It Shouldn't Happen to a Teacher

Year 7 camp takes place at the end of June and everything is being planned out. Two girls in my form asked if there would be anywhere to plug in hair straighteners. I know it's only a camp for twelve year olds and it's not like we're heading out into a forest and surving by eating moss and slugs but they're not really getting into the Ray Mears spirit of things.

There probably is somewhere to plug them in because we have a little building for cooking and eating. In fact I heard that one of the art teachers took some hair straighteners themselves last year, but no way am I having my form preening themselves each morning. I'm desperate to win the interform challenge but I'm fairly certain the pupils' appearance doesn't count for points. We'll be going down a cave so I think a torch and some sturdy shoes or boots would be of much greater use.

I was thinking about getting an air horn and blasting it at 6am each morning, but I imagine the kids will all be up before me anyway. If they ever go to sleep at all that is.

It was my last lesson with my year elevens yesterday. We've had our ups and downs but I'm going to miss them. And in all fairness it's been mostly ups, I managed my only 'outstanding' lesson of my NQT year with them and I do actually quite like most of the class.

There are a few 'characters' of course. It was a non-uniform day so I was in jeans and a hoodie. One boy was comparing how much his clothes cost compared to mine, his were more expensive by quite a margin. He was inordinately proud of this until I asked how much his car cost ('oh that's right you're only sixteen so can't drive yet!') and whether his mummy tucked him in at night. The rest of the class - all eight of them who had managed to turn up - greatly enjoyed the spectacle. The term they used was that I'd 'owned' him, in which case I'd like my money back. It was only a bit of harmless banter but it was good fun all the same. He even resorted to calling my car crap - which is true I suppose - so I just jibed him for getting so desperate that he was having to swear. There's so many occasions where pupils say thyings that you have the perfect comeback/put-down for but have to hold back in the interests of professionalism. But in the last lesson with year eleven I wasn't going to take any prisoners.

A number of the girls had little notebooks for people to sign. One nice girl who's been brilliant to teach and one who I've constantly fallen out with. They asked me and it was hard to think of what to put. I was tempted to google for snappy phrases, a trick I used recently when writing a note on a wedding present. It'll be fine as long as noone else has the same idea. In the end I came up with something about how much I'd enjoyed teaching the nice one, wishing her good luck for the future and how much she deserved a great one. For the not-so-nice one I put some fairly meaningless 'good luck' statement.

Apparently most of the year group was going up this big hill near the school to get very drunk. I wonder how many will be requiring a morning-after pill right now.

Whilst they were supposed to be adding fractions a year ten came up with a rap about me:

Mr xxxx is really cool
He makes all the girlies drool
He's got really spikey hair
You never know when he's there

I think they were getting desperate by the last line. It's a reference to the fact that I'm not very tall, but seeing as the singer/songwriter is pushing on about five foot it's a little harsh.

I must be getting old; I have no idea what my pupils are saying. The word I've come across recently is 'braaap' (prounced brap in spite of all those As) and I have absolutely no idea what it means. I got one of my pupils to explain it to me but I'm still none the wiser. Quite possibly because I wasn't really paying attention seeing as my interest was on a par with that of a thriteen year old finding out how to solve equations, but it might also be that the concept of braaapness is beyond my twentyfour year old brain.

I think braaap might be the new cool. Maybe being cool isn't cool anymore. Except if cool isn't cool anymore then it must be cool to be cool anyway because for something to be cool in the new meaning of the word it isn't cool in the old meaning and the new meaning of cool definitely isn't cool in the old meaning so must be cool in the new meaning, therefore it's still cool to be cool.

What I really mean is that it's not braaap to be cool.

I think.

There are days in teaching when everything seems so relaxed, they're called INSET days and there are no pupils around to ruin the calm. Joking aside, life in the classroom can be very chilled out at times. On Friday I took my year nines into the computer room to play on some maths games on the internet. As if I was going to make them do lots of hard work on a sunny Friday afternoon just after the SATs. I think it's important to have the occasional lesson where you just take it easy, and it makes it so much harder for them to get in trouble (easily done on a Friday afternoon) when they're not being nagged into solving equations. Just so long as you find something to engage them and keep them occupied.

