But by next Friday we’ll have reached the end of this mammoth term. Usually you know it’s week ten and you just have to get the kids through those last few days when they’ve really just had enough of each other. This time though… there was still two more weeks to go.

My lot though haven’t done too bad a job of putting up with each other in the lead up to the end of term. Sure, they’re occasionally getting narky with each other (that’s an educational term) and are starting to get on each other’s goat, but generally they’re trying to to completely wind each other up. This means I tend to leave work each night with all my hair and my sanity a little further away from the edge than could otherwise be the case. But… I’ve worked out how to best manage them and we’re running along quite smoothly.

Loudly, but smoothly!

But then there was this afternoon…

Rotations. I’m running the music rotation for our five grades. Two each week, and my own grade once a fortnight. Today… today I had two other grades for the final time this term. And they were both absolutely mad…

Now, my own kids are by no means perfect. They’re quite probably the noisiest, rowdiest and more talkative bunch of kids in the entire school. But at least they generally work as well as they can and genuinely like or at least openly tolerate each other. Also, there’s not a single behaviour problem amongst them. They could just talk underwater with a mouthful of marbles. In fact, one of the other teachers today after having them for Rotations herself asked me whether I was going to go deaf by the end of the year. Yes. They’re a talkative bunch.

But… after half a year, I’ve learned to appreciate all their little positive sides and little antics. And to be honest, they more than balance out the rowdy, talkative bits that make sitting a test a fair old challenge for me when trying to get them to sit still, shut up, and not try to help each other out. Yes, they’re that helpful for each other that they’d even help each other out in all innocence through a test!

Meanwhile though… I’ve just sat through two sessions after lunch with two grades that didn’t want to listen, couldn’t keep their mouths shut, and generally just weren’t in the right frame of mind to do anything.

Yes… quite a lot like my lot, eh?

But… I’ve grown used to my lot…

I guess it’s like they all say… you can’t smell your own, eh?

It’s the Monday of the Queen’s Birthday long weekend and I’ve just drawn the curtain on my reports for the kids for this first half of the year. Okay, later on this afternoon I’ll pull the curtain back just a little and give them a once over look to check for errors and things – a second read through should be mandatory for any sort of report – but I think I can safely put them aside for most of the afternoon and enjoy what’s left of the public holiday.

The reports won’t be handed out to the kids for another fortnight, but they’re still to be proof-read then handed back for minor tweaks and corrections after the cross-examination. There’s usually at least one sentence you’ve snuck in that someone from higher up requests be, at best altered or at worst removed completely. You have to be honest and truthful when reporting to parents about their abilities and where they are, but only for a given value of ‘truth’. Sentences like ‘your son is in the half of the grade that makes the top half possible‘ and ‘somewhere your son is depriving a village of its idiot‘ tend to be frowned upon.

Which is a little bit of a shame, because I’m sure it would make both the writing and the reading of these reports much more entertaining. Mind you… there’d probably only be a select calibre of parents who’d appreciate the humour, eh?

I think I’m fairly happy with what I’ve served up though, although I’ll probably spend a bit of time tonight running through the ’scores’ I’ve given the kids for ‘effort’ and ‘behaviour’. Have another think about them and decide on whether they’ve been very good or acceptable in those cases. Have they worked as well as they can, or could they do with a rocket placed under them to get them moving a little more in the second half of the year? That’ll be the final thing I re-read before uploading them to the server tomorrow morning, along with perhaps a final sentence addressed to each kid at the end.

They’re funny things, these reports. Easy enough to write when you know the kid, and after five months you generally know the kid. The strange part is you’re often reporting on them with an eye on the rest of the year, or where they’re going to be in the future. There only seem to be a few parents who come in to talk about their kid in the mid year interviews who have read the reports with their eyes on where the kid is now. Most of the time you’re talking about where they’re going but, honestly, I think the best part of a kid is seeing where the little tacker is right now.

I guess that’s one of the best things I like about this job. I may not get to see who they are in the future, but every day I get to see who they are now.

Yes. Quite an important day to get those Prep parents hooked early and enrolled, eh?

Mind you… for a better chance of hooking them in, the joint should be neat and tidy, eh?

So that’s what most of us spent the first fifteen minutes or so after lunch doing this afternoon.

‘Kids! Get back out there and CLEAN THAT YARD!’

So we did.

