I played a game of twenty questions with my form this morning. I told them I was thinking of a place and away we went. It started well enough:
'Is it a country?'
'Is it in the north?'
'Is it a town?'

But it went downhill from there:
'Is it Liverpool?' no Liverpool's a city
'Oh, is it Manchester?' no that's another city
'Is it Chesterfield?'
'Is it Leeds?'
'Is it Liverpool?'
'Is it Macclesfield?'
'Is it in America?' no
'Is it New York?'
'Is it Liverpool?'
'Do they have a football team?' yes
'Are they in the Premiership?' no
'Is it Newcastle?'
'Is it West Ham United?' no it's a place
'Is it Liverpool?'

I think it took about thirty-six questions before they got it and only after I'd given them a massive hint that their football team had recently caused an upset in the FA cup and that it rhymes with garnsley.

The pupils' reactions to the earthquake were varying degrees of bizarre, inaccurate and downright ridiculous. Rather predictably some decided that it would be fun to 'recreate' the quake by shaking their desks about. Indeed, by period 5 it had gotten rather dull.

Some are still anticipating an aftershock and I think will do until we next experience an earthquake at which point they'll turn round say 'told you so'.

Many said that their cats and dogs were running around all crazy just before the earthquake hit - animals: alwasy the first to know.

One boy was puzzled why his mother had rung his gran to check if she'd experienced the earthquake. When telling the story he laughed at his mother's idiocy and said 'it's the whole world that shakes'. I'll leave that one to the geography teachers to sort out.

A girl had said that she thought it was her cats running around the house, another's mum had thought a lorry had crashed into their house. Though given my own initial reaction that my washing machine had blown up I'd better not lord it over them too much.

I've only been back at school two days and I'm already feeling frazzled. I've had comments about my haircut, I've been asked if I whiten my teeth, asked if I smoke (I don't), asked if I'm sure I don't smoke because I smell of it (I really don't - perhaps it was just steam coming out of my ears), I've had my hair ruffled and have generally been run off my feet.

Somehow I'd forgotten that it's not all plain sailing in the classroom.

One of my form turned up yesterday wearing a 'fancy' belt. We don't have a strict guideline on the maximum thickness of belts but if it looks remotely fashionable then it's probably not allowed. What I don't understand is these wide belts. I'm not an expert on such things so stand to be corrected but as far as I can tell they don't actually have the property of holding up trousers as they don't appear to be connected to anything. But if a girl says their trousers will fall down without it then it's not something I'm willing to put to the test. Answers on a postcard please.

Yesterday we had a training day about Special Education Needs. Part of this involved a talk by an outside speaker but there were also several workshops. The one I attended was called 'a mile in their shoes', the basic premise being that we got to suffer being dyslexic for an hour by writing with our left hands, covering our rights eyes and wearing rubber gloves coated with vaseline.

When I heard about this on Thursday I was geuninely excited about the whole idea of the session, it's always much better to actually be doing something than just sat there listening. But there was so much innuendo about gloves and vaseline. Frankly it went completely above my head, and people even took my enthusiasm as being innuendo in itself, when in reality I'm far too innocent to have a clue what anyone was on about.

The whole experience was incredibly frustrating, which was the whole point. I struggled to write anything remotely legible and took ages to write each word, even though I was trying my very best. I'll certainly have more sympathy for the pupils when it looks as though a drunken spider has crawled across their page.

We had a non-uniform day recently and as usual we got the full range of the latest trends. There are several categories of clothing that the pupils wear. Boys, regardless of age or peer group, will wear hoodies, something with stripes or some combination of the two. This will always be accompanied by jeans, which means they dress pretty much the same way as I do. Girls clearly spend more time thinking about it and will wear a wide variety of attire. Mostly this will involve something furry/fluffy. This is usually hoods, cuffs, boots and belts. They stop short of wearing fluffy dice as earrings though. Just. I think fluff must be the new bling, though I'm never sure if bling is supposed to be cool or not anyway. Whatever, it's quite sweet really.

I always think it makes the kids look younger than they do when they're in the school uniform. Which is nice because I feel all grown up in comparison, even if on these days I actually look like a sixth former. Unfortunately there's always a few of the older girls who confuse non-unform days with 'wear as little as possible' days. It's a bit gross really, and it's funny how it's the, er, attractively-challenged ones who feel the need to do this. I overheard one girl telling a boy in her class that her face was 'up here'. Poor lad was probably trying to look anywhere but.

It's odd in a way because these same girls are the ones we spend the rest of the time constantly telling off for wearing non-uniform tops. You'd think they'd use the opportunity to wear as many of these as possible. Strange how it doesn't work like that.

Working in a school is always high-drama. Adolescents have a habit of making the world seem like a theatre production for the hard of hearing. Full of drama and way too much shouting. In part it must come from watching too much Eastenders, the kids can't imagine life without the occasional row or scandal. So during a lesson it was weird to hear the phrase 'off the scale' in the context of graphs and not refering to some atrocious act committed by a boyfriend or the amount of fags smoked at breaktime.