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.