Exercise 3 in the Write Your Life project.

On a typical morning, I wake up before the alarm goes at 0630, stumble through into the bathroom, then back into the sitting room where I get suited and booted for the day. (Gill, being a sensible type, gets to sleep in some more, so banging around the bedroom in the dark isn’t a particularly good idea). If I’m running to time, I nip into the office, check my mail and skim through my RSS feeds.

Because the commute into Middlesbrough is time dependent, I try to get out of the house by 0715. If I manage to do that, the run into the school where I’m on placement takes about 45 minutes—if I leave much later then it’ll take at least an hour, and punctuality is essential when you’re teaching.

I still find being in school as a ‘teacher’ a little weird; it’s like being backstage. Right now, I’m spending most of my time observing classes. I’ll be doing a little bit of teaching in the next week though, and I start my teaching practice proper at the beginning of November.

I’m enjoying lesson observations, but I’m itching to get teaching now. The way observations work is that I watch while the teacher introduces the topic, and then we both help the pupils with their exercises. I sometimes find it shocking what the kids get wrong though and, after spending almost all my school years ignoring teachers who nagged me to show my working and do some bloody homework for once, I’m finally starting to understand where they were coming from. I’ve even managed to explain to kids why it’s a good idea without having to resort to the “If you show the working and you go wrong, we can spot where you went wrong and you might not lose all the marks” gambit by pointing out that, whilst they may understand what they’re doing now, they’ll be coming back to these books in two years time when they’re revising for exams and a page full of answers isn’t that useful. +header: :trim-post nil The school day finishes at 1530 and it takes about an hour to get home (Middlesbrough’s clogged with parents doing the school run, so things take longer). Once I’m home I’ll either sit and read, do some preparation for the next day, burn some time on the X Box or hang out on IRC and generally catch up with mail and stuff. Gill’s usually home before me, and she’s recently been drawing the cooking short straw. Lately I’ve been going to bed by nine—I dread to think how I’m going to cope once I’ve started teaching; I’m exhausted now.

Every other Tuesday night however, I head over to the Cumberland for a singing session with a bunch of fellow folkies. The Cumberland session is one of the most enjoyable singarounds I’ve been to, it’s relatively small with a really high proportion of good singers. And, unusually these days, the majority of ’em sing traditional songs instead of modern songs in the ‘folk idiom’. Last night saw a particularly bloody selection of Child ballads, a couple of delightfully bawdy songs and the odd selection from the Sacred Harp. I think I may have been the only person who sang a ‘written’ song, and that was Composed in August, which isn’t exactly a new song. I’ve had some fabulous nights there, including one glorious evening with Alistair Anderson, Sandra Kerr, three of the Witches of Elswick and “fiddly” Jon Boden; at one point we were competing for who could sing the longest ballad (Fay Hield won with a 15 minute reading of Tam Lin) which we followed up with a couple of rounds of Peter Bellamy appreciation. We were glad there was an extension that night.

And then to bed. Not the most exciting of daily routines I’d be the first to admit, but I’m happy enough on it.