I’m not overly impressed with my year tens at the moment, or at least four or five of them who aren’t exactly behaving like the mature young adults they like to think themselves. In particular there’s a group of ridiculous girls who can’t believe it when I tell them off for things like being five minutes late or constantly talking or brazenly playing with their phones. How dare I ask them to be quiet when clearly there are far more important things going on like make-up and boys?

For instance the five minutes late girl tried to excuse it by saying she had to go see someone about a fight. I presumed she meant talk to a teacher, but no, apparently GBH isn’t really an issue the school needs to worry about and her mate in year eleven was much more important to talk to. How stupid of me.

Or the girl who was ‘just looking’ at her phone and not reading text messages. The pupils don’t understand that it’s actually quite easy to see under desks from the front of the classroom; you get a really good line of sight. They must reckon there’s some kind of invisibility shield underneath school desks that means the normal laws of physics don’t apply. It’s kind of amusing really.

My ‘favourite’ though is the girl who seems to collect issues as though they were for some bizarre sticker album. You can trade in ‘boy trouble’ for two spots on the chin and a slash of the wrists. When you complete it you have to attempt suicide. Today’s issue seemed to centre round some boy ignoring her calls. As far as I could work out the poor deluded girl couldn’t understand why. Quite how I managed to avoid pointing out that it might have something to do with her being fat, ugly and having a personality that would make Genghis Khan seem outgoing ranks up there with the disappearance of Lord Lucan and the ongoing popularity of ‘I’m a celebrity get me out of here’ in terms of the great mysteries of the modern world.

If every teenager threw down their pen and didn’t do any work every time they had the slightest bit of heartache they’d never do any work. Actually, that might explain a lot.