Summary: Some reasons why I shouldn't be sacked.
Now please don't think I'm daft, or that I want to commit career suicide. This is a place for me to rant away to my heart's (and sanity's) content, something to which I believe everybody is entitled. Besides, the clue is in the website's name: this is my place to rant. I generally don't write about all the good stuff that happens, because when that happens I can just bask in the self-satisfied glow of having ended up in a career which has lots of great things going for it.
On the other hand, I'm well aware that the internet is a public forum, and there is no way I would wish to humiliate or embarrass anybody I come into contact with as part of my professional life. I am prone to moments of paranoia: that what I do in my own time, in this case venting my spleen, will affect my professional life, especially when I hear of horror stories about people being sacked because they wrote a whingey website about their job. But I think in those cases the authors weren't at all discreet: in one case I heard, the blogger added a photo of themselves in their uniform - bit of a giveaway really.
I'm content that this site doesn't have millions of visitors per day, and so the likelihood of anyone I work with reading it is very slim indeed. That's the way I like it. That doesn't mean I don't sometimes find myself uttering something and then thinking to myself, "Oh no! Didn't I write something like that on my website?" HOWEVER (and you'll notice the capital letters for emphasis there) to call this a weblog ("diary" in non-geek talk) would be pushing it a bit. Why? Because I don't always record exactly what happened, and I especially don't record events when they happen around corresponding dates. Well not all the time. A bit like Piers Morgan and his recently published diary really. Saying that though, Christmas is pretty much a fixture in the teaching year, for example, so mentioning that tends to be unavoidable.
What I certainly hope is that none of my colleagues or students would ever be able to identify themselves, as that would be very unprofessional of me, and I think I can safely say that details are changed enough to prevent any possible seepage of what's on here into the community of my school. What I can tell you is that some of the staff mentioned on here may actually be a freaky splicing of two or more teachers I have met throughout my career. Sometimes I wait up to a year before posting pages about the things that have happened. But sometimes I don't. Sometimes what I write about happened at another establishment; not that it matters, as a straw poll of five teacher friends convinces me that all schools have variations of the same stereotypes of teacher, and that there's nothing we like more than blaming others, particularly managers, even though we don't really know what it is they do. Unappreciative buggers, aren't we.
I hope that all this disclaiming doesn't detract from your enjoyment though, especially if you like to imagine me suffering amongst the constant barrage of abuse I seem to receive, as some self-perpetuating cycle of revenge for my pessimistic outlook. I don't mean to trick anybody, I merely want to protect others. Okay, back in the box with that halo now.
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