Joe Bloggs

Teacher for a day

Over in the UK the teachers are considering strike action to prevent classroom assistants from taking charge of lessons. Today I had the dubious pleasure of experiencing what those teachers face everyday - though without an assistant. The local international school had a teacher off sick and they asked if I would mind taking a class of 6 and 7 year-olds for the afternoon. I have done it before, but with older children. One forgets so quickly what it was like at that age. The difficulty in concentrating on what the teacher has to say and how sometimes the smallest movement outside the window, or a moving shadow in the classroom, takes on the biggest importance and the subject of freshwater and saltwater is, frankly, neither here nor there. I'm comfortable around children so being thrown in at such short notice wasn't exactly the deep end, but rather the teachers than me. I couldn't put up with the constant, "listen up", "Shun stop that and face me", "Rikiya please don't lean back in your chair, you've already seen Mari and Hans fall over", etc., etc..