Last week I was startled out of my comfortable routine of regular timetabled duties and, in a rather last minute way, had to step into somebody’s place on a course / conference / residential (you decide, I don’t want to be specific). This meant I was to be away from school for a few days, and at what seemed to me to be a very inconvenient time of year. (But then, when would a convenient time of year be? Probably November, when the days may be short but they do tend to drag. Or February, when a few mornings off the ice-scraping battle with the car would be welcome.) However, here I was, ordered away from my classroom and the classes who all seem to be at critical stages of work.
Now, a few days off from the routine of any job should be an excuse to celebrate,
but instead I found myself in a state of panic, and headless chicken syndrome kicked
in. Should I start by clearing my desk, shoving the stacks of folders into the cupboard,
finding each class’s register, sorting out work for the cover teachers, marking all
the work that had been lingering around for too long, or locking away all my important
papers? I was on a time limit here, just a few hours to sort and prepare before the
caretaker appeared menacingly, swinging his big bunch of keys and flicking his eyes
to the watch on his fat wrist every few seconds.
Dashing around the room, and between the photocopier and stock cupboard, I felt like
I was trapped in an episode of Changing Rooms, only this was Changing Teachers, and
the only MDF in sight was Messy Desk Face-lift. But just like the show, I managed to have
everything sorted by zero hour, except in place of a vase of flowers and pebble
arrangement, I left a selection of chalk sticks that I knew I’d never see again,
board rubber (ditto), and neat piles of papers bundled up in elastic bands and
labelled with clear instructions.
A colleague came to admire my desk. We both gazed at it, me with pride gleaming in
my eyes, and him with what I hoped was slight envy and admiration. And then he burst
my bubble, saying, “You do realise that you’ll be lucky if anyone follows your
instructions, don’t you?” I felt my teeth start to gnash slightly, and my fists
began to curl into a clench. I’d just spent hours planning the next few days lesson
by lesson, rewriting my own plans in favour of lessons that could be taken by anyone
used to dealing with kids rather than a subject specialist, and had leant towards
lessons where the kids could just get on with the work rather than needing explanations
and prompting over the normal range of activities we’re expected to include. But I
knew he was right.
How often had I left plans for a day’s lessons, only to return and ask the kids how they got on and hear the same reply: “We had a free lesson. Mr/s So-and-so didn’t tell us to do any work.” And then inevitably one child will hold up a battered photocopy with graffiti all over the back, and say, “S/he gave us some paper to draw on”, and only then will I begin to notice the paper aeroplanes wedged on top of light fittings and littering the bookshelves and tops of cupboards. The very same self-sufficient worksheets I’d dashed off specifically for the cover lesson, whose only purpose had ended up being expensive scrap paper.
So it was with a heavy heart that I left my classroom, wishing I’d had the foresight
to photograph my desk in its pristine ordered state, and looking nostalgically at
the posters pinned carefully to the walls and the books stacked in neat piles. And
the conclusion of this tale? That I will not know until Monday morning, but at least
I am braced for the worst: a jumble of paperwork that I shall just scoop up and put
in the recycling bin until some poor unfortunate steps out of line and receives my
newly invented penalty of lunchtime paper arranging. I shall assume that the children
have done absolutely nothing for a week, except destroy my wall displays and graffiti
all over the desks. I’ll be ready to chastise my exam classes, who should have known
better than to drive their cover teacher up the wall for an hour at a time at such a
critical stage of their course, and I shall strike out this week from my planning
file with five letters: C-O-V-E-R.
It shouldn’t have to be this way, but I’m used to it by now. Yes, it’s a blow to
lose your free period to cover somebody else’s lesson, but surely it’s easier to
have the class getting on with work that their regular teacher has left than to let
them run riot for the whole period? And as for supply teachers brought in for the day,
curse all of them who hand out ridiculously simple puzzles and colouring pictures
instead of following the plans left for them. All in all, it puts a massive dampener
on any course / conference / residential beano, and is a complete waste of time for
the kids stuck back at school with nothing to do for an hour at a time except get up
to mischief.
added 16/4/05
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