The maths department is quite isolated, located in the old (meaning smelly and falling apart) bit of the school. This appears to have given some members of the team an island mentality, believing themslves to be the dispensers of the divine word on what the school should be doing and be damned with anyone who disagrees. Part of this includes headteacher-bashing. I innocently mentioned the other day that the head had commented at an NQT induction thingummy that the maths department was shirking taking part in a particular part of an INSET day.

Suddenly it was like lighting the blue-touch paper, with everyone taking great offense. Whoops! I tried to back-track and explained that he hadn't really said it in any seriousness, but they insisted that he'd meant to drive the knife in. It was performance management time so perhaps they could be forgiven for being paranoid, but next time I think I'll just keep my mouth shut.

Talking to kids I can manage. Talking to other teachers I can pretty much cope with. But talking to parents is a whole new ball game. On the final day of term I had to phone a pupil's mum after she'd been trying to get hold of me earlier in the week.

I find it easy to forget that I'm supposed to be an adult now, when talking to someone's parents I feel as though I'm a little kid myself. So I was expecting to struggle to make my voice heard, with the parent in question taking her child's side without pause for considering whether, maybe, he might be in the wrong. It was a nice surprise then that the mother respected my professional opinion. Poor deluded woman.

Part of being an NQT means going along to lots of induction sessions and trying to smile and nod in all the right places (the tricks pupils pull to try to get out of lessons, disapproving of the behaviour not the pupil etc...) and have a caring, concerned look on your face at all other times (child Protection, kids with tough home environments, not using someone else's mug in the staffroom).

Fortunately as part of this comes a great deal of free food, including a nice meal after a training session at a hotel, when typically I ended up sat next to the Head. Fortunately I am slowly starting to get over my irrational phobia of talking to 'grown ups', but am still capable of garbling my words and feeling like I'm about six years old, probably not helping myself by saying that I'm too young to really remember knightrider. At least starting young I'll have plenty of experience by the time I'm thirty - if I survive that long.

Today was 'wear it pink' day in honour of breast canser awareness. This was a chavtastic opportunity for the pupils to bling it up a bit and I witnessed hooped earings that had probably been swiped from the PE departments supply of hooplas.

Seeing as they weren't in the usual attire, most of the children took it as no uniform = no work. This is at odds with my goal of making the buggers write until their hands bleed. The worst behaviour came from my year ten class in the afternoon, many of the girls in which had decide to ignore the pesky 'cancer' bit in the day's title and made it 'breast awareness day' by wearing tops with necklines that weren't merely plunging but bordering on antipodean. Firstly there was the pupil who tried to encourage everyone to ignore me (put in the back of someone else's A-Level classroom where his subversions would fall on deaf ears), then there was the pupil who was removed by a member of senior staff for fighting at dinnertime (and came back later with the news that he'd been excluded). Next was the turn of the skanky teenage girl texting her mates, this was actually a good thing as it gave me an excuse to send her to the isolation facility. Next came the girl who when I gave her a detention for next Monday said that it didn't matter because I'd only forget. Cue me taking a sheet of A4 paper and writing her name in great big capital letters, along with the names of the others. Good job the lesson hadn't lasted much longer or I'd have needed to use a poster to fit all their names on.