7am: Arrive at school - cut, stick, plan, photocopy, and so on.

910am: Year 9: A relatively sensible lesson from a sometimes insane class.

1010am: Year 7: The impending parents' evening still loomed large in front of them keeping them under control.

1110am: Duty in the dining hall. I hate this part of the week, if I wanted to bark out instructions with no-one paying the slightest bit of attention I'd go yell at a wall. The other teacher - who the pupils are actually quite scared of - is usually late, leaving me to fend for myself. We have a rule at school that the pupils aren't allowed to wear coats inside, which as you'd expect they seem to forget every five minutes and need reminding. So half my time on duty ends up being saying 'coats off' with the other half being 'sit down' and 'stop throwing that you little shit' (or very nearly).

1130am: Year 8: the not-so-great group and they lived up to the billing. I ended up keeping about half of them back for detention, with one pupil actually walking off out of the room because I was picking on him, meaning I wouldn't let him continue his conversations whilst I was talking to the class, wasn't happy with his lack of work in the lesson and his ill-concealed copying of another pupil's work. This is as well as two other pupils in the class accursing me of picking on them. Surely it's only 'picking on' someone if you single them out - when half of them are stuck in detention surely that's completely consistent? Sigh. Confiscations: One mobile.

1230pm: Warhammer club (a.k.a. futuristic toy soldiers) It's geeky and terrible - I know - but somehow I got roped into helping out because I used ot collect it myself. Bizarrely the teacher I replaced used to run it and the head of key stage suggested to the kids that I might like to help out without even knowing I had an interest. Weird. The poor behaviour of my year 8s meant I hardly saw them today though as I chased things up and bashed my head against my desk repeating over and over, 'why won't they shut up? why won't they shut up?'

120pm: Five minutes before my year ten is due to begin and someone comes along to replace the broken window in my classroom - great timing. In all fairness the pupils did well at getting on with their work regardless of all the bash-smash-crash involved. The only notable incident was a pupil throwing a hissy-fit and flinging his coursework onto the floor after I put him down as late.

230pm: Year 8: the nicer version. They were doing a test so there was no chance for them to piss about. Though on boy did try his best, turning round and grinning at the others whenever the opportunity presented itself. This was coupled with moaning about not beign able to do the questions every five minutes and asking for help. How about shutting up and listening in lessons for once? At one point I thought he was going to cry, or at least I was hoping he would.

430pm: Year 7 parents' evening. I was quite nervous about this after one boy had said his mum was going to 'batter' me - I presume this meant some sort of beating rather than a threat of deep-frying me. As it happens only the parents of nice pupils turned up so I was able to say how wonderful their children were. Generally this is quite disarming for them and I sent them away with big smiles on their faces. I was even in luck as I was able to finish early.

710pm: On the drive home I run over a dead badger - it even squelched. Yuck.