Monday morning . . .

I'm definitely in need of some of Brian's advice, and he says, "Use filters."

These are two excellent words for my present situation.

Firstly, I have so much marking that I'd probably cry if I didn't filter it into varying degrees of importance. Besides the usual books, I have 32 Year 8 Horror Stories to read, I have 4 classes of Christmas writing tests to mark, 32 GCSE coursework essays etc. Soon I will have another 32 mini-essays on "Holes" by Louis Sachar. How I will get through this mammoth load of marking is yet to be revealed.

Secondly, I'm not in peak physical condition, and almost fainted in briefing this morning. I had to shuffle out of the door to avoid keeling over. The problem there was that I'd been ill all weekend, and in briefings everyone is crowded into the staffroom which quickly becomes very hot and stuffy. Very few people are early enough to grab a chair, so it's more likely that you'll be standing, and that the senior team will be going on and on and on about something or other. Today I was phasing in and out (filtering?), unable to focus on what they were talking about, until the head of 6th Form started telling us about a girl who was knocked down by another 6th former on Friday.

We thought that the girl had "just" broken her leg, but she's now in a critical condition because the breaks and fractures are extremely severe, and the trauma of undergoing two long and complex operations led to her kidneys beginning to fail.

See how succinctly I can put it? Instead, we had a chronological account of every horrible detail of the poor girl's experience in hospital.

The girl also has two younger siblings in school, neither of whom have been told just how ill their sister is. I teach one of them tomorrow, and I have no idea how to cope with the situation. If he doesn't know how ill she is, then it would be strange to ask them to say a prayer for her, and obviously being a heathen, asking kids to say a prayer when I'm not obliged to by school rules is not something I'd do anyway. Still, I want to show some support.

Best, I think, to just give them a shitload of tasks and get them to work quietly and/or loudly.

I'd like to be able to filter this out, but the impact of something like this on a school is staggering. You see head teachers on TV giving speeches about how good pupil X was and it makes relatively little impact on you, but in the actual school there's a shift in everyone's concept of reality .

I hope she's ok, particularly for the sake of her two siblings (how awful to think your sister has two broken legs and then for her to die - I think their parents have made the wrong decision about not telling them), and also for the kid driving the car. His life now will be awful enough without something worse happening to her.

I don't have prayers, but she's in my thoughts.