With strict instructions that we were to clean the area around our classroom WITHOUT playing on the monkey bars, we scurried around along the gutters, burrowed under the play equipment, dragged one or two inquisitive and over-eager kids out from between the two portables, scampered through the bushes and fished little wrappers out of the puddles on the asphalt.

And laughed at the older kids who thought they’d cheat the system by pinching rubbish from our grade’s bin to show that they’d collected a lot themselves, only to walk back to their own grade with their friends trailing after them singing the ‘Bin Scab!’ Chorus.

We did have to call it off short though. Not only was it a little chilly by then, but the clouds decided it was time to open up too.

Ever tried to get twenty five kids across the yard to wash their hands and back again while it’s raining and they think it’s more fun to dance around in it? Or decide that the taps are all well and good for normal washing… but we can wash our hands just as well by rinsing them in the asphalt puddles or scraping water off the monkey bars.

Well… we got them inside eventually, and generally dry all things considered.

‘What’s next, Mr V?’

‘Okay kids… now you can clean the room.’

‘AWWW!!!!’

Well, that’s probably not quite true. They were standing in a long row across the netball court playing ‘Elimination’ together. You know the game – the first person has a shot at goal (on a basketball backboard), and if they get the goal, they go to the end of the line and are still in. If they miss, the next player has their turn and if they get it in, the first person is out. Play continues until one person is left. Well, they were playing that, and half of them were from my grade last year. I wandered across mainly because I noticed the kid who was out lying down on the asphalt so I had to go across and ask if he was out.

‘Yep! HE got me out!!’ while pointing with a friendly accusing finger to one of the other boys.

‘HE got you out? Gee, you must really suck!‘

‘Yep!’

Anyway, this lead to half of them crowding around asking that great question the kids from your previous year always end up asking you…

‘We were your best grade, weren’t we, Mr V?’

How do you answer that?

There are probably new teachers out there right now wondering how you mould the kids into a perfect grade. How you change the behaviour of the whole group to fit that perfect mould. Where they listen intently, work hard, produce great work that all comes out great, don’t talk out of line and behave impeccably all day. Well, to those people, I say ‘don’t fix what ain’t broke‘!

Bad behaviour, yeah, for sure, work on changing that… but who really wants a perfect grade? A perfect grade is what you make of it. Let’s take that question from above again.

‘We were the best grade, weren’t we, Mr V?’

How do you answer that?

It’s true, last year’s group were fantastic. And they quite possibly pipped the grade before that as the best I’ve had, although there are kids in each grade I’ve really enjoyed. Okay, there have been a few grades that have given me merry hell all year, but I take the approach that if you can find one of two kids in each grade that make it absolutely worth your while to come to work every day, then no matter what the rest of the grade’s like, you can still enjoy your job.

Fortunately, the last few years have been very good. It’s been a while since I’ve had what I’d consider a ‘hard’ grade. And boy, was that particular one a doozy! On the plus side though, I still get along really well with one of the kids and keep in touch fairly regularly, so I also see that year as one I wouldn’t have swapped.

But how do you answer the kids when they ask you that? Because you know it’s going to filter back to the kids you’re teaching right now, and probably to the kids you taught the year before, who asked you last year if they were the best. And so on and so on.

I’ve got a really interesting mob this year too. Not a single behaviour problem amongst the whole lot of them. Not a single kid on medication or tablets. And often not a single kid who would rather sit still and listen than have a good old chat with whoever may currently be sitting next to them.

Yep. They’re a great, big, dirty mob of chin-waggers. And it’s taken me until nearly the end of May to regularly get them sitting relatively quietly on the floor to listen to me. It’s only these last few weeks where they’ve cottoned on to the fact that, hey, guess what, I’M the bloke you’re supposed to be listening to, not Noddy sitting next to you!

So yes, each day I’ll work to keep them listening and not carrying on their own conversations or piping up with their own contributions to the discussion without bothering with the process of putting their hand up first and waiting their turn. I mean… that just takes too long, eh? By the time Mr V gets ’round to me it’ll be too late, and besides… what I have to say is so funny it’ll make you all wet yourselves!!

Yep. It’s one of those groups of kids.

But… really… do I need to clamp down on them and turn them into a bunch of quiet, attentive little gnomes sitting serenely before me? They generally work hard, they get along with each other, and they look out for each other. Okay, I had to have a stern little chat with one feller who gave one across the face to one of the girls during lunchtime, but he stood in front of everyone afterwards and told them why our grade wouldn’t get a Yard Behaviour award this week. A one off blue like that doesn’t tarnish the kid for the whole year.

