5 Truths about the School Day

In five days, Ranting Teacher will be five years old - surely a position of some doddery seniority in the fickle world of blogging!

To celebrate, here's my first list of five...

5 Truths about the School Day

1. 3.45pm isn’t necessarily the end of a long day for everybody else in the world of work; it’s the end of a long lunch.

2. It is impossible to rush to the other end of the building to join the toilet queue, make a cup of tea and drink it, and prepare your room for your next class in one 15 minute break.

3. Depending on your subject and the promises you made in your job interview, your lunch break may be no such thing, but instead be a purgatory of detention duty, sports practice, music rehearsals, chess club, or forcing reluctant Year 11 slackers to mass produce coursework.

4. If you do make it to the school canteen, remember that these days healthy eating isn’t an option – it’s the only choice. The kids aren’t dealing wraps of speed or cocaine as it first appears to an outsider, but they are handing round illicit sachets of salt.

5. Six and a half hours inside a school building actually translates as thirteen hours in the real world – remember how the days used to drag by slowly when you were slumped over a desk? The only difference is that being a teacher you don’t get to sit down for most of it.