The difficult second week
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve sat down to write and re-write this post. This week has been *hard*. I think there’s a belief amongst people who aren’t teachers that the hardest part of the job is dealing with belligerent children all day, but it’s really not. The hardest part is dealing with the systems, the culture, the expectations placed on you by society, the government, whoever it is who happens to be writing education policy that day, or the particular member of senior management who decides a school-wide writing policy is the thing that’s really missing from my Year 8 music lessons. For me, the hardest thing about teaching isn’t the children – it’s the adults. This is apparently true even at the School of Mum and Dad. Alex is not the problem – it’s me.