Awful, awful weeks

How funny that the last thing I wrote on the blog was, "Trust in the you of now." This is amusing because I've been hugely paranoid, insecure, tired and generally feeling shit all this week and last.

I've had TWO complaints from parents in TWO weeks. The parents involved were fucking crazy weirdos and awful mothers, plus their complaints were ridiculous (setting up an extra SATS booster session and rearranging it for the girl in question to attend; telling another girl to be quiet as she entered the classroom), and yet I felt so victimised and on the defensive that I really believed I was terrible with kids and everything was pointless. On Monday, having to explain myself AGAIN to the deputy head after another stupid phone-call from the mother, I cried. I was so ill and tired and felt like packing the whole job in.

Having five days off now puts everything into perspective (plus my last lesson today was observed by the acting head and went extremely well), and makes me feel a lot calmer about actually having a personality and sometimes putting it to use in the classroom. For a start, despite the complaints from the wet-blanket kids, using sarcasm or just being quick actually helps bad children pay attention and focus. Plus, if the kids are scared that you'll "own" them (i.e. verbally and quick-wittedly beat them to a pulp in front of their friends in an amusing manner) they tend to make fewer ridiculous marks and ask fewer imbecilic questions.

Anyway, though I'm feeling better mentally, I'm still physically shitty, so I'm spending the night in to recuperate.

On the plus side of being down about school, I fucked off school-work on Tuesday night to write an article about the tyranny of the so-called BRIT School which has unleashed the "talents" of Adele, Amy Winehouse, Leona Lewis, Kate Nash etc upon us. You can read it at a new music blog called Shovelled Up Like Muck, which I'll hopefully be regularly contributing too. I've put it in my Links list too, so check it out. My Foals CD is on its way to me, so I expect I'll write up a review of that imminently.