It was nice to have a bit of a laugh and a joke with them. 'Sir are you going to the fair tonight?' 'No because you'll be there'. I love taking the piss out of my pupils, it's great fun. One pupil suggested that I wouldn't be allowed to go to the fair anyway because that would make me a paedophile. I think that might be a little over the top. Suggesting that any adult that goes to a fair is a pervert is the sort of paranoia that you might find the in the News of the World. Curiously it's the same reason my year elevens thought I wouldn't add them as friends on Facebook. That and I just don't like them.

Actually I do quite like them and will miss them when they go. They're sort of on the right track because I'm sure there's some rule about contacting pupils out of school, though I'd be concerned about any teacher who the only reason for not wanting teenagers as friends on facebook is because there's a rule against it. Personally I wouldn't want sixteen year olds writing in txtspk on my wall anyway.

Back to my year nine lesson. It was a nice bit of revenge on the science department. We have year nine last thing on a Wednesday afternoon just after science. They always come to us as high as kites. I think they must do experiments with chemicals or just load them up with sweets. The head of science is always annoyed that the maths results are better than science's so perhaps it's a cunning ploy to gain an advantage. On Friday they had science immediately following my lesson so good luck to anyone who was trying to get them working hard after they'd had such a relaxed time period four.

I was free last so had a nice easy time of it before going to Warhammer Club later. It's a hard club to run not because of anything to do with the club itself but because of the way the other pupils see it. Whilst I'm not concerned about kids thinking I'm a geek I do have to defend it for the sake of the pupils who go. It would be so easy to distance myself from it as until they asked me to run it my models had been sitting in the loft gathering dust, but I owe it to the members to take any flak for it and to get properly involved. On Friday I had a battle against the top dog in the club and managed a creditable draw. It's sad how happy I was about drawing, not even winning, a game of Warhammer with a thirteen year old.

On my way home I came across a colleague who had stopped by the side of the road. She's got a reputation for bad luck with cars so I wondered what it was this time and stopped. She'd only run out a petrol so rather than being sympathetic I just called her a muppet. Her brother was already there and had got some petrol for her. Later she sent me a text thanking me for being a good friend. Which was great seeing as I hadn't even had to do anything. I like getting thanks for nothing.

Each year seven form has a log book. In it their teachers write a comment for each lesson along with a mark out of five for how well they settled, how well they listened and for general work and behaviour.

Last week ours went missing and by this Thursday it hadn't turned up. Seeing as the marks the pupils get count towards the interform challenge we were seriously missing out and I was in danger of losing my bet that my class would beat the forms of two other teachers.

During my PPA (Planning and Pissing About) time on Thursday some year nines came in. They were looking for places to film their media project in English apparently, though it came across more like they'd just come along to my room for a chat. To be honest I didn't really mind as I was bored and they're nice girls, even if one did freak me out the other day by showing me a picture of her sunburn.

Sunburn girl asked if my form had lost their log book. She'd seen it in a science classroom, she even went to get it for me and soon I was reuntied with the book that will hopefully earn me twenty quid. Though I am suspicious that she'd stolen it and brought it back just so I'd be grateful enough to give her merits or write a good report at the end of the year. I am being exceptionally paranoid there but if that was her plan then it's a succesful one.

My favourite part about the story is that she helped me and my form out during a lesson with the English teacher I have that bet with. Deserves her right for letting her pupils roam the corridors during lesson time.

My form had their trip to the local library - or librarary as year sevens pronounce it, in all fairness it is the word in the English language that would win a 'things that sound like you'd find them in the woods but actually wouldn't' competition - this afternoon and I was fortunate enough to go with them.

I'm proud to say they behaved themselves very well, though during their introductory talk when asked what they might expect to find in the library the first reponse was playstation games. Which is true enough but as word association goes library to playstation is a little unusual. I suppose to many eleven year old boys the word playstation could be associated with anything. Football... playstation. Car... playstation. Turnips... playstation. When asked if they had any questions they were interested if the library had any wii games.

