So today I didn’t want to write a post. Originally I did. A fair few things happened since this time last week that I could have easily written about. But I got home, had a shower, watched some Agent Carter with pizza and two glasses of wine (I know! On a school night!), and then I just couldn’t be bothered.

The reality is, nothing particularly interesting happened. Many little things happened, all of which were significant at the time, even significant for a day or two after. But I just can’t be bothered.

Last week we were told about a new focus for the school – making sure the notice boards in the classrooms are focused appropriately. This means making sure there is a Challenge Board, a Student Progress Board, and a Resources Board in each classroom. In the department there needs to be at least one What A Good One Looks Like Board. Within our department there are about 40 boards all up – this is going to be an undertaking. Most of the other departments have about a dozen boards to update. The best part is we will be audited, yes audited, on the suitability of our notice boards. Let’s just leave that there to sink in for a minute…

I found a job back in Aus that I’m going to apply to – not a specific teaching role, but one to do with teaching and learning at the whole school level. It’s something I am super keen about, and would absolutely love to do, so I will write a killer cover letter later in the week.

Yesterday I was with the year 9s all day, doing sex ed. We had nurses and community workers come in to talk about sex, sexual health, orientation, drugs and alcohol, and relationships. It went really well – the group I was with were hyper-engaged (not unexpected), asking loads of relevant questions, being silly when you’d expect. To be honest, it went well and there’s not much more to say than that. We discussed healthy and unhealthy relationships, looked at pictures of ordinary and diseased genitalia, spoke about all the alcohol the students definitely don’t drink yet, and put condoms on ‘demonstrators’.

Today I had year 11s doing revision, a year 8 class looking at the three main rock types (along with some behaviour issues, as this is one of my more challenging classes) and a year 7 class looking at the digestive system. In complete contrast to the year 8s, these year 7s are so on to everything they were telling me about things like the specific enzymes in different parts of the system before we’d even labelled our diagram.

Tomorrow I have my doctor’s appointment in the morning for RSI and stress, then I teach the same year 8 lesson as yesterday, and do the same (different to yesterday) year 7 lesson twice in a row.

Overall, even with the sex ed thrown in, it’s a pretty stock standard week for me. If anything in this post actually sounds interesting and you’d like to hear more about it, please let me know! But for now, my wine-calmed system is going to go back to my music and possible an adult colouring book – even teachers need to switch off and let it all go sometimes!