or whether they were texting, that sort of thing - and I don't think putting 'she showed me a picture on her phone of herself wearing very little so I took it off her' would sound very good.

I know that I'm a little prudish so that skews my views on such things but I do hope she learns that it's not a smart thing to show such pictures of yourself to any male under the age of, I don't know, fifty. On the other hand I suppose I should take it as a compliment that my pupils feel so much at ease with me, as though I'm a kind of benevolent Uncle. It's just it's a role I don't particularly want, especially if I have to gouge my eyes out afterwards.

Apparently my year tens have come across my younger brother working in the school. I do have a brother but he isn't younger than me and seeing as he has a successful career as a joiner I find it hard to imagine him doing a bit of moonlighting as a teacher.

Seeing as I'm something like the third youngest teacher in the school anyway I was slightly shocked by the comment. My younger brother, what were they trying to say? This follows on from Wednesday afternoon when one of my year nines said that I had some grey hairs. Mayeb the stress of teaching is beginning to tell on my youthful appearrance. In any case it was a bit rich as she needs to sort her roots out - though I came to the conclusion that I should keep this thoguht to myself as making a fourteen year old cry would be a little on the harsh side.

Anyway, my 'younger brother' is an art student-teacher who they think looks like me (he doesn't) and the reason for them thinking of him as being a younger version of me is because he uses words like 'yo', 'dudes' and 'sup'. I would imagine if I did that my pupils would tear me to shreds. So he's the hip young one, wheras I'm the geeky older one. Which is a state of affairs that's fine by me.

It's important to develop a good relationship with the pupils, for the most part I think I do quite well. There's times when I get things horribly wrong and there's some pupils out there who I don't think would piss on me if I were on fire but I get on well with the majority of the kids. I'm always careful though because it's a dangerous game trying to be 'down with the kids'. I think if you tried to hard to get along with them the pupils would smell a rat and it could backfire spectacularly. I think most pupils like their teachers to be a bit on the geeky side, that's more like the natural order of things.

I'd taken my year sevens outside for a lesson on symmetry on Thursday. It had gone well with the pupils being interested in the work and actually learning from it.

On Friday morning in briefing the head gave a message saying that we shouldn't take classes outside for sunbathing. Some teachers had moaned that it was undermining serious work and that it should be business as usual even after key stage three had finished their exams.

I wasn't the only teacher who'd taken a class outside, my year tens were telling me about doing chalk drawings in art on the dull and dreary paving slabs. I know another maths teacher had done about area, another had done some statistical work looking at different makes of car going past the school.

Heaven forbid we actually inspire our pupils and get them enthused about our subjects. What's the point in doing that when we can get our pupils answering a load of dull questions from a textbook that don't really teach them anything except that maths is boring? I'll bet the teachers who complained are the ones who teach lessons stood at the front with their pupils just writing all lesson and wish we were allowed to cane them. And if lessons can't take place outside then we'd better cancel all PE lessons because the Sports Hall's in use for exams at the moment. Admittedly I'm being slightly fecitious but I'm always getting kids asking what the point of maths is, they seem to have the impression that it only exists in classrooms, so it's very disappointing to be restrained like this when we're actually doing very important work in showing them that maths doesn't vanish when they walk out the door.

If we're going to stop any kind of lesson then we should be looking very carefully at how we use computers. When I've used them in the past I've had kids moaning that I shouldn't be making them do actual work in a computer room. They have the impression that computer rooms are for games and dossing, which is half the reason they like going in there.

The saddest thing is that if a member of senior management walked past my lesson and the kids were all sat quietly working from a book and not really interacting with the maths they'd be happier than seeing them outside enjoying the work.

I'll finish with a special case. In my year sevens there's a boy with mental health problems. He struggles greatly with written work and the fact that he can even make it through a whole one hour lesson is extremely impressive. On Thursday he was working very hard to find examples of symmetry and had built up a good collection of photos on his phone that he showed me at the end. He got many times more out of that lesson than he would have from one inside and he'd actually enjoyed being at school for the right reasons.

So next year if it's hot and sunny I'll conveniently 'forget' this dictat and teach the same lesson again. It'd be worth it.

The warm weather recently is fantastic but it does make for awfully hot classrooms. The same kids who were moaning about it being too cold and wanting to keep their coats on are now complaining that it's too hot to work. Yet strangely the kids who were happy to make do with a jumper when it actually was cold, and so you'd figure are generally warmer than colder, are staying quiet and content. Most peculiar.

The situation isn't helped by the fact that the school heating is on this week to keep the year nines warm who are doing their SATs in the cooler sports hall. Unfortunately that means the heating has to be on everywhere. My room is a furnace.

I took my year sevens out into the school car park this afternoon for a lesson on symmetry, we were looking at hub caps, to escape the heat and get some sun. I got some odd looks from other staff walking, especially as I was getting them to take pictures on their phones. An assistant head came to see what was going on as I think the lesson might have been outside his comfort zone. He actually asked 'and you're allowing them to use their phones?' It'd be a mighty show of defiance from the class to walk out with phones in hand. And having made it that far it be weird for them to congregate in the car park taking pictures of wheels. I cheerfully explained what we were doing and he went away looking somewhere inbetween confused and bemused. Admittedly it was a risky lesson but it was with a class I could trust my life with.

And it's always nice to get some fresh air.