School

We're on holidays from CU this week and next week, so I've taken the liberty to go back to Brentwood where I was teaching last year and do some relief teaching, much to my surprise I've enjoyed it way more than I thought I would, now that I no-longer work there full time it's giving me an oppotunity to get out of the house and earn some good money and I've loved catching up with my old teacher friends and even some ex-students. It's also helped me to realise a number of things about why teaching is so rediculously stressful and how nice teaching can be without all that stress such as:
- Not needing to prepare for classes (or think of something on the spot because you've been doing report writing/proof-reading/collating).
- No marking
- No reports
- No meetings
- No need to follow up student discipline all the time
I feel like I'm hardly working at all and yet I'm getting paid for it - it's lovely!
I've been amazed at the number of students who both remember me and want to say hello and seem genuinely glad to see me, while I do love student work, I did invest a lot of time in some of these students over my two years of teaching and I feel like (much to my surprise) that I really did make some sort of impact (because you're so busy and stressed, you rarely get to either ponder on or reflect on the difference you might be making).

Relief work is giving me a whole new perspective on teaching, or perhaps confirming the perspectives I already had - it's hard, it's stressful, the hours are long and some of my friends look like they need 6 weeks to recover from the 12 week term, not that other professions aren't hard but I realised even more that when I thought I was going crazy last year, I probably was.

Thank God for teachers and good ones at that!