Once again my PGCE has taken over my life and left me with no time to write, but since it’s Christmas, and all my lessons are planned up until Christmas (well, tomorrow) and it’s mostly videos until the end of the week and we finish early on Friday, I’ve finally got a little bit of time to breathe!
This week I finally had the lesson I’ve been dreading, the one where the boys were persistently, annoyingly and disgustingly rude and reduced me to tears (though, fortunately, I managed to hold it back until I got back to the staff room). I knew it would happen eventually, it’s inevitable. In this case I was knackered and ready for a break, they were behaving abominably, I shouted at them, nagged them and they just talked over me, spoke disrespectfully to me and teased me with factoids they’d gleaned from finding me on Facebook. They seemed to think it would bother me to hear that they knew the name of my fiancé, and though it shouldn’t bother me, it does because of what it represents, nosing into my private life looking for ammunition. They won’t find anything juicy, but their intentions are fairly malicious, and this is fairly intelligent misbehaviour. When I go back in January I’m going to really go for the ringleaders and see if I can’t sort out their behaviour down to a level where we can get some work done! I know that I’m otherwise fairly spoiled by my lovely classes, and that I’m more likely to have classes like this nightmare one, so I need this experience.
Otherwise it’s going quite well. My mentor generally has really positive comments for me and is still able to (tactfully) give me ways in which I could improve my practice. I think this is the ideal thing for me at the moment.
Still – bring on the holidays!
Diary of an NQT 
Oh, I had a day just like that today… I’m a first-year teacher with lovely classes and I shouted at my grade 9 French class today because they were (and have been from September) rude and inconsiderate and difficult. They keep talking about how great their French teacher was last year and shouting things out and generally being little creeps. I feel bad about how I yelled but I think they richly deserved it.
Christmas break can’t come soon enough. Who says teaching is easy???
urgh :o(
Sorry to hear about that – hopefully it’s the end of term-ness which is making them that way, and things will be all better after a break!
It’s a form of bullying and really should not be tolerated!
Hi Julie, that sounds a lot like my class. They’re terrible most of the time and as Christmas approaches they are just getting worse.
Today, however, I caved and let them watch a DVD in German and they sat quietly, asked if we could continue watching it tomorrow and some of them even thanked me!!!! I was stunned.
Make sure you get your facebook ‘privatised’ so that no-one like school kids can see it. I’d be in so so much trouble with uni if they’d found out that kids could get on my facebook!!
i’m with above, why aren’t ou private on facebook, two clicks of a button and only you and your friends can see your profile. was the first thing i did when facebook started becoming big at work was to close down who could see me.
but do feel for you have shitty kids to deal with. i wouldn’t be able to cope with out loosing my rag with them.
keep up the good work!
What they said – change your settings to private!
I hope things improve for you.
Well, you know what’s most disturbing about this is that my settings were set to private. They are more persistent than the average teenager and I think I have a ‘friend’ in common with one of the boys in the class, so it got round to the others.