One A Day, Day 9: All Wound Up

All wound up, on the edge, terrified. Sleep disturbed, restless mind, petrified. Bouts of fear permeate all I see. Heightening nervousness threatens me.

That’s the opening to Dream Theater’s Panic Attack, a song I adore both for its Castlevania-esque piano/orchestra/choir breaks every so often but also for its blunt, honest portrayal of what it feels like to have a mind that’s so stressed out it feels like you might explode.

Feeling that right now. The pounding inside my head isn’t helping the feeling, as I have a headache from the very depths of R’lyeh to contend with at the moment and I am holding the annoying children I have to endure for my day job personally responsible. Tuesday is supposed to be my “quiet day”, with the morning spent doing planning for the upcoming week, but the kids I teach more than made up for me not having the morning with them by not shutting up for the whole bloody afternoon. It didn’t help that our Maths lesson was interrupted by having to line up, go downstairs and watch twenty minutes of Indian dancing before going back to finish off a task which they didn’t understand not because it was too difficult for them but because they didn’t fucking listen the first time and the second time and the third time I explained what the little shits were supposed to be doing.

Arrrrgh! How annoying!

*breathes*

So how are you, reader? I hope my misfortune is either entertaining, eye-opening or both to you. The main reason today didn’t give me a complete nervous breakdown is the knowledge that it’s not forever. The only thing I wish I didn’t have to deal with is the fact that the school I work at is in “special measures”, which means that government inspectors (who have probably never spent even a single hour at the chalkface) came around to look at it (before I arrived, I might add) and judged it as “failing”. Like I said in the last post I mentioned this in, the fact that we can get any work at all out of some of these horrendous children is a minor miracle. Still, the government judges the school as “failing”, which means extra stress for everyone involved as the inspectors return every so often at very short notice to come and see how things are improving. This also means we have people from the local education authority coming at short notice to see how things are doing. This means we have lesson observations at incredibly inconvenient times, like next week. At least whatever outcome this observation has no longer matters for me, though I feel for my poor colleague in the classroom next door who not only has a lesson observation but also has to spend a protracted amount of time in the company of The Most Miserable Woman In The World talking about assessments we haven’t done yet.

I am clearly making the right decision to escape from this as early as possible. There will be no regrets. At least when I look back on the three years and one term that I’ve spent as a teacher, I have enough experience to say 1) “I’m never doing that again!” and 2) “Thinking about teaching? DON’T BE AN IDIOT.”

Now there’s something they don’t say in their patronising, unrealistic adverts.