This week I have really felt like I’m at the end of my tether. I’ve been overtired – which led me to
oversleep one morning. I feel over-burdened - not with the teaching, which is generally the best bit about
the job and the reason we want to go into teaching in the first place – but with all the extra demands on my
time and patience. There are only so many hours in the day, and some of that time has to be marked out for
sleeping. Everybody wants everything done straight away. The worst offenders are members of senior management.
Read why here.
We didn’t even have a full week: much to the relief of most staff and all the kids, our week finished with an Inset day. Ah, Inset day. The words ring through the school loud and clear, because that’s one message the kids don’t want to miss: a day off school in term time without a truancy officer knocking on the door and threatening parents with jail. (This is what the government would have you believe happens all the time as they crack down on truancy. In reality, as long as the kid has a note from home, there’s not a lot we can do about term-time holidays, shopping trips, hairdresser appointments, etc.)
Inset day for teachers is a bit of a waste of time really. It’s fantastic to have a day free of children, and there may be the odd meeting to inconvenience us, but usually it’s a day for clearing out cupboards or sauntering around chatting. It doesn’t really do what it’s supposed to, i.e. provide in-service training. Not that I’m asking for extra work, and admittedly my cupboard needs more of a clear-out than most, but I just wish they’d give us the day off to use how we wish rather than force us into the cold grey school building to stare at an uninspired PowerPoint presentation for half an hour and then make ourselves look busy for the rest of the day, marooned in strangely echoey classrooms, clock-watching and dozing off over piles of coursework.
Every now and again, by a miracle greater than the combination of winning the lottery and losing weight
by eating chocolate, you get given a nice class. There may be one or two slightly rotting apples amongst the
group, but they fester quietly away unnoticed because the rest of the class is so nice. With a group like this,
you can have a bit of a laugh and joke, and they’re prepared to work their hardest for fifty minutes so you
have ten minutes’ worth of kicking back at some point during the lesson. That’s all I wanted to say about
them really. Just to prove that it’s not all bad – there are occasional redeeming features of the job!
Although I don’t know if the job looks so great right this moment: it’s Sunday evening, and I’ve just finished an entire day of marking work. Well, when I say entire day, I got up at ten this morning, four or five hours later than a usual weekday morning, so it’s an abridged day. But still! Yesterday I worked for about five hours, and I was only up for twelve hours anyway before falling into a deep, neck-crooking sleep in front of the TV. Today has been an eight hour stint of school work, minus half hour or so of accumulated trips to the biscuit tin to relieve the boredom. It used to be that I’d still be in my pyjamas at this time on a Sunday thanks to a large and late night out on Saturday. Now it’s because there isn’t time in the day to get dressed, and besides if I did have proper clothes on I might be tempted to wander outside and become distracted by the autumn sunlight and rings of mushrooms on the lawn. And after reading thirty or so very similar pieces of work at a time, I feel like I should be shuffling about in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, so I may as well look the part. Right, in twelve hours I’ll be up and almost on my way to school to start the week over, so I’d better get some chores done before bedtime. Please let this week be more cheerful than the last!
added 9/10/05
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