I honestly couldn’t see this group of kids working as well if they sat quietly all day and barely said ‘boo’. It just wouldn’t be right. Actually, it’d be downright spooky!

So no… while they’ll talk the handle off a door while underwater with a mouthful of marbles, I think I’ll put up with that side of them in return for a group that enjoy coming each day, enjoy each other’s company, and make me laugh.

Who wants a perfect grade? I reckon I’ve got one pretty close as it is.

At any moment the School Captains will knock sheepishly on the door and ask if you can bring your kids out now, even if they’re right in the middle of a big lesson you’ve spent all week working towards and… bugger me… they’re actually working well! Then when you’re outside in the first clear spot you can find, you set about the task of getting twenty five excited kids into a line from the shortest to the tallest. Meanwhile… the kids at the front have worked up their excitement levels to near-hysteria and by the time you’ve gotten halfway down the line, the front half is once more a shambles. Meanwhile, you haven’t even reached the end of the line where already one kid is grizzling because his mate behind him messed up his hair or messed up his collar. Which only starts the other kids off laughing at the poor kid!

Yup. Trying to organise a row of excited kids into an ordered, height-sequenced line can be like juggling jelly with a tea strainer.

Anyway… we managed it and wandered over to have our grade photo taken, a feat that took all of a minute once we were standing nicely on various benches or sitting on seats, hoping the tall kids up the back wouldn’t fall off and break their legs, because a phonecall home to mum explaining why little Johnny broke his leg having his photo taken leads to all sorts of questions you just don’t have time to answer. Fortunately, none of them fell off during the photo, but there was a moment of madness when the photographer told all the kids up the back to jump down…

Not to worry… the photos have been taken, and fortunately we got them all done before recess, so the boys particularly didn’t have to worry about getting filthy during playtime. They were very happy about that. Probably a good thing they were all wearing their uniforms too and not in any old dress ups they found at home! All’s well that ends well…

But I’m still a little concerned about the kid who whispered quietly as I was having my own photo taken… something about ’should’ve gotten your mum to do your hair this mornin’, Mr V!’

Related posts: Your mum’s here, boy… better get out of that dress!

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You’ve done the hard yards through the first few weeks setting your various rules and expectations. You’ve relocated certain sections of your classroom population to a term of service keeping the rubbish bin company. You’ve proven that, just because you’re doing the knock-kneed dance of the bloated bladder, doesn’t mean that the teacher’s going to cave into your boredom and work-avoidance tactic and let you spend five minutes of your handwriting time wandering the slightly stale refuge of the toilets until you think you’ve reached that length of time where, any more and you’re pushing it, and any less and the other boys will think you’ve caved in.

No. This is the point where the kids have woken up to the fact that, despite all the evidence, you’re the teacher and, knock me down with a feather, you’re actually running this sanitised Lord of the Flies tribe of egos and insecurities.

For me, that point arrived at 9:35 this morning, ten minutes or so into our final reading block Learning Centre activity for the week.

All four tables were working quietly, helping each other out with hints and pointers, and if they were talking about something other than their work, they were still working AT THE SAME TIME! Granted, a bit of that might have been because the one table filled with boys were doing the mix and match cloud activity and half of them had spread themselves across the floor to give themselves room to organise their cloud pictures, names and descriptions and were therefore far enough away from each other not to flick each other’s ears while the other poor kid wasn’t looking. Still, they were all working properly, and it was quiet, serene and peaceful in the classroom.

So, of course, there was only one thing I could possibly do.

I gave all four tables about 50 points each over the next twenty minutes until the session was finished.

That point might have arrived, but a healthy dose of blatant bribery hardly ever goes astray, eh?

Whether others may think it morally ethical or not, or grizzle about rewarding kids with abstract things like table points or even, heaven forbid in this age of apparently obese Australian children, give them a lollyroo, the kids kept working well all day. It was a fantastic end to the week, and left me, the poor feller in charge who’s hoping day by day his facade of a teacher who really knows what’s going on will last one more day, feeling quite proud of them all. They think well of me, they want to be here, and they’re enjoy their learning. It can only mean respect.

Then I found the rubber spider on my desk after I’d sent them all home…