I’ve just spent a wonderful day with a group of year 9 students doing an “ICT Booster Day”. No, really, it was wonderful. No sarcasm there for once. Why was it wonderful?

Well when you’re training to be a teacher you have this mental image of what teaching is, and then a dim memory of being at school and what it was really like. You imagine it to be a bit like the adverts, with bright, intelligent interested children asking you why the sky is blue, where baby whales come from and why water doesn’t run off the bottom of the Earth. Your own experiences at school probably contain a few memories of teachers you liked, and quite a few memories of teachers you hated and were a little bastard for.

Then, as a trainee teacher you get put in a classroom and discover what’s in your head doesn’t match what’s in your classroom.

Well not today. The kids were making a website, editing video and making a leaflet. With the exception of three students, everyone was really interested and keen and in addition to learning stuff, they actually had fun.

Now to work out how to apply this to normal every day teaching.

When at Uni training to be a teacher we were introduced to the concept known as “work life balance”. The idea being you leave your work at work, and don’t bring it home, the intention being to stop us going crazy.

Yeah, work life balance meet the real world.

What they should be teaching new teachers is not how to manage their work and life, but how to adlib on the spot and make stuff up as they go along. Little coping mechanisms for when It All Goes Wrong, or when someone springs a surprise.

Like tomorrow. I have an all day ICT Booster day where me and another teacher are taking 15 year 9 students and doing a full day of ICT with them. Fine, should be OK if the kids don’t turn into idiots. Only I forgot to set some cover work for the lesson I should normally be teaching on Thursday morning.

If this was my training year I’d now be sat up till 10pm planning a lesson, making resources and generally having a bit of a controlled panic. Instead I’m writing this. Tomorrow I will go into work and pick out a random cover lesson from our pile, print off the worksheets (after modiftying them a bit) and leave them in the classroom. Job done.

They can make me a poster about Internet Safety. That’ll do. The non IT trained cover teacher can then just wander about trying to persuade the kids to keep off the Internet.

Oh, supposedly I have to write some year 12 reports for kids I taught six months ago. Right… OK… well I’ll do that in between my year 10 reports, planning next week’s lessons and preparing for my NQT final interview on Friday. Or I won’t. If they want reports they can ask for them.

Managing workload is easy - do the important stuff and leave the rest until someone asks for it. If it’s not important they’ll not ask again. And do the ten minute quick stuff immediately. Think of it as the Getting Things Done philosophy combined with the Dilbert mentality.

Monthly curry meeting tomorrow

I only teach one lesson on Thursdays now my year 12s have finished. The group I teach are very low ability year 9 students. Normally we do a bit of work, go on the Internet and generally keep quiet and calm. These kids aren’t going to be IT specialists, the closest they’ll come to using IT is probably working an automated system in a factory, or the CO2 machine in a garage. They have problems with abstract concepts (spreadsheets make them very confused) but real things they can get their hands on and mess with make sense (they’re quite good at making posters, or finding things on the Internet).

Today’s lesson was about manual handing. I teach in the Library for this lesson, and today the IT technicians had received a large delivery of computers and monitors. They all needed shifting into a store room out the way. Guess what we did for half an hour.

“Right kids, these boxes go into the room down the corridor”.

And they were off! Not a single moan or complaint, in fact at the end they asked if there was anything else they could move around. I have other classes that if we tried that they’d tell us to F-off and refuse. I let them have the remainder of the lesson free on the Internet as a reward.

I have no idea how, but with groups like that I need to somehow incorporate more moving around to keep them occupied.

The boxes weren’t heavy or overly large, they only contained TFT monitors and super slimline PCs. It’s not like they were carting 19″ CRTs or full-tower cases around, before you worry

Wednesday afternoons are when I teach a really irritating group of year 7 students. They seem unable to sit quietly, can’t listen to instructions and will do anything to distract the people around them. Following last week’s threat, they did today’s lesson on paper.

