When you’re teaching it sometimes feels like you’re going round putting out fires. You get one kid sorted with the work, then another puts their hand up, but you don’t have time to help them yet because Kirsty is screaming that Bobby has just thrown a pencil at her and Alice is asking why you’re not yelling at Kevin for putting gum in her hair and then there’s a message for a pupil who rather mysteriously ‘has something to collect from reception’ and Annie needs the toilet and who wrote ‘maths is shit’ on the board?
All this is small fry compared with the rouge who literally gave me a fire to put out. I don’t think she meant to actually set her bag alight; she was probably just trying to singe it. Unfortunately the material must have been highly flammable because great big flames shot up out of it. This was definitely the worst moment of the year. It was compounded by the fact that the deputy head had observed me in the morning and she had ripped my lesson to shreds because it was so rubbish.
Another teacher once said to me that no matter how bad it seems you can always comfort yourself in knowing that in your worst lesson no one died. Well, I came pretty close.
2007-08-17 @ 10:46