When the dust settles …

Nine weeks allows some perspective, albeit distorted with inexperience and exhaustion. It means about 170 lessons, maybe 60 free periods, probably over 1000 emails and innumerable cups of tea, stern looks, raised voices and moments of quiet desperation. Of course, that stock-take barely does justice to the experience of teaching a couple of months in a comprehensive school in south central London, but one gets the gist. And, interestingly, it turns out that the kids ARE alright. Or at least, most of them are alright most of the time. Not sure about the teachers though. The years that most of us spent IN classrooms but OUTSIDE staffrooms lent the latter a certain mystique; glimpses through the door revealed teachers chatting in a suspiciously, well, casual fashion. Almost as if they had something to talk about. Some even laughed. And even as a newly qualified teacher there’s a hard-to-locate feeling – just the tiniest perceptible shudder – as one passes through the door into what was for so long the unknown. And it becomes clear that, yes, the teachers DO have something to talk about. But after this realisation it is hard to overcome a sense of bathos when it turns out that all they talk about is the kids anyway. Now, that would have really amazed us back then. In fact, I often think – what conversations were had concerning me? Did MY teachers speculate with such inappropriate alacrity about the state my pubescent, fumbling love life? Was the news that I had crashed and burned trying to ask out whoever from 8E greeted with the same hilarity as was a recent announcement in our staffroom concerning the similarly unsuccessful exploits of our very own year 8 proto-Casanova? It doesn’t bear thinking about.