I’ve been enjoying the adventure of day-to-day supply work, not knowing from one day to the next where I’ll be sent or what I’ll be teaching. Will it be that charming girls’ school where the students greet you with respect and a thirst for knowledge? Will it be the rough-and-tumble, bog-standard comp, with all the good-natured banter and cheeky joie de vivre of the typical teenage urchin? Will I be called upon to surprise a class with my in-depth knowledge of Foucault’s post-structuralist critique of total institutions or have to wing it trying to remember how to solve quadratic equations? All of this safe in the knowledge that if the place sucks, I don’t have to go back again the following day.

Recently, however, I accepted an offer of a three-week placement: a boys’ school I’d driven past countless times on the route to the place where I’d spent the majority of my career (actually it was 10,000 times; I worked it out once. It was around then I realised it was probably time to quit). And so I’ve been learning another valuable skill of the supply teacher: how to adjust to a new regime.

As it happened, I’d spent most of my career in a girls’ school, and while I firmly believe that kids are kids, there were a few clear differences to being in an all-male environment. First off, boys can’t stop touching each other. I don’t know if it’s hormonal or the particular privations of being in a single-sex school, but seriously, the amount of poking, tweaking, squeezing, grabbing, flicking and otherwise trying to mess with each other wouldn’t have been out of place in an MMA bout.

The next surprise was to see that there are ways of dealing with difficult male pupils that just wouldn’t work with girls. There was the liberal use by the staff of ‘moron’, ‘idiot’, ‘waste of bloody space’, an approach I naively believed had gone out with mullets and caning in the eighties. There was also a significant amount of ‘physical’ behaviour management - one young male teacher would regularly walk up to boys in the corridor and thrust his chest into them, backing them into a wall, all without saying anything or identifying the particular misdemeanor he believed them guilty of committing. It was both impressive and slightly disturbing to watch.

Then there are the specific rules to be found in each school. At my new home, boys were under strict instruction to begin every lesson by lining up outside the classroom, shoulders tight to the wall, in total silence. Now, to be honest, this kind of cadet corps approach isn’t my thing at all, but when in Rome. And within a day I’d quite warmed to it - “left shoulders touching the wall” I barked enthusiastically. I did this once when I was in a different classroom without thinking and my well-drilled year 7 class all immediately spun around and faced the opposite direction.

Another change when you’re on a longer placement is that it feels right to get a little more involved with school life. The state of play for day-to-day supply is fundamentally to do what you have to do and get out; if supply teachers had a motto I like to think it would be “it’s not my problem”. But if you’re going to be somewhere for a week or so, step up. If you give the kids an assessment, offer to mark it. Ask your HoD if you can do anything for them during your free lesson. Share some of your best lesson ideas. If you’re only there for a few weeks, no-one really expects this from you so it’s nice to be that guy. The school will be asking for you by name before long and you can leverage that kind of reputation to bump up your daily rate. Or you could do it just because it’s a nice thing to do of course. One other piece of advice: make friends with the office staff, technicians and TAs; everyone knows these are the people that actually run the place.

I was also surprised by just how rapidly you can build relationships with the students. Kids can get attached fast and I was genuinely taken aback when after having taken a day off in my second week, on my return the following day I was surrounded by students demanding to know where I’d been. In the end, it was this that reminded me why I’d enjoyed teaching for so long because after all, it’s really all about the kids. For the most part, they’re a nice bunch who just want someone on their side, and that’s a great role to fill. For a few weeks, anyway.

The writer has recently taken up supply teaching after 20 years in a full-time teaching job