It Shouldn't Happen to a Teacher

Occasionally on INSET days we are required to go off-site to another school. This can either be an exciting opportunity to meet other maths teachers, to exchange ideas and learn about new innovations in teaching. One such INSET is approaching in a month or so but unfortunately the majority of teachers in our department have the same level of motivation towards the idea as my year nines have for simplifying ratios.

Thus I was nominated to go on account of my 'being good at feeding back on things'. It's safe to say that this is the first time anyone has ever described me as having this quality and it falls in line with such compliments as: 'you're really good at washing up', 'you're good at being the designated driver' or 'you'd make a really good human sacrifice'. In short if you don't want to do something make out that the person sat next to you is really good at it and they'll get lumbered with the job.

I was in the middle of explaining some quite difficult work on indices to my year tens. They were focused and keen to learn and I was trying my best to get it across, making sure I was patient if they struggled.

Suddenly the door swings open and in comes the Head of Science with a boy from my form behind him. Why had he dragged this boy to see me? Had he tried to singe a girl's hair with a bunsen burner? Had he called his teacher a wanker? Had he blown up a science lab? If so then I'd certainly want to know, but there's a time and a place. We even have a system of PINs (Pupil Information Notes) to inform tutors of any misdemeanors. However it was none of these things:

'Do you know this boy?'

Well, yes of course I did. I would imagine the Head of Science was intelligent enough to ask the child whose form he was in rather than taking him round every classroom in turn until he found his tutor.

'He hasn't go a pen, I thought I'd bring him up here to save writing a PIN.'

At this point I look around the room for a hidden camera, wondering if this was some sort of set-up. No one jumps out from underneath a desk. None of my pupils zip back their skin to reveal themselves as TV presenters. It genuinely was a case of someone interupting my lesson to tell me that someone in my form hasn't got a pen.

I am then left in peace to get on with teaching a class who looked as bemused as I did.

In order for the timetables to work I teach a year nine class once every two weeks. My first meeting with them came on Thursday and it didn't go well.

Firstly it was extremely hard work to get them sat in their correct places. I had a seating plan their regular teacher uses and wanted them to stick to it. They did not do this well, lied about their names and were generally useless. Whilst using every trick in the classroom management handbook to get one boy to sit in his correct place another boy decided to start banging his hands on the table. This spread like wildfire around the room.

In these kind of situations you can either plough on on your own or get back up. It's always preferable if you can sort things out for yourself but it's better to get help before anyone dies. I metaphorically kicked the percussionist into the corridor and got a more experienced member of the department to help me out. She glowered and nagged at them. She'd taught some of them before so was able to shame them into submission.

Thankfully this had the desired effect and we were able to get on with the lesson, even meeting our learning objectives. It was a stressful experience though and I was actually sweating.

When lesson go wrong you sometimes wonder to yourself if you could have done things better. Did you deal with certain situations in the correct manner? Was the lesson actually good enough to stop the pupils from straying off-task? Was I in a bad mood for some reason? I try to be sympathetic and respectful towards my pupils because there are times when they find it genuinely difficult to behave and it's not their fault.

Sometimes though they're just being little shits.

I seem to be blessed with some fantastic pupils this year. There will always be a few 'characters' that make life hard work, but for the most part my classes seem plain nice.

Yesterday one of my year nines stopped back at the end of the lesson to show me a card trick. Impressively I have no idea how he did it as normally pupils' magic tricks are as transparent as glass. He then asked when his next maths lesson was and was genuinely disappointed to find out it wasn't until Thursday.

My year sevens this morning were asking for more homework, because apparently it's fun. I love it when my pupils haven't had all their enthusiasm and desire to learn crushed out of them.

My other year seven class were absolutely magic this afternoon. They were so enthusiastic and were enjoying their work. This then makes me happy and I enjoy teaching them more, which in turn means I'm teaching them better, so they enjoy it even more. Lessons like that just fly by.

This really is a great job sometimes.

It's not nice to make fun of pupils work, but some of the things they come out with are rather amusing. During registration yesterday I showed them pictures of twenty famous people. After this had finished they had to write down all the ones they could remember. There were countless misspellings, which is understandable: I think each pupil spelt Rihanna differently.

