It Shouldn't Happen to a Teacher

My year ten bottom set come out with fantastic gems sometimes. Last Thursday we were doing scatter diagrams. One pupil was plotting the points on his diagram and I went to check to see how he was doing. I noticed he was rubbing out some points.

'Did you make a mistake?' I ask
'No' came the reply, 'I've finished and I'm going to do it again.'

Priceless.

I've discovered the problem with having a set 1 class. They generate so much marking.

1. There's more pupils.
2. Of those pupils, all of them hand in their books when you ask.
3. They do more work.

It's almost enough to make me wish for my Set 2 year 8 class from my previous placement. Well, maybe half of them - it'll be a cold day in hell before I want to see the rest again. Indeed, the most likely place I'd see them would be hell.

Having so many classes on this placement means learning all the pupils' names is hard word. I've resorted to mixing their real names with nicknames based upon their appearance and classroom demeanour, in my head at least. These include (with names changed for anonominity):

Fringey Sarah
Gobby Gary
Fatty George
Sid, who looks like me (poor kid)
Jailbait Jo

I really hope they don't slip out whilst I'm teaching.

I taught my first lessons at my second placement school today. I was astounded by how good the pupils were. Even without the regular class teacher in the room my Year 7s were little angles. Presumably this is because they've been well trained - let's see what I can do to undo all that good work.

The only trouble I can see with this is that horrible pupils make life so much more interesting - how am I supposed to blog about lesson after lesson with hardworking children? I doubt anyone would be very interested in reading about the time one of the pupils dropped a pencil ont he floor and couldn't find it for three whole seconds, or the pupil who held the door open for me as I entered the classroom or the time I told the class to settle down and... they did. Gasp!

The most notable 'incident' was a Year 8 offering me a bet on the outcome of a very important forthcoming football match. I thought Christians didn't gamble?

I was at a party at a village hall on Saturday and the DJ played that godawful 'Working Nine til Five' song. The irony of the situation was just delicious. I couldn't help but sing (inside my head of course) 'working nine til half three'. It was made evn better by the fact that the place was full of student types - the DJ must have had a strange sense of humour.

In school today I was observing languages lessons. Ordinarily I'd try to help out but I've seeing as I've not done German since GCSE and the extent of my French knowledge is watching Amelie a few times, I thought it might be a little optimistic.

The highlight of the day was in one lesson telling a pupil that I was there to inspect the class's behaviour. The hardest part about this was keeping a straight face. He asked what my job was called so I've now invented the career of 'Pupil Inspector' - not a bad day's work.

After having been in the house for the past few weekdays due to what I could only call 'scheduling' I've been forced to suffer the horrors of daytime television.

On Tuesday it was the ITV news, featuring Anne Diamond cheating at Celebrity Fit Club. The most curious thing I found about this story was that it appeared on 'the news', rather than 'the boring stuff nobody needs to know about'. This was followed by Jeremy Kyle on ITV2. When I said to my housemate that I'd never heard of him she gave me a look as though I were some sort of imbecile and had just asked what that bright thing in the sky was.

Fortunately today I had the remote, meaning PMQs blasted out of the set. Oh how I laughed knowingly as a bunch of immature half-wits took verbal chunks out of each other - what better way to prepare for going back to school tomorrow?

Being on placement at a religious school is having a very bizarre effect on me. Last night I had a dream that my housemate was pregnant with my baby, except that the usual protocol for creating life had been circumnavigated. Given that only one person has ever been successful in making babies this way - and He's quite mighty - it makes me wonder if I'm developing some kind of messiah complex.

I fully intend to avoid wearing white robes though.

Working with children lowers your expectations of decent behaviour. Someone working in an office might consider someone pretending to have Tourettes slightly barmy, someone working in a school might consider it an improvement.

Even so I couldn't help but be shocked when as I went to overtake an old lady on the pavement she spat down at the ground, missing my feet by mere centimetres, or in her language - inches. I don't think she was aiming for me, but I couldn't quite believe it. What next? Baseball cap wearing Granddads? Hoodied gangs of OAPs sat on park benches drinking cider from thermoses? Old ladies called called Chantelle-Maude-Britney-Barbarra?

I'll soon be scared to go out before dark.

Last Thursday's icey hockey observation provided the funding for my development into a fully functioning phlegm factory. In a break from convention the initial designs were produced by a bunch of teenagers. If it contributed towards the country's GDP then we'd be rolling in it. Money that is.

This is the trouble with teaching: you have to deal with horrible little organisms that attack you at any given opportunity, and it's even worse when they bring in to the classroom a load of germs. Every little dear has a different variety of the common cold (though seeing how this school is quite posh, perhaps the cold's aren't quite so common). Which means that at least I'll be some sort of super-immune being after a few years of teaching, even if I end up accounting for half of Kleenex's profits in that time.

I have to worry about my Year 10 group. They're set 8 (if this were the videprinter I'd have to type in 'eight' next to that) and it shows. In the lesson today the teacher asked for 92 - 2 and they reached for their calculators. Dear me.

In all fairness to them plenty of pupils in other sets have a similar dependence, including one pupil who told me they couldn't convert 4/7 to a percentage because their caluclator didn't have the right buttons and it was my fault for giving them a rubbish calculator. In case you're wondering it wasn't one of those special calculators manufactured without the number 7 to cut costs.

Without meaning to sound like some condescending fool, you have to wonder what's going on with kids today. I'm worried that one day I'll ask a pupil thei name and they won't be able to tell me without checking on the organiser section of their mobile.

In school today I tracked a pupil, which thankfully doesn't involve hunting them down, merely going to the same lessons as them. The worst part about this was having to go to a PE lesson. Make that the second worst, the worst being that it was outside in the freezing cold. It was so bad that the astro-pitch was frozen solid. From this I have come to the conclusion that PE teachers are either completely barmy or have anti-freeze flowing through their veins.

Write a 3000 word essay with the title "Is a teacher more than just a subject teacher?"

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, YES!!! x 500