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

Help me! I’m drowning in Year 10 reports. I have my entire form’s reports to collate, sort, read and comment on. It’s a paper shuffling nightmare of biblical proportions. I’m half way through reading them and making notes, and already I want to burn the lot. It’s not helped by finding mistakes and having to ask for some to be reprinted… and conversely having the same requests made of me from other year 10 tutors.

English teachers are the worse, they pick out random grammatical errors but rather than explain how to fix it, simply circle the offending word and leave you to guess what’s wrong. I’ll start circling random IT layout errors then - oh that circle? well you started in Times New Roman size 12, but then this line is in size 11, and this paragraph is 2 pixels to the right compared to the rest. Also, pressing space loads of times to line things up is poor, go away and learn about tables. This report is hand written… please get with the 1990s and use a word processor.

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

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 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.

WTF?! There’s a mouse in the office. It just ran out one of our classrooms and is now hiding behind the filing cabinets.

Let’s hope it has the sense to keep away from the kids or there’ll be pandemonium.

… OK own up, who wiped my students’ minds? Who restored them to factory defaults? They’ve all forgotten how to behave and how to sit still. Stupid bastards. Year 7s first thing on a Monday is not a good thing; I’m not quite awake and they’re unable to shut up and let me explain the new fun things we’ll be doing.

Oh well, back to basics it is then. Seven weeks before we break up, and five weeks before year 10 go on work experience (which is nice).

Today was Year 10’s Alton Towers trip, a reward for being good kids all year. The bad ones got to stay at school and learn stuff (well, actually they just skived the day off, but the point was they didn’t come to Alton Towers and have fun). I went, along with all the other year 10 tutors. And most of year 10 - all 240 of them. It took five buses.

Now, fitting 240 normal people onto five busses and ensuring nobody got lost would be quite tricky. Try it with highly excited kids. Yeah. Oh, and our bus driver was a miserable git who kept chuntering and moaning. Supposedly the kids are thick because they like loud offensive music, and drop rubbish. Well duh, they’re kids, that’s why we bring binbags. We mostly ignored him.

I went on Oblivion, which was fun but waaay too short, and RipSaw which was hilarious. The designer of that ride did an awesome job, teasing the riders with the water jets; then actually spraying them by slowly lowering the carriage upside down into the jets and not turning the water off It also looks deceptively tame from the ground, but the whirling forces were fun and disorientating. It also lasted long enough for us to appreciate. Top stuff.

Getting all the kids into the busses again was fun. Two were still on a ride, making several of their friends really annoyed as they had a locker shared between them. All I knew was that on my bus there should be 47 kids, so after sitting them all down I had a count… 48. Hmm… let’s try again… SIT DOWN! NO! Give UP hitting each other, yes I’ll have a sweet thanks. 45… 46…47… that’ll be it right we have 47 kids (no idea if they’re the same 47 we started with, but they’ll do). Driver let’s go.

Like a military operation it was… slick. Yeah. But everyone arrived home and we didn’t take kids from anyone else’s school so the day was a success

Next year we get to go with them again for the year 11 trip Next time I’ll buy a queue jumper pass to avoid queuing for an hour for a 30 second ride.

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.

It’s fantastic starting the week on Tuesday, it’s quite refreshing not having to deal with year 7s first thing in the morning. There’s just two and a bit weeks to go before half term, and then another seven weeks before the end of term and the summer holidays again.

It messes up my internal clock when the week starts on a Tuesday, it doesn’t seem a week ago since I was last teaching my Tuesday lot. Thursday this week will be quite easy, the only class I really tech will be doing their SATs.