A cup half empty

Sometimes, not often, but every now and again I get the urge to tell my class that they are a useless bunch of lazy halfwits, I want to scream at them, they are so unbelievably obtuse. I then want to walk out, just walk and walk. I did that once, a couple of years after I began teaching (the walking bit not the screaming bit!) I was walking to Blackheath station to get the train to work and I walked right past and carried on walking for hours. Sometimes teaching can be very claustrophobic, especially when teaching the younger students. I could NEVER be a primary school teacher how do they do it?
As teachers we have no choices about what we do during the day, we HAVE to be in the same place at the same time, hamstrung by the demands of a timetable. YES we have the bloody holidays, the same ones every year, no flexibility what so ever. The whole education system stinks from top to bottom, why can't schools stay open all year round and rotate staff and students? Why do we all walk on the same treadmill?

Time for a day in town I think to refresh my batteries.
I am once again snowed under with marking and target setting, as well as having to stay at work late for various meetings. I should be looking forward to a life of wandering around Europe sleeping in swanky hotels, instead I am struggling to come up with what to take to live in a soulless concrete box in a village miles from civilization. The weather seems to be wet and with very cold nights. The house is unheated and has solar panels to provide hot water, which sans much sunshine means cold showers all round. We will be bunking up with his sister and niece too, oh what larks.

We were back in A&E on Monday night, I started to wonder if I had Munchhausens by proxy syndrome. In fact Leyla had had a severe allergic reaction to Penicillin, and so had to change her medication. It was so bad she even had spots on the palms of her hands! I swaddled her in calamine lotion soaked cotton wool and gave her porridge baths, she was back at school by Wednesday. She is over the moon that she can now tick a box on a medical form. 'Yes I am allergic to.... '

Normal service will resume next week...