Coming back after the two week holiday, I had somehow lured myself into the false hope that the behaviour would have miraculously improved and we were in for a nice quiet week. By 8:30am on the first day back that false notion had been quashed and I was right back where I had been on the last day of the previous term...except in the unfortunate position of staring down a long term of this!
In many respects the week has been positive - my NQT review was really good and I felt, for the first time in quite a while, that I might actually be able to be a top notch teacher one day! But the familiar problems of last term - whole school not just in my classroom - of truancy, refusal to follow instructions, violence and illegal activity yet again reared their ugly heads within hours of being back.
The first day back I had an email from the mentor for my year group asking me to come and see her as a matter of urgency, but with all the crazy goings on and million and one emails I had over the course of the day I missed the email and only saw it after she had left. So the following day I managed to catch up with her and was informed about the many goings on over the holidays that had led to one of the 12 year old girls in my form needing to go for a pregnancy test. This was compounded by finding out that another girl, this time 13, had unprotected sex with a 15 year old boy in the school, and another one had been sexually active with another boy in the year group.
So I have spent the week trying to deal with the fact that three children in my form are clearly acting way above their age and getting themselves into a whole lot of bother! It terrifies me to think that these girls may end up pregnant before they've even stopped being children themselves! Sometimes I forget just how young they are - at 12 years old I was vaguely aware of sexuality but I definitely wasn't looking to have sex with any boys, and definitely not with men, and yet these girls are posting provocative photos of themselves online and sending these same photos to boys and men who they barely know! In this age of modern technology I feel like it's so difficult to be able to monitor everything they are doing and stop them from making potentially dangerous mistakes...
Aside from the obvious huge issues with my form that have been happening this week, I have also had many issues with other students. There is a hardcore group of about 30 kids at the school who truant many lessons week in week out. The school seems to think that because we have 'done so much to tackle persistent absenteeism' that as long as they're in school, even if they aren't in lessons, we should be happy! Unfortunately trying to cope with a student who turns up 25 minutes into the lesson and refuses to follow any instructions is getting to be a little bit of a joke! Similarly, having ten kids hanging around outside your classroom door during lessons because 'the G is a good place to truant' is also highly disruptive!
The last thing that happened this week, in 2nd lesson yesterday, was that I was physically abused by one of the students in my Year 8 class. You'd think you'd get used to it, this grabbing and pushing out of the way by students who seem to think that they are perfectly within their rights to manhandle teachers! I've lost count of the number of times this year that I have been hit, pushed or grabbed by a student...on a couple of occasions I'll admit that I've been genuinely worried about what the student is willing to do. I mean a lot of these kids are bigger and stronger than I am, particularly the older boys, and they are so volatile. I'm sometimes a little bit scared that if I were to see them outside of school they wouldn't have quite the same fear about being caught. In school there are CCTV cameras everywhere, so there is no chance they will be able to get away with it, but outside there aren't!
So where to go from here? Back to counting down the days and hours? I'd really like to know what it is like to teach at a school where there aren't these behavioural issues, where you aren't worried that you will be abused on a daily basis and where you can actually be a teacher, and yet what happens to these kids if everyone feels like this? Do they just stay where they are and get sucked into the same lives as their parents?!
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