The calm before the storm

It's the holidays! Hurrah and hooray. But I have an awful lot of work to get done before the big kick off on Jan 5th. In a moment, I will continue filling in my learning journey wheel. But this evening, I hang up my work for the next few days and enjoy Christmas properly.

My emotions range from wildly excited to unbelievable panic. But I know it will be fine. Very difficult, but fine.

I have now learned all my children's names, which will hopefully surprise them greatly in the New Year. One of them suggested name tags, but there should be no need for that.

Speaking of the class and their welcome to me, here is an amusing welcoming piece of advice written to me. More to follow, but in the meantime Merry Christmas!

• If there were 3 things I would give you a tip on, it would be:

No running in the halls

Always use your manners

NEVER leave the dinner hall without asking.

Lessons learned...

Today I learned two things:

1. Getting the bus to work is going to be totally infeasible, rather than the train which is just mildly infeasible. The train will get me there in time as in before the children arrive, but about 30-40 minutes later than I need to prepare everything and generally stay sane. The bus will get me there late.

2. I have a lot of complicated paperwork to get used to, and I met it all today and it mildly scares me.

On the plus side, I had a goodbye curry to end our small group tonight and in the most polite and least unkind round I have ever played, I ended up with Madagascar on DVD which I've always fancied watching!

Tomorrow is school Christmas meal which should be fun I hope...

First meeting

I met the class today, they are lovely and now I have a lot of names to learn!

I know the names of the naughtier children (although they aren't really naughty at all!), and the distinctive names too. Always the way!

Tomorrow I'm going in to find out about all the paperwork-related malarkey involved with this job.

Pen and paper at the ready...

A New Job, A New Blog

I have recently secured a new full-time position as a Primary School Teacher, and tomorrow I'm going to make my third visit. My first was for the interview, where I taught 7 of my future charges while being observed by the teacher I'm replacing (who's off to have a baby). They all seemed nice children, but freakishly quiet.

My second visit was to fill in all the paperwork and see the classroom, but tomorrow I am going to meet the whole class for the first time. At the moment, I feel excited and nervous in equal measure. First impressions are important. I'm sure I'll come back really looking forward to Jan 5th, but at the moment, the unknown nature of everything means natural anxiety does kick in from time to time.

I'll be doing my best to conquer that, and hopefully in the coming months, this will become a place for me to record frustrations, successes and amusing anecdotes from this crazy journey.

I'll let you know how things go...