Its hard for me to forget the date at the moment because every morning I get an update from my form about how close to Christmas it is. Even without this you could probably work it out by taking into account how poorly the children are behaving and how little you can be bothered to actually do anything about it.

Christmas cards being passed round the room are common-place, including, to my relief, some coming my way. There are almost entirely from sweet little year seven girls - I wouldn't expect any from my year nines. The strangest one featured a picture of a pile of 'poo' on the envelope, drawn not to be offensive, but merely because the girl who sent it was bored; she's a little bit strange and sulked when I put the envelope in the bin.

I'm also getting protests from year tens saying that it should be illegal to make them do work so near to Christmas. I'm dreading next week though. You could argue that we shouldn't bother with the last week before Christmas but then the second to last week would become the last week and so we shouldn't bother with that, which has its upsides I suppose. I will try to avoid actually teaching them anything, taking my philosophy as 'they don't wanna learn and I don't wanna make them'.