A few weeks ago in the Maths office we were discussing numerous teachers who were off due to illness or stress or whatever reason. Our head of Department told us all how thankful he was that we all turned up every morning. We all warned him not to jinx us and I bet he's regretting the kiss of death he gave us after today.
One teacher was off sick on Friday and today, another looks like being off all week due to falling off his bike and yet another is having to have a number of lessons off here and there because her husband has had a stroke. We're falling to pieces here.
The knock on effect is that we remaining few are left to pick up some of the slack. Our school is fairly well resourced in terms of cover-supervisors, but we all need to chip in occasionally. This morning I was called upon to cover a year eleven top set, which actually was quite a pleasant experience as I knew some of the kids in the group from a trip to Scotland a couple of years ago and we had a bit of a catch-up. Mainly this was to do with recalling the time I 'fell down a hill', which is a gross exageration as I merely tripped and never broke my crown with Jill tumbling after.
I also managed to greatly embarrass one of the girls in the group. They were working through some questions from a textbook when I spotted her looking in this little booklet. I picked it up to check what it was only to reveal the booklet's title of 'Dealing with Homosexuality'. Very much a case of curiousity killed the cat.
I myself felt a little embarrassed hearing the pupils whinge about their normal teacher, mainly to do with her being a little short with them when they don't understand things. Not that she's a dwarf you understand. Even so it was actually quite nice to teach a different class as you sometimes get a bit tired of the same pupils day in day out. Though I wouldn't complain if their regular teacher was back tomorrow.