However what really tickled me was that it was as though they were living in some strange parallel universe where:

We could be on the verge of the first Irish US President: Barack O'Barma

Big Brother is presented by a psychic: Diviner McCoil

Meeting a new class is a stressul experience. Especially when your new year tens arrive and you find that they're all about six foot tall and tower over you. It's quite intimidating standing in the doorway of a classroom and finding yourself crowded by thirty one not very small children. Last year my year ten class was mostly girls and as a rule they weren't especially tall so it was a bit of a shock to the system.

I definitely felt very nervous as I made my introductions, I could see all these eyes looking back at me and I was terrified that I had some food on my top lip or had accidentally put on make-up in the morning. Though several of the pupils in the class have seen me in make-up anyway, but that's another story.

I prefer to plan very simple lessons when I first teach a class. I know some teachers pull out all the stops for a spectacular hour of learning related fun but I simply don't have the confidence for that yet. So I make sure it's something the pupils will be able to do well and then heap on the praise when they get it right. I'm determined this year to use praise on positivity as the basis of my classroom management. My preparation for this over the summer involved watching lots of Sue Cowley's videos on Teachers TV. The problem with this is that I think I've internalised her. I found myself saying things today in the same intenation that she does on some of the clips. It was rather unnerving.

Things actually went quite well with my new year tens, though it probably helped that it was the first lesson of the day. They're a top set too, though that hasn't helped in the past seeing as my least favourite class last year was in fact a top set. Fingers crossed that we can build on this though.

Finally, after what seems like an eternity we’re back teaching again. I say teaching, though in all honesty I’m not sure how much maths my pupils learnt today given that the first lesson with each class is usually taken up with what I’d describe as bits and bobs. There’s books to hand out, expectations to set, pupils to find after they’ve inadvertently gone to the wrong classroom. It all adds up and I tend to err on the side of caution with my objectives anyway. I’d rather the work be too easy than too hard in the first lesson because at least then they’ll get used to working in lessons rather than being sat there with their hands pointing at the ceiling. However I must stress that this isn’t an approach I take to every lesson, it’s just better to get things rolling at the start.

Only the year sevens were in first lesson, with other years going to their form rooms for period two. Seeing as my form are now year eight I had an extra free to waste. I wish we could save our frees for the middle of the year. They’re not that significant at the beginning and end.

Notably my form seemed to be noisier than ever, but I may just be suffering a bout of amnesia. It was nice to see them again though. All the girls seemed to have had haircuts, with bobs clearly being the ‘in’ thing. There was also a new girl who I had no idea would be there. Thanks for the warning guys. She’s come from our local rival school so it feels like we’ve dragged her away from the dark side.

My first proper lesson was period three with my now year elevens, as with my form it was nice to see them again. They looked very brown compared to how they’d looked in the English rain last July. Because they’re all fifteen, and probably sixteen in some cases I abandoned my seating plan with them. It seemed a bit contradictory to expect them to behave like young adults but then tell them where they can and can’t sit. This coupled with my renewed determination to be positive meant it was one of the quickest hours I’ve ever spent in the classroom. The pupils seemed to be happy too even though it was a fairly uninspiring lesson. It’s amazing the effect a bit of positivity has. It actually led to suggestion that’ I’d got some ‘summer lovin’ over the holidays.

Sadly this isn’t true.

During the rest of the day I bumped into numerous pupils I’d come across in previous years. I came across some girls I’d taught as year nines last year. They asked if I’d missed them, I of course replied that I had. And in this case it’s actually true. Partly because they’re nice, hard-working children, but also because the last time I saw them they gave me some beer.

Last lesson I met my top set year seven. They seem to be the brothers and sisters of my last year’s year eights. This doesn’t bode well considering all the hassle they gave me but there seems to be some likeable characters in the group. I hope it won’t be a case of history repeating itself.

I’m really glad we’ve got started again. Tomorrow I meet the rest of my new classes, including a low ability year nine group that I’m eying a little warily. Things could get rather interesting.

As with all new school years we kicked off with an INSET day. Unlike previous occasions where there seemed to be all the time in the world to ease in to things, today seemed jam packed and left me feeling exhausted. Just wait until the pupils are in tomorrow.

I'm very excited about the new year though. I'm in a much calmer, more confident mood than twelve months ago. Partly due the extra experience, partly due to knowing my way around the school better and partly due to the fact that this time last year I was struggling to get over a crush on one of the English teachers. She's now left for another school, which I assure you is completely unrelated news. This is good for me as when someone rejects you you'd rather not have to see them every day and then you can just pretend they don't exist. Which is easy to do if they're not around, just so long as people don't talk about them either.

