Inset days within MY school

First things first: I don’t know what INSET stands for. It was basically two days of in staff training/ bonding and preparing the classrooms. There were more staff in the school than I had previously thought- like fifty, including all the cooks and cleaners and admin guys. I love the cooks and cleaners and admin guys; they make the family environment of a school all the more tangible. They make it the microcosm that it is. If it was all teachers and kids, I think it’d feel more like a military institution than a family homestead.

We did a lot of training with the teachers at the secondary school down the road as well, which, whilst interesting to see the guys who’ll be teaching the teenagers of the town, was a bit boring because the training was more generic and broad. It was like Powerpoints on safeguarding children and fire safety- a hilarious video that one, as far as fighting fires go. They’d updated it for the 21^st Century but it was still full of bad acting and random fires burning in isolated bins in the middle of empty rooms.

I found all these Powerpoints and seminars a distraction from getting the classrooms ready. The training with the secondary school teachers were so boring in fact, I actually fell asleep with my head in my hands. It was a practiced technique from university; I positioned my head so I was looking down at the handout, hands cupping my eyes and forehead like I was deep in concentration, yet fast asleep. I suppose I should feel disappointed that none of these hardened teachers recognised my slack behaviour. Or maybe they did, they just couldn’t be bothered to call me up on it. There was a series of free buffets for all this training though, so, swings and roundabouts. Actually, swings, swings, swings, swings. Do you know how horrible it is to sit in a staff room where the only sound is six other mouths using six sets of teeth to chew their way through dry bread, Hobnobs and extra crunchy apples? Jeez! The sound of other people eating appears MAGNIFIED in school staff. It’s like I’m sitting inside their ear canals. It’s like they’re grinding shards of glass into the bones of my jaws. I don’t relish all the lunch hours I’m going to spend in that staff room at ALL.   

The main exercise in those few days was, as I said, getting the classrooms up, and this meant displays. We tore down those awful ones we’d made in the Generation Game the week before and set up actual half way decent ones. Then we set up the other boards in our room, as well as the ones in the library, the corridors and the hallways. God, so many displays. I thought teaching was all about paperwork, I had no idea it was actually about drawing, cutting, sticking and stapling. Am I meant to be good at this stuff? I’m not. And because I’m a bit of a perfectionist, no line ever looked straight, no edge ever looked well trimmed, no staple or blue tac ever appeared subtle enough. After working at such activities from 7:30 to 5:30 though, you just have to draw the line somewhere and hope that no one will notice if a border is a few degrees off dead straight, or the colour combinations of a double mount don’t completely complement each other. Last word, I found the ten hour work days easily manageable, even with eating and exercising and sleeping. Nothing of report there.