Monday Time to meet and greet: if performance pay was based on the size of a box, hold-all or Sainsbury’s groceries basket that staff use to bring in work marked over the weekend, the newly qualified modern linguists would win. UN weapons inspection dossiers pale into insignificance.
TUESday A tricky parent. “I’m not generalising, but I have never trusted Catholics.” I’m taken aback. “I’d hate to hear you when you were generalising then.” Now to prepare a job advertisement. Freud would say I have “logo envy”. We have a couple but I want moreI more! I’ll not sleep until our ads are as multi-faceted and richly designed as a Native American totem pole.
wednesday Easy day today, apart from a fight in my history class. A couple of 6ft Year 11s have a difference of opinion. I intervene, manfully, pausing for a nanosecond to consider what home improvements I could get on with if one of them ends up hitting me. They don’t.
thursday Another tricky parent, unhappy with the parent of another child who has been upsetting his daughter. He is insistent: “I want her in here with meI I’ll look her in the eye and we will sort it.”
friday My car parking space is blocked by the personal hygiene lorry. The week is starting to tell on me as I plug in the laptop and check my emails.
I have been sent junk mail; instead of a missive from the DfES, I have mail from “latinochickwantstomeetyou”. I think not. Not with syntax like that anyhow.
Benedict Lee is a deputy head of a Catholic comprehensive school in the south-east. He writes under a pseudonym
