Day 1: Blah

What's the best way to start your new job? Oversleep. Yep, after a frantic night of tossing, turning, smoking out the window and reading The World's Wife to calm me down, I awoke a full hour and a quarter later than my alarm. I'm not entirely sure how or why that happened, but by the grace of god (and a helpful driver) I got a place on the overpacked bus and made it in by 8. Phew.

After a particularly excruciating faux pas (a joke involving parents + jeremy kyle) by one of the members of senior staff at the morning briefing, I spent most of the morning running around in circles trying to organise myself for my lessons and counting down the hours.

Eventually 2.10 rolled around and I went to my door to await my year 11s. The lesson went... ok. They did what they were told, mostly. They kept quiet, mostly. And other than a particularly embarrassing confrontation with a pupil during which I seemed to forget the department's rules and asked him to move seats without real warning, I ended up taking him outside for a brief chat, it was mostly uneventful. This is the hard part, you see. I've had relatively "bugger all" training (according to my mentor) and we have so much advice flung at us that sometimes it's hard to remember what to do. I wasn't prepared to be put on the spot, which I really should have thought through, but he went back to his seat and basically behaved - enough - for the remainder of the lesson. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten how boring reading out is in a lesson, so I need to think of a more interesting way to get through the play tomorrow.

Speaking of which, I should probably get on to that. My mentor is happy for me to plan the day before, which is great because I don't think I'm organised enough right now to sort it out in advance, and more to the point it's difficult to know how to pitch a lesson without seeing the pupils before.

Tomorrow I have four classes, with only the first lesson off, so I am going to be exhausted. As I wandered around Morrisons today after work I had those black thoughts taunting me: Why not just give up? It's not fun, it's hard work and I'm rubbish at pretending to be something I'm not. A conversation with my ma made me feel a bit better; it's hard to remember sometimes that "bugger all" training really doesn't equip you with the know-how you need to teach, and noone, luckily, is expecting too much from me. Which is good, because my expectations of myself are too high right now. Time to reassess. But at least I didn't cry.