I was also impressed with the drivers around our school. On our way from school to the library lots of people stopped to let us cross roads. It was as though I was holding an invisible lollipop. Thankfully with my form behaving so splendidly we probably gave a very good impression of the school too. It was a nice way to spend the afternoon.

I saw one of my year nines topless today.

I should probably explain...

She was just showing me her sunburn on her back

I should probably continuing explaining...

During their lesson this morning she was telling me how burnt she'd got at the weekend and offered to show me the picture of her back. Too much skin makes me uncomfortable, generally I mean. I'm practically asexual. I'd fit in perfectly in the 1920s. I'm not convinced schoolgirls should even be allowed to wear short sleeves so I definitely could have done without having any pictures thrust in my face. I pleaded that I'd go blind if she showed me but it was too late and before I knew it she'd whipped her phone out and I was looking a picture of a very red back with my face turning a matching colour. I'm going to have nightmares tonight.

Nevermind the fact that she had her phone out in class. I could hardly confiscate it anyway. We have to log what the pupils were doing with phones - whether it buzzed or whether they were texting, that sort of thing - and I don't think putting 'she showed me a picture on her phone of herself wearing very little so I took it off her' would sound very good.

I know that I'm a little prudish so that skews my views on such things but I do hope she learns that it's not a smart thing to show such pictures of yourself to any male under the age of, I don't know, fifty. On the other hand I suppose I should take it as a compliment that my pupils feel so much at ease with me, as though I'm a kind of benevolent Uncle. It's just it's a role I don't particularly want, especially if I have to gouge my eyes out afterwards.

Apparently my year tens have come across my younger brother working in the school. I do have a brother but he isn't younger than me and seeing as he has a successful career as a joiner I find it hard to imagine him doing a bit of moonlighting as a teacher.

Seeing as I'm something like the third youngest teacher in the school anyway I was slightly shocked by the comment. My younger brother, what were they trying to say? This follows on from Wednesday afternoon when one of my year nines said that I had some grey hairs. Mayeb the stress of teaching is beginning to tell on my youthful appearrance. In any case it was a bit rich as she needs to sort her roots out - though I came to the conclusion that I should keep this thoguht to myself as making a fourteen year old cry would be a little on the harsh side.

Anyway, my 'younger brother' is an art student-teacher who they think looks like me (he doesn't) and the reason for them thinking of him as being a younger version of me is because he uses words like 'yo', 'dudes' and 'sup'. I would imagine if I did that my pupils would tear me to shreds. So he's the hip young one, wheras I'm the geeky older one. Which is a state of affairs that's fine by me.

It's important to develop a good relationship with the pupils, for the most part I think I do quite well. There's times when I get things horribly wrong and there's some pupils out there who I don't think would piss on me if I were on fire but I get on well with the majority of the kids. I'm always careful though because it's a dangerous game trying to be 'down with the kids'. I think if you tried to hard to get along with them the pupils would smell a rat and it could backfire spectacularly. I think most pupils like their teachers to be a bit on the geeky side, that's more like the natural order of things.

I'd taken my year sevens outside for a lesson on symmetry on Thursday. It had gone well with the pupils being interested in the work and actually learning from it.

On Friday morning in briefing the head gave a message saying that we shouldn't take classes outside for sunbathing. Some teachers had moaned that it was undermining serious work and that it should be business as usual even after key stage three had finished their exams.

I wasn't the only teacher who'd taken a class outside, my year tens were telling me about doing chalk drawings in art on the dull and dreary paving slabs. I know another maths teacher had done about area, another had done some statistical work looking at different makes of car going past the school.

Heaven forbid we actually inspire our pupils and get them enthused about our subjects. What's the point in doing that when we can get our pupils answering a load of dull questions from a textbook that don't really teach them anything except that maths is boring? I'll bet the teachers who complained are the ones who teach lessons stood at the front with their pupils just writing all lesson and wish we were allowed to cane them. And if lessons can't take place outside then we'd better cancel all PE lessons because the Sports Hall's in use for exams at the moment. Admittedly I'm being slightly fecitious but I'm always getting kids asking what the point of maths is, they seem to have the impression that it only exists in classrooms, so it's very disappointing to be restrained like this when we're actually doing very important work in showing them that maths doesn't vanish when they walk out the door.

