It Shouldn't Happen to a Teacher

Today was the first of two-consecutive INSET days. Tomorrow I'm off to another school nearby but today was a home encounter with no particular plan of action. Normally there are at least a few meetings to pad the day out but the only thing on the agenda was performance management interviews. These take about fifteen minutes, leaving around six hours to kill by tidying and sorting.

I decided to give my room a good clean and brought in a bucket and some flash. I've never seen so much dust in my whole life. There were some corners of the room where the it was so thick that I swear the dust was actually older than me. It can't have been cleaned in years.

It took a lot of sweat and elbow grease so rest assured that I'm nto abouot to give up teaching to become a cleaner. It's sort of thing isn't going to impact massively upon the learning in my classroom but it makes me feel much better that my classroom is now a little less like someone's dusty old loft.

I made a hugely emabarrassing gaff yesterday. At the end of the last lesson Bert, a year eleven 'character', came into my room with one of his pals in tow, not a boy I recognised but there are plenty of pupils at our school. He claimed to have an after-school detention in my room. Seeing how I've had several run-ins with him before I thought he was talking crap, in all honesty it's the sort of thing he'd think was funny so I told him to clear off.

Ten minutes later and he's been escorted to my classroom by an assistant head. Whoops. I confess my error to a colleague who tells me that she'd just made an embarrassing mistake too. Pupils are supposed to be picked up from their lessons to be taken to detentions: 'I just asked him why he hadn't been picked up for the detention, but only realised after I'd said it that Bobby Football [new PE teacher] was stood with him.'

I groan in the realisation that I'd made an even bigger mistake by telling another teacher to leave my room under the presumption he was a teenage boy. It's not my fault though. I mean, I look young but this guy looks pubescent.

I later explain what had happened to the assistant head. 'I wondered why Bert said you we an idiot' he says.

Sounds about right.