In PSHE today we were doing about seatbelts, why you need to wear them and so on. I showed the pupils a video of an advert that was on television a few years back. It starts with a woman driving a car with her kids in the back and the narrative goes something like 'Like most victim Julie knew her killer...' After a bit of justified paranoia about a white van behind being driven like all white vans are driven - three inches from the car in front - she crashes and her head gets smashed by her son who is thrown forward because he's the dopey sort and hasn't got his seatbelt on.

I got the pupils to write a newspaper article about seatbelts. I suggested they used the advert as though it were an actual story and base their work around it. So they wrote about Julie, but they struggled to think of a surname. It's hard to think of random names, there's always going to be some reason for picking a name. Some played it safe and stuck with 'Smith' but others were more adventurous and so we ended up with three articles about the tragic death of actress Julie Walters. I couldn't help but laugh and had to apologise to them and explain.

They thought the name sounded familiar.

I love this job sometimes.

There are many times in life when someone says something and you think of the perfect comeback. Two hours later.

In teaching it's the opposite problem. You can have the perfect put down but can't use it because it wouldn't be 'professional'. I was teaching my year eights about factorising expressions (a.k.a putting expressions into brackets) and a generally quite irritating boy complains about it having a fancy name: 'why don't we just call it "putting it into brackets?" It's just confusing' I came so close to saying 'why don't we ignore your name and just call you "that annoying boy who can't shut up for ten seconds?"'

I don't mind my pupils asking questions, they do come up with some good ones, but this boy does so with such monotonous repitition that I having the sneaking suspsicion that he's only asking to be a pain.