Wear Sunscreen

Some more advice: don't talk to strangers and don't attempt to pick up spiky plants.


Hectic week this week, what with writing my essay/taking over my classes/writing enough job applications to satisfy the sudden mountain of vacancies; so although I've scribbled various posts I haven't actually finished any enough to publish them. So I'm going to compile some vague ramblings now into one mammoth post.


I deliberately didn't blog about school for the first couple of weeks - but it's getting better now that I'm actually teaching. I am SO excited about next lesson with year 7 - it's tomorrow, but I planned it after our lesson together on Thursday and have been looking forward to it ever since! I'm writing my own poetry SOW for them, which I thought would be tough but it's amazing. I love it! Best of all, they seem to as well.


I've also been getting lifts into school with a PE teacher, and consequently am now an honorary member of the PE dept. That's nice - they're far more sociable than the English dept (who are friendly, but prefer to work alone in their own rooms so the staffroom is permanently deserted apart from the half-hour lunch break). I did, however, manage to meet one NQT long enough to have a bit of a barney with her.

I'd like to say it wasn't my fault but it probably was. I'm not too good at the whole diplomacy side of things.

Everyone knows that when you meet someone new - especially when that someone is a lost and lonely looking trainee - common ground is a great place to start. However, a word of warning - make sure you know their opinion on said common ground before beginning to voice your own.

This NQT (let's just call her Liz) came to sit with me at lunch and began her conversation with, "I hear you were at [Hogwarts] before here, what did you think?" I opened my mouth to wax lyrical about said school when she subsequently launched into a slight tirade against it. Not angry ranting, just whingeing. I sat in shocked silence for a while, using body language/facial expressions to signal to her that she could shut up any time she liked.

She didn't.

I'm quite opinionated. I can be a real cow. I know that biting my lip is usually the best way forward, especially at work, but if you press the buttons in the right order then sometimes I can't help myself. Like when people remark that footballers actually deserve their wages (I can feel my blood simmering already). So when Liz moved onto people that I knew personally, enough was enough. I began with that awful cliche, "no offense, but I really think..." and began my own side of the debate. In what was, for me, actually quite a diplomatic manner - I think the worst I escalated to was, "well, no. I'm really sorry if what I've said has offended you in any way, but to be frank I couldn't disagree more. Maybe we should move on from this topic now."

There was a slight atmosphere for the rest of the conversation.




I also made a complete prat out of myself in the library on Thursday - I was walking past a shelf when I saw a display and something inside my head went "ooh! Shiny!"

So I stopped to look. 'Recommended Reads for Year 9' - "hmm, could be useful, I'll just grab myself one of those leaflets..." I leaned over to get one and promptly knocked the librarian's plantpot onto the floor in the process. Mortified, I bent to pick it up. The pot was still intact, fortunately, but when I picked it up and saw the plant still on the floor a momentary panic set in. A cactus? Seriously? Are they not poisonous???
But I couldn't just leave it - I had to get it back into the pot, preferably without year 7 noticing what on earth I was doing kneeling on the floor. So I gritted my teeth and grabbed it.


Please don't ever feel the need to test my hypothesis that picking up a cactus with bare hands is a painful experience.