Just ten minutes after arriving in school I was showing a colleague some of the displays in my room. 'You know,' he says 'that's similar to the sort of display Miss English [my former crush] had.' I'm glad he was looking intently at the displays as my expression could have been described as 'looking daggers'. There's just no escape.

The first meeting of the day was a rather droll affair discussing the exam results. Though not after we'd gotten through some extra bits of information such as extra meetings going on and, oh, by the way Miss English has crashed another car. I'm not sure how this fits in with pretending someone doesn't exist.

During the meeting itself I struggled to keep my eyes open. In spite of the fact that as a school we did very well the Head seemed rather negative about everything. Perhaps she was grumpy about a new term, or perhaps she was annoyed because normally we have tea and cookies at the start of an INSET, but because a freezer had broken we were without the cookies. She also reckons that Ofsted will pay us a visit in the summer term, which put the fear of God in me.

I didn't enjoy the meeting.

The next meeting was to do with the role of the tutor, I'm struggling to remember much from it even though it was only nine hours ago. All I can remember is that the Deputy Head who was doing the first part of the meeting is obsessed with PowerPoint presentations and his final slide actually said 'over to you Bob' as he handed over to a collague taking the rest of the meeting.

After this came lunch, even though you shouldn't expect miracles from what is ultimately a school dinner I was left disappointed. I had cheese and potato pie.

I didn't enjoy lunch.

In the afternoon we had a meeting about Teaching and Learning. I never cease to be amazed during such meetings. We hear all about how we need to inspire and motivate the pupils but I always end up with my eyes shutting on me in the middle of them. I don't think I was a very receptive learner in the afternoon as I was starting to get frustrated at having been in school for six hours without having taught anyone anything. It didn't help that on the Slideshow Presentation there was a sentence talking about 'learning entitlement'. I'm sure the teaching and learning coach at our school is a brilliant teacher and I hope I can be as good (or do I mean oustanding?) as him in the future, but it's almost as if when someone gets into a position of responsibility in education they have to start talking utter bobbins (I heard an English teacher say that word today so it must be okay to use). It's a far cry from my machine gun approach to teaching. All very spectacular, lots of noise and surely with all those bullets they're bound to learn something.

We then had a departmental meeting where our Head of Department congratulated everyone on great results, which cheered me up a little. This was followed by a meeting in the SEN area about two boys starting this year that I will teach. I seem to have quite a few extreme cases this year and I'm looking forward to the challenge. I really want to do well for them and I'll be so annoyed with myself if I get it wrong. One boy has medical problems and during the meeting I heard the words 'incontinence' 'bag' and 'if his button comes out'. I don't know exactly what that means and I don't think I want to find out.

With the meetings over I got down to getting myself and my classroom ready for the new year. I started work on my noticeboard, though am trying not to do too much after I was reminded earlier that it's really my form who are supposed to do all the work. I intend to give them jobs but I'm reluctant to relinquish creative control because they might wreck it.

After ten hours in school walking to and from the dining hall for meetings I went home. The trouble is I feel less prepared than I did at the start of the day, with words like 'learning entitlement' swimming around my brain. I'm now just looking forward to seeing the pupils. Teachers can be so boring sometimes.

With just a few more days before we go back to school I'm busy getting prepared. I'm even trying to get housework jobs done so they're out of the way before we go back. I might try vacuuming the floors seven times and see if that'll mean they won't need doing again until half term.
I'm busy planning lessons of course, desperately trying to make sure those first encounters with my new pupils go spot on. I'm getting notes prepared for my A-Level class. I've been rereading sections of Getting the Buggers to Behave, I've been watching videos on Teachers TV about good classroom management. I so badly want to do a good job. It's becoming something of an obsession, if soemone asked me to name an iconic figure I wouldn't go for John Lennon, Che Guevara or Mahatma Gandhi, I'd name Sue Cowley or John Bayley.

I'm genuinely excited by going back. I had a terrific finale to last year with a fantastic trip to Scotland with a group of year nines, a couple of my pupils bringing some beer into school for me and getting a huge round of applause at Sports Day even though I only came seventh in the staff race.

I can't wait.