Teenagers these days know their rights. Which most of the time is a good thing. You wouldn’t want teachers going around punching pupils in the face or copping a quick feel, it’s just not on.

Unfortunately they seem to ‘know’ some rights that don’t exist. Such as apparently the UN charter contains an article about going to the toilet or that you have the right to eat non-stop – if you don’t you will certainly starve to death. On Wednesday one of my year elevens turned up a full twenty minutes late. His excuse was that he’d gone home for lunch and had burnt his pizza, so had to cook another one, ‘would you rather I starved sir?’ I really wish my pupils wouldn’t ask me rhetorical questions as they expose me to such temptation. I could have said any number of things: ‘you must weigh around fifteen stone so I think that’d be unlikely’, ‘I didn’t know you were at death’s door, have the money I was going to donate to Comic Relief’, ‘you could stand to lose the weight’ or simply ‘yes’.

One of my year tens has a lawyer-like comeback for everything. It’s odd as he rarely does anything wrong himself. I admire his spirit and willingness to fight for justice on the behalf of others but most of the time he talks complete bulls***. I’d confiscated some make-up off one of the girls and said I’d give her it back the next day when she brought me the work she’d failed to complete in the lesson. He claimed that I could only keep it if she’d had it out five times, it was the week of a full moon and I hopped to Glasgow and back, or some other such nonsense. I wonder where they get that kind of rubbish from. I’m not even sure we can legally take anything but given that I rang her parents I could actually do pretty much what I wanted with the make-up, as long as they were okay with it. They were.

The same boy once told me that I should let a girl keep her hoodie on as there was a petition going round to allow them, until that had been resolved they shouldn’t be removed. By that logic I could start a petition saying that my pupils have to pay me a pound every time they talk crap and I’d end up a millionaire.