/a/muse(d)

So I’ve managed to get through five entire weeks of being a teacher.

I seem to be doing fine judging by reports I have had from my supervisor and other people who have wandered into my classroom over the past few weeks, and I maintain some degree of sanity, which has to be a positive thing. I still make organisational blunders such as getting the day when I have to be at an in-service wrong by an entire week and stuffing up the arrangements that had been made for a casual to replace me that day…I felt pretty stoopid about that one. I’ve missed my playground duty once because I didn’t know that they’d changed the roster, and I’m semi-regularly confised about the timing of things such as assemblies, integration, RFF etc, but I’m managing to hold it together, and I just pray that my brain would become programmed enough in time to be able to juggle the bazillion things I am just supposed to know instinctively, without dropping anything. There are lots of those instinctive things which I am supposed to just know…like how to legally keep a class roll, (no, not bread storage…), what the red card that suddenly turned up in my pidgeon hole was for, why I have to contribute hard earned money to something called the ’social club’, and what to tell a child when they ask if they can go somewhere that I’ve never heard of. I still giggle to myself when small, lost looking children approach me in the playground and ask me if i have seen their friend, Herbert, or Janice or something, whom I have never met, seen or heard of in my life, but such is the way a child’s mind works. Teachers know everything. A dangerous, but flattering misconception.

The whole experience makes me tired if nothing else, and people who say teaching is an easy job with short hours and long holidays should be shot on sight. I work longer days than some lawyers I know. They say it gets easier. Bring it on.