At work we have a combination of a busy week and two people away on holiday. Not that I'm complaining - the wet summer brought too many cancelled workshops and thus less money to those of us working in museum education.
Today we had a city school which I have previously found to be reasonably well behaved and hard working. As I have remarked before, what a difference a teacher can make! Today they were an undisciplined rabble! Admittedly their own class teacher was absent, and the teacher in charge of them knew only a few of the children from teaching them maths, but children who don't pay attention, wander around when they are supposed to be working or listening, and talk when other people are speaking tend to have acquired such behaviour over longer than a few days or weeks.
One of the adult 'helpers' was so much use that she couldn't distinguish between cottage and cobbler. The clue is "Go to the cobbler's workshop and find something Anne has left there to be mended". Her group brought down a frilly waitress apron dating from the 1930s which is left as a red herring on the cottage clothes line to confuse those children collecting Victorian pinafores for their 1881 character instead of a pair of clogs from the cobbler's shop! "I thought it couldn't be right" she said, "but there wasn't anything else there." How many times do I need to say "Ask me; that's what I'm here for."
Yesterday's (Tuesday) school from a largish village had a vast number of children with very obvious special needs (including Downs syndrome) yet coped well and behaved beautifully. Can it just be the difference between a city school and a country school?
Thursday
Another country school - KS1 this time - mainly little angels although there were a couple of little boys who had to be warned quite sternly not to touch the mangle until they were told to do so. Yes, I know, I was helping mummy with the mangling by the time I was three, and so were most people my age and older and we all have all our fingers, but nowadays we have health and safety - plus, of course, the fact that most children have never seen a mangle before and don't know about being careful. On the other hand is it going too far that the children aren't supposed to open the desks in the schoolroom lest they drop the lids on their fingers? There are days when I think longingly of the days when teachers would slam those lids down on the fingers of naughty children. I think yesterday's teacher was somewhat of that mind by the end of the day: he spoke with a certain nostalgia about the cane.
lizdavies
You may be under-estimating the difference the lack of usual teacher makes. Admittedly these were probably boorish children; but they would probably have respected their own teacher enough to behave far better under her eye.
I speak as a sometime supply teacher who knows only too well the class introduced by their teacher as very pleasant and knowing all the rules, who immediately start pushing the boundaries when she leaves in the hope that strange teacher doesn't know either the rules or the usual sanctions.