A DAY IN MY LIFE ON THE FRONTLINE
6.25am The alarm goes off but I’m not asleep. I am three years into teaching and on this November morning, as on most others, I wake early, braced for the day to come.
6.53am The walk from my house to school takes exactly 21 minutes at a brisk pace. It is raining and still dark.
7.14am I need to print the classwork for the first two periods, but the printer is jammed — again. Cursing, I go down to the library and wait while a geography teacher prints out what seems to be an entire atlas.
8am In the auditorium, we get a five-minute blast from an RE teacher whose title is ‘Excellent Teacher’ (the implication being that the rest of us are Rubbish Teachers) on how to break down our explanations to make them easier to understand.
8.13am My colleagues are moving up and down the lines of students in the playground, checking uniforms. ‘Hands out of pockets,’ I say to a 12-year-old boy.
This is not my favourite part of the job but the head teacher is glaring at me, so I make a perfunctory effort. My own hands are in my pockets and I briefly take them out, then find the air so cold I put them back in again.
8.20am Thirty 12-year-olds file in and stand silently behind their desks. ‘ Good morning, Year 8,’ I say. ‘Good morning, Miss Kellaway,’ they reply in perfect unison. At the beginning I found this scarily robotic but now I’m soothed by the routine. School life is intrinsically so chaotic that this sort of certainty has something to be said for it.
8.56am In my Year 10 economics class, I walk around, looking over shoulders and chivvying. When I started teaching, I marvelled at the way teachers could look at an exercise book and spot a mistake before their eyes had even had time to focus. Now, miraculously and inexplicably, I can do this too.
10.50am I now have a double free period, the first of which is partly taken up with a weekly meeting with my HoLA (Head of Learning Area). I feel a bit sorry for him having to manage me. I am a tricky mixture of inexperience and overconfidence — and have started querying policies that I don’t agree with.
11.15am Back at my desk, I turn to the pile of purple exercise books from my Year 11 class. The task I set them was: evaluate the effect of a rise in the value of the pound on UK consumers. ‘God,’ I groan after opening two exercise books. ‘ They don’t bloody understand it! I spent the entire sodding lesson explaining this!’
11.45am I hastily scrabble around for material for this afternoon’s lessons and put together a slapdash PowerPoint.
12.28pm I must eat now, as I’m on duty. I put my Tupperware lunchbox in the microwave but the machine is so old and slow that I give up after a minute and return to my desk with a plastic box of cold lentils that are warmish around the edges.
12.40pm I watch the students stand around in the damp, talking and laughing in groups. A boy approaches, his eyes shining, and says: ‘Miss, I saw an article you wrote.’
Me: Quite possible. I used to be a journalist. Are you interested in journalism?
Student: Nah.
1.35pm I ask Year 9 to consider two items: petrol and Mars Bars. Imagine the price of each doubled. We know that demand would fall, but by how much?
Most get the idea that demand for petrol doesn’t fall much when the price doubles. But most think that demand for Mars wouldn’t change much either.
Me: Look. If Mars Bars in the local sweet shop are £1.60 instead of 80p, most people will buy Snickers instead. Abdul: I won’t — I don’t like Snickers! Benjamin: Snickers is WAY better than Mars. Emmanuel: No way!!! This has the makings of a riot, so I shut it down firmly.
2.30pm I repeat the same lesson with a different class, but it is the last period of the day and students invariably become about five years less mature than they were an hour earlier. At the end I feel like a failure.
3.25pm I have not sat down since 12.40pm. I am hoarse. I start marking 50 Year 9 books.
3.42pm One of my students is asking for me. It is Beccy, a sweet Year 11 girl to whom economics is a scary land of alien ideas, none of which she understands. I take her to an empty classroom and try to explain exchange rates to her really slowly.
4.18pm I’ve still got 40 books left to mark. I time myself: two minutes per book.
5.40pm I do the same walk as this morning, again in the dark. I’m exhausted but not especially stressed. This is something odd about my new life: even though it is far more tiring than my old one, it doesn’t stress me out in quite the same way. I think this is because it’s not actually about me. It’s about the students.
6.03pm Back home, I take the cork out of last night’s red wine and pour myself a large glass. I open a packet of Kettle Chips and eat and drink standing up.
6.45pm My daughter gets in. Rose: How was your day? Me: Not bad, but I had a slightly difficult conversation with the mother of one of my worst Year 11 students — Rose (interrupting): Mum, let’s not talk about school stuff?
She has spent ten hours at the coalface in a much tougher school than mine. And now she wants some life. I, on the other hand, am still new enough to teaching and still so in thrall to the whole thing, I don’t want any other life at all.
I hold my peace, and we have supper and watch something on Netflix instead. 9.05pm I take my clothes off, dropping them on the floor, and get into a hot bath. 9.20pm Bed.