It Shouldn't Happen to a Teacher

I try to find something to like in all my pupils but some of them make it very difficult. There's a girl in my year eleven class who I just cannot get along with.

She had her phone out in today's lesson (not a rarity unfortunately) and when I asked her to hand it over she was argumentative. She'd never get away with impersonating Catherine Tate because she always looks extremely bovvered. She was adament that it was really important to send this particular text. I had to get a little back-up courtesy of an older teacher. This other teacher took her out of my lesson to sort it out and justice was served with her phone (and also her belt) sent up to the Head's secretary's office.

And what was so important that she had to send the text? She'd slept with her friend's boyfriend (at twenty years old he's closer to my age than hers) and was trying to find out if they were still friends. I'm guessing not. What I find utterly baffling is that this guy would want to sleep with her anyway. He has a girlfriend and he's prepared to blow it for someone who is unattractive, unlikeable in the extreme and let's not forget underage.

Equally baffling is why someone would kick up a fuss over having their phone confiscated with parents' evening less than a week away. It's just not good sense.

It's always a little daunting when you have a cover lesson. You never know what the works going to be like, you don't know who's going to be in the class and it's a bit annoying losing your free.

Today I had a cover for a science lesson, which should be good as I got an A* at GCSE in the subject but bad because it was eight years ago. The bizarre thing was that I knew all the pupils anyway, through teaching them either in either year eight, year nine, currently teaching them, because they went to Warhammer club, from year nine camp and even because one of them is friends with some other pupils I used to teach. It was a case of 'I remember you!' over and over. Though not that many times as even though this was a high ability group there was only around fifteen pupils in the class. God knows what we're up to in maths; I have thirtyone in my top sets year tens this year.

Unfortunately the work set was very very very boring and insufficient in quantity to keep the pupils busy for a lesson. I think the normal teacher was at a funeral so I won't complain about it to anyone (but it was bad). I was left to use my charm and good humour to stop them revolting, which seeing as I'm completely lacking in natural charm was hard work. We found a multiple choice Science based game to project from the computer to the board which was enough to keep them occupied. It also brought out the competitive side in myself as I kept shouting to them that it was B and celebrating when I got them right. Quite why I'm so proud of being able to do work intended for fifteen eyar olds I'm not entirely sure, but it was good fun.

It was actually a reasonably nice way to spend an hour because it was a class of nice children, but I hope my next cover lesson has some decent work to go with it.