For the past three weeks I've been taken for cover last thing on a Friday. I'm beginning to wonder what I've done to offend someone in the office. Whatever it is, I'm so sorry and promise I'll never do it again. I think a box chocolates might be in order to sweeten them up a bit.

The first of these covers was a bottom set year eleven, the one I had last week was an annoying bunch of year nines. This week I had the year eleven set just above the one I'd had two weeks previously. Five minutes into the lesson and there's only half a class there. I was kind of hoping the rest wouldn't bother showing up. A couple of minutes later and there's a mass of noise and hair-pulling as two teenage girls tore each other to shreds. It was horrifying. If you've ever seen the film Mean Girls (and why would you want to?) think of the wild-animal nightmare visions Cady has and then double it. Scary.

Over the course of the next ten minutes the rest of the class I'm covering arrives in dribs and drabs. It turns out that the street-fighters were from the bottom set I'd covered before. Thank god I'm not taking them this week.

And you know what. The lesson was really calm. My attitude to covering low ability year elevens on Friday afternoons is that they don't want to do any work and I don't want to make them. It works quite well. Of course they could still cause problems by kicking up a fuss and deliberately trying to piss you off, but for some reason the type of girls who end up in bottom set maths groups seem to think I'm sweet and usually end up telling off anyone who gives me even the slightest bit of hassle. Sorted. I wouldn't actively try to charm anyone round because there's nothing worse than a teacher trying to be 'down with the kids' and it could spectacularly backfire, but it's nice when it works out that way without having to try.