Listography – Five reasons I know I’m a ….. Teacher

Although I haven’t taught for a while in an actual school environment, the signs are still there in daily life;

One

I struggle in any environment where there are children to not tell them off if they are being silly; supermarket, cinema, playground, street even other people’s houses. I don’t know what comes over me, but I just have this overwhelming need to tell them to sit down and be quiet.  I’m fairly sure it happens with my own children from time to time too, they just think I’m mean.

Two

I detest chair swingers. What I mean by this is when children lean back on their chair. Why do they do it? I don’t know but in every class, you teach, there will be several chair swingers lurking and it drives me crazy. I am always telling my children not to do it and I remember a child in a school that I taught in did actually swing back too far, hit his head on the wall and ended up in hospital. He was fine fortunately and continued to swing on his chair, but it can be very dangerous as this story illustrates.

Three

If a teacher has told you off then you must have been doing something wrong. I always assume the worst when my children come home, tell me that they got into trouble but mysteriously they were doing nothing and it wasn’t fair. That doesn’t wash with me I’m afraid. There are very rare occasions when it’s true, but I generally find that on further interrogation, I mean questioning, that they were indeed up to something. My now teenager often accused me of having ‘my teacher head on’ on these occasions and said that it was so unfair that I never took his side.

Four

Activities are always organised and planned. That’s how I was with lessons and now I am the same with activities that I do with my own children. I’m not keen on spontaneity, there are too many things that can go wrong. I don’t go as far as risk assessing everything, but I probably could…

Five

I have silly amounts of stationery.  I admit that I am a bit of a stationery geek anyway, but we do have a rather copious amount of paper, notebooks, folders, pens and various other things of a distinctly stationery nature.  Drawers of the stuff.  I also have a ‘be prepared for anything’ pencil case filled with pens, marker pens, rulers, rubbers, pencil sharpeners and pencils.

So you can take the girl out of teaching, but you can’t take teaching out of the girl!