If we're going to stop any kind of lesson then we should be looking very carefully at how we use computers. When I've used them in the past I've had kids moaning that I shouldn't be making them do actual work in a computer room. They have the impression that computer rooms are for games and dossing, which is half the reason they like going in there.

The saddest thing is that if a member of senior management walked past my lesson and the kids were all sat quietly working from a book and not really interacting with the maths they'd be happier than seeing them outside enjoying the work.

I'll finish with a special case. In my year sevens there's a boy with mental health problems. He struggles greatly with written work and the fact that he can even make it through a whole one hour lesson is extremely impressive. On Thursday he was working very hard to find examples of symmetry and had built up a good collection of photos on his phone that he showed me at the end. He got many times more out of that lesson than he would have from one inside and he'd actually enjoyed being at school for the right reasons.

So next year if it's hot and sunny I'll conveniently 'forget' this dictat and teach the same lesson again. It'd be worth it.

The warm weather recently is fantastic but it does make for awfully hot classrooms. The same kids who were moaning about it being too cold and wanting to keep their coats on are now complaining that it's too hot to work. Yet strangely the kids who were happy to make do with a jumper when it actually was cold, and so you'd figure are generally warmer than colder, are staying quiet and content. Most peculiar.

The situation isn't helped by the fact that the school heating is on this week to keep the year nines warm who are doing their SATs in the cooler sports hall. Unfortunately that means the heating has to be on everywhere. My room is a furnace.

I took my year sevens out into the school car park this afternoon for a lesson on symmetry, we were looking at hub caps, to escape the heat and get some sun. I got some odd looks from other staff walking, especially as I was getting them to take pictures on their phones. An assistant head came to see what was going on as I think the lesson might have been outside his comfort zone. He actually asked 'and you're allowing them to use their phones?' It'd be a mighty show of defiance from the class to walk out with phones in hand. And having made it that far it be weird for them to congregate in the car park taking pictures of wheels. I cheerfully explained what we were doing and he went away looking somewhere inbetween confused and bemused. Admittedly it was a risky lesson but it was with a class I could trust my life with.

And it's always nice to get some fresh air.

It's strange how big a difference there is between year 10s and year 9s. During my year 10 lesson I heard two boys discussing one of their girlfriends. As in one boy was telling the other about his girlfriend, not that they were discussing some kind of bizarre adolescent version of swinging.

There was a little confusion as to who they were talking about with the one being told initially describing one of my year nines and then calling her 'fit'.

Now it's a bizarre thing but it was like two worlds colliding. I know that there's only one year difference between years 9 and 10, I am a maths teacher after all, but I always think of my year 10s as being much older than my year 9s. I certainly relate to them in a different way. I probably treat my year 9s like kids whereas I tend to see my year 10s as young adults. Yet in some cases there might only be a month or so difference in age.

Anyway, it was a bit of a shock to hear such a comment and I felt a strange sense of something akin to paternal disapproval. Though seeing as I've never felt anything like that before it may just have been hunger. In all fairness I'm not sure who boys in year ten are supposed to go out with. The girls in their year seem to be all going out with 18 year olds, the girls in year 11 go out with people my age, and sixth formers probably go out with pensioners. It's a state of affairs that certainly bugged me when I was fourteen.

As a slight aside from the story I saw a year 11 and a year 8 cuddling in the corridor the other day. Now that's definitely wrong and was extremely disturbing.

But thankfully some kids seem happy to be with someone their own age. The same year nine girl as previously mentioned was telling me later in the day about her friend sat next to her going out with a boy I'd taught last year. And, get this, they'd even kissed at lunchtime. Seeing as they're both lovely kids I made a slightly patronising 'aw bless' kind of noise. Which was promptly copied by the rest of the class and the girl going very red.

It's hard to imagine such a scenario with my year 10s.

