This Teaching Life

It is very satisfying to get to the end of a week and be able to sit down at home on a Friday night and take it easy. More pertinently I am not dead tired and my health is a lot better. It has been a bit of a roller coaster week. Peaks and troughs.

Yesterday afternoon I was at the end of my tether, close to the edge. A simple request to go to the toilet led to about seven students making similar requests. I was writing material on the board at the time of the first request so agreed and that, so to speak, opened the flood gates. I found myself in slow fury telling my students that in future they could go to the toilet but that they would not be allowed to return to the class and re-iterated the school's policy. After this I took a mobile phone from a student.I regret to say I was beside myself with rage, absolutely fizzing mad! On the plus side I didn't assault anyone or use inappropriate language. However I felt unhappy that my students had managed to get at me so badly.

Today the same students were a joy. No toilet requests, no mobile phones. Another class left me staggered by the amount of knowledge they had retained about plants and as we walked around the school grounds they appeared to be delighting in telling me what plants were vascular and non-vascular. I mean these are ten year old kids! I might have walked out of the job yesterday evening!

My wife, however, is a wonderful support. I asked Luna, she a veteran of the chalk face: "Are there ever times when this job makes you feel close to the edge?" and she replied without hesitation: "Oh yes"!

This morning I was teaching a science class on potentially harmful drugs like nicotine, alcohol and narcotics. I was really powerfully struck by the change in behaviour and attitudes. One student volunteered that her father smokes! I tried to explain to these students, 11/12 year olds, how I started smoking when I was about 14 and that when we had breaks at school most of us headed to the toilets for a cigarette.

We then moved on to deal with alcohol and I asked my students to think what it would be like if they were to visit a hospital emergency room in any British city about midnight on a Friday night. They looked strangely at me and I encouraged them to think about what they would see. One student said: "Dying people"!. I tried to explain that the hospital would be full of people who were heavily under the influence of alcohol and drugs and that security would be needed to protect the doctors and nursing staff and to maintain order. I could tell they didn't understand. Didn't know what I was talking about!

I think this teaching has got its claws into me.