The Start of Term

You were anxious that you’d forget to go back to work on September 1st because for the last 6 weeks, days and dates have dissolved into one big soup of inertia and apathy and you’ve lost any sense of time. Fortunately, you will be alerted to the fact that the start of term approaches by the following occurrences:

- Trailers on TV for the new series of The Inbetweeners and Waterloo Road;
- You can’t fit your trolley through the supermarket entrance without knocking into a display of special offer “Back to Skool” stationary (you curse the dickhead who suggested the deliberate mis-spelling of this slogan);
- There is a long queue of shaggy-haired young boys with their mums in the barbers.

The day the supermarket runs dry of “Back to Skool” stationary is the day you should be back at work.

INSET day! No kids. Every teacher wears their own clothes, women splash on fake tan and the men sport their summer beard for the final time. The Head, in casual corduroy trousers and mis-matched jumper, delivers his state of the nation speech, flashes up the exam results on a powerpoint and rallies the troops. Then he gets all the newbies to stand up to be introduced, while the rest of you ask yourselves in reference to each one, “would I?”

Then chaos commences. Because no matter what work and preparation anyone has done over the summer, the inability for anyone to liase with each other means that everything is only 80% ready.

Everything apart from the IT system, which is about 30% ready, because the network support team have spent the summer eating pies, watching porn, doing 3 hour days and hiding each others’ trousers round the school for a joke.

Two days later the kids come back. Starting with the Year 7’s. In the bad old days, you’d be bending over backwards to introduce the nervy little ‘uns into secondary school life with a friendly, gentle approach. Nowadays, you find your chin on your chest as you watch open-mouthed at how overly confident and cocky the new generation have turned out. What the fuck do they do in primary schools? Train them to be Big Brother contestants? As it turns out, this mouthy minority colour your view, you end up shouting at a whole class and 2/3 of them go home with piss-stains in their new “Back to Skool” trousers due to the trauma.

Then the older kids return. And it’s like you’d never had six weeks of daytime TV, hour-long baths at 2pm and making arse-moulds out of your sofa. All the behavioural baggage they took away last July, they bring back in September. You wonder about their lives in those 6 weeks and realise it was much the same as yours, but probably involved more hanging around McDonald’s and park playgrounds.

You plan your lessons for the first week: Give out exercise books, re-establish ground rules, draw a title page. By the 3rd day, after 18 lessons of this, the students crave intellectual challenge and start asking questions about the news. Like, why does everyone hate the old man in the disabled car? He’s the Pope, you say.

And then you get on with the job of starting to teach your new GCSE syllabus, which you spent many hours planning over the summer (between baths and the human abattoir that is known as The Jeremy Kyle show) knowing full well that the fucking Tories want to replace it as soon as possible with a different qualification which will improve standards of education in this country, standards that have fallen every successive year under Labour. (Based purely on the evidence of the Jeremy Kyle show rather than a less-sensational, media-appealing body of evidence such as exam results and Ofsted inspection reports, which tend to offer the opposite view.)

Finally, you open your new academic diary and with your fresh gel pen you neatly write dates for parents’ evenings and reports, before counting the number of days left until half term, when for one small week, you get to be a blob again.