Teaching is a lonely business. Just you and a sea of expectant faces waiting for you to deliver. And teaching is never lonelier than when that sea of faces belongs to your assembled colleagues eagerly expecting in-service training day entertainment.

As a kind of teaching career rite of passage, it was bound to happen one day, and my turn duly came. Could I make a presentation on “whole-school literacy” to the entire teaching staff, plus the teaching support assistants, plus the initial teacher training students? Even without the benefit of the numeracy strategy, I knew we were talking about an audience well into three figures. Nothing to it, I’m sure.

Before the event, colleagues who weren’t having to step up and do it themselves could not have been more generous with their advice. Admittedly, many of them had a wicked gleam in their eye, but they were emphatic with their preferences. On no account use a flip chart and marker pens. So last year. Similarly, overhead projectors are passe. PowerPoint presentations are de rigueur. And don’t forget the opening joke.

They knew, as I did, that PowerPoint and jokes are fraught with dangers and potential pitfalls. Nothing offers more fun than seeing one of your own demonstrate incompetence in the face of recalcitrant technology, or witnessing the metaphorical tumbleweed being blown across the school hall after the opening “sure-fire” joke has had the impact of a collapsed souffle. I questioned their motives as, in the words of Confucius, “Happiness is seeing your best friend being blown off the roof of his house.”

I decided to surround myself with expertise, on the basis that if the barrel organ doesn’t work, it’s no good blaming the monkey. So step forward the ever-helpful ICT technician, a volunteer mouse operator, and the workshop leaders who found, to their chagrin, that their “I’ll think about it”, to my ears was “Yes, definitely. I’d love to do it.” My thanks to them remain engraved on the heart.

So how did it go? Well, the Russian peasant woman joke* did raise a muffled titter, and after including a dollop of self-deprecation and stirring in an indulgent homage to the glories of Carlisle United, I found the audience was with me all the way - until I shook them off at the station.

Teachers have an ambivalent view of Inset days. They like the dress-down informality, they like the no-kids, less-stress atmosphere, and they like the opportunity to grumble about Inset days. Why else would so many enthusiastically abbreviate the soubriquet Baker day to B-Day?

But our training day was a success if, for no other reason than as a team, we had the opportunity to talk and plan with colleagues, share good practice and take decisions on how, together, we would continue to “make a difference”. For teaching is a lonely business, and as Auden almost said, “What will survive of us is collegiality.”

John Clarke is head of English at Balby Carr school, Doncaster*After living for more than 70 years near the RussianPolish border, the peasant widow woman one day had a visit from the authorities. They told her that the international boundary had been changed and from now on she was living in Poland. Her response was: “Thank goodness, I couldn’t stand another Russian winter.”