… the whole lesson … They’re learning about computer control; so flowcharts, statements, structure and order. We have a program called Flowol which lets them make simple programs using basic flowchart shapes, then link the programs to animated pictures. It’s programming, but at a level so simple the kids don’t realise they’re doing anything important with the computer.

The lesson was based around a set of traffic lights. All they had to do was plan out how to make the lights change in the correct sequence. And with the assistance of another teacher dragging the disruptive ones outside for a stern word, and a surprise visit from their head of year, the lesson went well.

Next week we’ll go back on the computers and make a big wheel work. I’ve done it with my year 9 class and I could see some of them getting that little buzz from making something work. I set them challenges - “make the wheel stop when the gate opens” “ok, now make the lights flash” and they’d go off and do it.

Welcome to my world kiddies It’s just a shame they only do it once each year and the stuff we do is so limited. I wonder if I could do Logo with them at some point. I saw a really good Logo lesson being taught at my first training school.

I was observed teaching a lesson first thing this morning. I’d got it all planned the night before and just had to go into school, sync my laptop with the network and I’d be set. Planning on arriving at school a bit earlier to get everything sorted, I left the house five minutes earlier.

… which was a good thing since the centre of town had turned into a carpark. I sat for five minutes waiting for the traffic to move before giving up, turning around and going the long way up the motorway. I arrived a mere 15 minutes later than I should. This isn’t a problem since I normally arrive half an hour earlier than registration begins, so I can check my mail, faff about and make sure everything is OK.

The lesson went quite well, with the only downer being some kids pissing about on the Internet. I’ll keep a tally of them doing this next lesson and they can pay me back at break.

The lessons are getting better, most of the classes have calmed down enough that their brains start to turn on. Other kids are still taking the piss and I’ve got five after school detentions next week.

Next year I’ve got a lot of things I’m going to do right from the first lesson. This is one of those jobs where the training gives you a vague idea of what to do, but it’s not until your first proper year that it starts to sink in and make sense.

My form room is like an oven, it’s horrible. My classrooms are like furnaces, and the students are unable to sit calmly when too hot or too cold. I have no idea why they pace around, it makes no sense. Sit down you silly buggers and stop winding yourselves up.

I have to teach in my form room tomorrow. No idea how this is going to go down. Fortunately the idiots in my form are off on other things that lesson, and the rest are quite nice.

Think I’ll make food for tomorrow and go to bed. I’ve got an observation tomorrow in the first lesson.

My NQT file has been checked today, to make sure I’m keeping lots of nice juicy evidence of the things done this year. Not content with proving I know stuff during my PGCE, I have to do it all over again this year. I’ve spent all day sticking little post-it notes to lesson observations and things with cryptic little notes everywhere.

Yep, it’s death by paperwork time again. Hopefully they’ll be as interested in this file as my Uni was with my PCGE files.

This week is full of interesting things for me to do. On Tuesday it’s work’s Curry Club meeting, Thursday is the Year 10 trip to Alton Towers and then on Friday we break up for half term. After half term there’s only seven weeks of teaching and then we break up for summer.

Oh, and we’re on the computers for PSHE on Tuesday too, so no need to contain my form within our horrible form room for 50 minutes. My form room is a nasty room at the top of part of the school which was built in the 50’s. In the winter it freezes, in the summer it turns into an oven. It’s also devoid of computers which is kind of irritating.

And we’re done. They’ve been written and copied to my laptop. Now to read them, check for mistakes, print them, sign them all (and their copies) and cut them up.

After the 5th report my signature turns into a meaningless squigggle.

Oh the tedium! 91 reports to write and I’m about half way through. Thank god for Excel and Word’s mail-merge. Having to actually type out 91 kids names from a list would be awful. It’s bad enough having to write their comments.

Reports aren’t a substitution for parents’ evenings. Although it is satisfying being able to explain exactly why someone’s child isn’t reaching their full potential.

When these are done, it’s the Year 10 ones. Whooo.