One of the best things about teaching is working with children who say the silliest things. Each term we get a magazine from the council to give our pupils. One of the boys asks me 'why does it only say when they're doing it for girls but not for boys'

'Because you don't have a cervix'

'Oh'

I did a little research about the jab as I was unsure how it actually worked. The idea behind it is to prevent women from contracting a particular STI that can cause the cancer. Interestingly there's an argument that men should have the jab aswell as that would help to stop the spread of the infection, so perhaps the boy wasn't that far from the mark afterall. It might turn out that the past two years he's been in my forms he's only been pretending to be terrifyingly dopey and is actually a master spy with a growth-disorder.

I'd find that hard to believe though. On a not completely unrelated topic when Jade Goody died he said that he wasn't sad about it because she was racist and had been nasty to 'that woman' on Big Brother. I was impressed with his moral fibre on the subject but he ruined it seconds later. He asked me what her name was and when I told him it was Shilpa Shetty he started giggling because apparently her name sounds really funny. I think we have some PSHE work to do there.

I was having an interesting conversation about racism with my year tens. They were calling one of their class 'Polish'. I questioned why they were doing this. One response was that he looked like a Polish boy in year nine, which probably makes it not racist. Another was that he has a 'Jew nose', which I guess is technically anti-Semitic and ill-informed rather than racist but definitely not the sort of thing they should be saying.

One of the girls joined in the conversation by asking if she called Paul black, would it be racist. Paul's very white so I suggested it wouldn't be racist, just a bit thick.