The school day is so frantic there's barely a moment stop and think about what's going on. But in my year seven class today I had one of those mental-kodak moments. They're the best behaved class I teach, probably the best behaved in the school and given my mellow nature possibly even the best behaved class on the planet that aren't afraid to breathe.

I'd spent hours over half-term making a dominos game involving fractions, decimals and percentages and the pupils were playing it. Often when I try something clever the pupils ruin it by throwing the cards or whatever's involved across the room. I end up thinking that my lessons would be brilliant if it weren't for those annoying little children.

Today however it worked perfectly. The pupils got on with it so well and were saying things to each other like: 'ten one hundredths is the same as 0.1 I promise, no really!' instead of 'are you getting pissed tonight?' They worked really enthusiastically and it was awesome.

I paused at the front of the room to drink it in. I was the cause of children enjoying mathematics and it's certainly not everyday you can say that. I'd rate my current mental state as being somewhere between tender and emotional so as I looked across the room at these young minds I was inspiring, I felt everything rising up in me like a flood: the frustration at getting pupils to listen, the difficulty of trying to fit in with the other staff, the occasionally hellish journey to work, all the planning, all the marking and the little things that fill every other moment of the day. Seeing a lesson going so extraordinarily well was fantastic, but I had to quickly snap out of it to avoid an embarrassing, but ever so manly, tear falling down my cheek.

Last Friday's incident involving a pupil filming me on their camera phone has made me a little jumpy. I was walking along the corridor when I saw a flash out of the corner of my eye. Was it a camera wielding youth? I honestly don't know, though the alternatives are few: a torch that's incredibly bright for two milliseconds but then runs out of battery, a tiny little supernova (unlikely), tinkerbell (slightly more unlikely) or the shining brilliance of the pupils (even more unlikely). Probably I'm jumping at shadows, or I suppose technically the opposite, though 'jumping at lights' makes me sound vaguely moth-like.

Lately my lessons have seemed much calmer. I'm not entirely sure why as if anything I feel a little jaded. Idiot children with camera-phones, a bit of a cold, a slightly bruised if not exactly broken heart, general tiredness from working too hard and a touch of the winter blues aren't likely to come up on Family Fortunes under the category 'things that make you teach better' but they seem to be having that effect. Perhaps my hyperactive bouncy enthusiasm is too much and I need bringing down a bit to avoid winding the kids up into a frenzy. In future I may have to put matchsticks under my eyes so I stay tired, jump in the shower fully clothed and then go for a walk, and avoid sun-light at all costs.

Put that in your training manual.