Yesterday I had to cover a geography lesson period 5. It was horrible for several reasons, the first being the timing. The second is there there were several what I shall euphamistically call characters in the class. And by virtue of the fact that the class were year 10s and I'd never done a GCSE in geography they actually had a greater education then me in the subject. Added to this the work was dreary and uninspiring and you have a recipe for a nightmare.

I had to take one boy outside because he was being a nuiscane and when I came back in everyone had turned their chairs so that they were sat facing the back of the room. It's such a cliche, doing daft things like that to wind up a cover teacher. So I broke it by smiling at them, because let's be honest it's not a bad gag, and calmly pointing out that every minute they spent facing the wrong way they would make up at the end of the day. They decided that it probably wasn't worth it and moved to face the right way.

It's weird. I struggle alot sometimes with basic things like making sure everyone's listening or getting the pupils to do enough work but when it's the big moments where you could so easily lose it in a massive way and swear at them or run out of the classroom in tears I feel completely serene.

After the chair incident they calmed down because I think they realised that they weren't going to get to me and we cruised through to the end.

It turns out that I look like a character from an American sitcom, according to one of my year tens at least. This sounds like quite a compliment but you have to understand that the character in questions is a geek and in fact the only resemblance I can see is dark hair, glasses and the said geekiness.

The programme is 'The Big Bang Theory' on E4 and is about some nerdy scientist types. The characters are an aspergic genius, an Indian guy who literally (and I mean literally) cannot talk to beautiful women, someone who thinks he's a smooth playa but is actually just creepy. And then there's the main one, Leonard, who's definitely a geek but is the sort of Everyman of the show, or at least as much as it's possible to be whilst talking about solutions that only work for 'spherical chickens in a vacuum'. This is who I'm like apparently. I didn't really mind the comparison seeing as I watch the show myself and happily indulged in a quick chat about it. But...

In the programme there's a gorgeous girl living across the hall from them who predictably Leonard has a crush on. This got my year tens asking if I had a crush on any gorgeous women. Suddenly a nice little chat about a TV was taking a turn into dangerous territory.

'I know!' said one of them, 'It's Miss English'. No, no, no, this is bad. Yes she is gorgeous and yes I did used to have a crush on her and I'd even made the same comparison myself, though in my case I'm one geek surrounded at school by many good looking women rather than the other way round.

Suddenly I went all tense. I told my pupils that it wasn't right for them to make that sort of comment and how it wasn't appropriate etc... Which amazingly they seemed to understand, until one of them chipped in with 'she's going out with Mr Science anyway'.

'No she isn't' I said rather too defensively as I felt a pang of envy rising up even though I knew they were talking crap. Again the pupils picked up on this and I had to cover my tracks by saying that I wasn't happy that they were discussing other members of staff and they should stop.

And for the second time in a matter of a few seconds they bought it and did as I said. I think I actually got away with it somehow and nothing further was said on the topic. Sometimes I wish my year tens were a little bit smarter, this wasn't one of those occasions.

You'd have thought I'd have learnt my lesson too, but in the following lesson when a year eight asked me if I'd watched Heroes the previous night I still talked to them about it. In this case I think I was safe seeing as the worse they could have asked me would be if I could fly, cut my toe off and watch it grow back or stop time. The last of these would have been very useful an hour earlier.

I don't mean to brag, but...

I've just marked the tests my year sevens did this week and found that they've done astonishingly well. They've made fantastic progress from the end of year six and some have even gone from level 4 right up to level 6. You don't need to understand National Curriculum levels to notice that there's a level that's been completely missed there.

There's a serious danger that they're going to show up the set above them. Which would be very satisfying because that class's teacher wanted me to put mine in for a lower paper which would have made it harder for them to achieve the results they did (in fact it would be impossible to get a level 6 because it only goes up to 5). It's not a very becoming quality but I do feel awfully smug about it.

To be honest though it's been so easy to teach them so I think most teachers could have got similar results. Each lesson has been a joy. Their behaviour is perfect and they'll always give the work a go no matter how hard it is. They always seem so cheerful as they come into the classroom. They're prepared to think for themselves and they're just genuinely nice children. I'm thinking about asking the head to come in and congratulate them for being so amazing.

They must be the best class in the world.