1. Every pen, pencil, stick of chalk or paperclip you don’t nail down. If you do nail
them down, the buggers will have the nail too.
2. Your voice, more often than can be good for you.
3. Any shred of dignity you may have had before you joined a profession that requires you to swat bees out of a room whilst glaring menacingly at an overexcited child and trying to unstick your foot from the floor where it has been glued with discarded chewing gum.
4. Most weekends. Saturday is for chores, cleaning, shopping, recovering. Sunday brings with it the dreadful feeling that it’s back to school tomorrow and you have three sets of books to mark, thereby missing the chance to watch the big match / go for a leisurely Sunday lunch at a country pub / chat with visiting relatives / have a normal restful Sunday.
5. The ability to spell properly. Looking at the hundreds of spelling mistakes that
pass through books every week has a negative effect. You suddenly start to see a sort
of logic in the way words are spelt incorrectly, and begin to doubt the validity of
our own very strange spelling rules and exceptions.
6. The art of speaking eloquently using a rich and varied vocabulary. All the clear and simple explanations you are able to turn out at every opportunity come back to haunt you when you try to have a grown-up conversation with somebody (usually a very clever parent or governor who will stare at your simpleton stutterings as you grasp for words of more than two syllables).
7. Friends who get fed up with your term time hibernation.
8. The opportunity to go on a bargain holiday – ever again. Coupled with this is the chance of going on holiday somewhere children-free.
9. The freedom to fall over in pubs within a fifty mile radius of your school. Although even if you respect a self-imposed boundary, don’t be surprised to feel a tap on your back and the words “Hello Miss / Sir” as you belch loudly in a post-pint kind of way.
10. Your sense of perspective. You may spend the weekend worrying about how sad
one of your pupils was feeling on Friday, only to return on Monday to find the sad
pupil full of beans with Friday’s problem forgotten. You may fear for your own sanity
once you start a serious man-hunt after pins go missing from your precious wall
displays. Catching the bugger who keeps writing rude words on your desks becomes
your raison d’etre. A piece of sub-standard coursework from your star pupil has
you in a sweat, and you consider phoning in sick rather than face the class from
hell once more last thing on a Friday. Just step back one cotton-picking minute:
it’s only a job. You’re not even saving lives or rescuing people from burning
buildings or diagnosing serious illnesses. The world won’t stop turning because
the child can’t spell or punctuate. Hope that the child with the pocketful of
stolen drawing pins stabs their own thumb as they rummage around for a lost sweet.
Add your own swear words to the desk to really shock the culprit. Find some way to
deal with those little things that become obsessions, then remember that you have
a life too.
added 26/3/05
© Copyright laws apply to the contents of this website. 2003-2005