Still Alive

Well, today was a good day.

Firstly, I didn't get stabbed. No honestly, this was a genuine red alert concern after yesterday, when a student whom I teach (well, try to but generally he ain't having it) sat in my class and said, 'I'm going to stab you, Miss, I'm going to stab you, Miss,' over and over again in a quiet and most sinister manner.

Now generally children don't freak me out, but some gut feeling unnerved me, and given this boy's history of drug taking and the paranoid and schizophrenic side effects of his habit, I was a bit bothered. So I thought, I'd better e-mail my concerns to the powers-that-be, if only so that when a caretaker finds me in the stationery cupboard lying in a pool of blood, I can say, 'Told you so!' from beyond the grave, heaven or hell or wherever else I might end up. (I'm secretly hoping for Herefordshire but I'm not sure how specific God can be about the after-life.)

Anyway, it seems my concerns have been taken seriously, which unnerved me even more and the boy was absent from my class today. I live! Hurrah!!

I'm sorry if I'm sounding flippant about the whole malarkey, but it's for the benefit of those people who say, 'Ha! Teachers! 9 - 3, Monday to Friday with 13 weeks holiday a year? Call that working??' I actually finished work at 7 last night because of a parents' evening and so far this academic year I'm averaging 60+ hours a week in school and doing prep at home. But I shan't bang on about it. Not much anyway.

My nicer, less murderous Year 11 students arrived in class this afternoon. First Charlotte.

'Look, Ma'am,' she said. 'I've made nail art from Blu-tak,' and she waved her hands at me and indeed, her nails were covered in various blobs of artisticky-looking Blu- tak.

Next, Callum.

'Look, Ma'am,' he said, and promptly stuck a small torch with a red light up his right nostril. The red light shone through his nose in a most impressive fashion.

'Very impressive, Callum,' I said.

'Yeah,' nodded Callum.

'Does it work in ears?' I enquired.

'Sort of,' said Callum. 'But up the nose is better.'

I didn't like to ask where else his torch may have probed. Best not. Teenage boy and all that.

Next Adam.

'Ma'am, can you e-mail all the homework I've missed to this address?' he said. When I picked myself up from the floor, I asked what had brought on this sudden change to his homework phobia.

He shrugged. 'Ah well, you know. I suppose Romeo and Juliet isn't so bad after all,' he said.

Somewhere in the distance, I thought I heard Shakespeare call, 'Hurrah!'

And so it continued. I threw away my lesson plan and ran a Romeo and Juliet competition based on 60 quotations from the play. The students fell upon the competition like crazy things, and they worked like mad for an hour and they asked questions about the meaning of Shakespeare's language and imagery and literary features and I nearly burst with the excitement and pride of it all! Rashly, I also said there would be prizes, which cost me £12. 49 in chocolate on the way home, but heigh-ho, it was a bloomin' good lesson, with lots of learning about English Literature and I loved it!

My Year 9s were also suspiciously good today, but they aren't getting chocolate coz I don't like them that much.

Not yet anyway.