Halfway through the busiest year of my life

It's unbelievable. There's one week to go before I enjoy a well-earned three week holiday, and even that will be punctuated by work. The life of a first-year teacher is not enviable, unless you happen to be that first-year teacher and love your job. That said, I enjoy my job more in theory than in practice at the moment. This eight-week term is well known as the busiest time of the year, with exams, marking, parent-teacher nights, and reporting putting a lot of pressure on everybody. Those things create nearly a full-time job in their own right; never mind the actual teaching of children. When one is inexperienced, the consequence of a heavy extra workload is that one cannot properly prepare for the 4.5 (on average) lessons per day. Teaching suffers, the students suffer, and I suffer. The ultimate consequence is exhaustion.

Am I complaining? No. It's a learning experience, and I know that this time next year will run more smoothly. Writing reports, for instance, is much more time consuming when you haven't done it before. Writing a decent exam takes more time than anyone outside the profession could imagine, but that also surely gets easier with practice. Marking is time-consuming, but at least it's not stressful. And parent-teacher nights are usually a positive experience that help you understand more about the students.

The first term was really busy because everything is a new experience, and working in a deservedly elite school, there's plenty of pressure from parents not to be a bad teacher. In the second term, I was forced to fly on instinct. I have planned exactly three lessons in seven weeks. The rest I more or less worked out as I went along. That's sometimes a good thing, but often the result is tetchy students, opportunities for misbehaviour, and me falling behind the curriculum. It's going to take a lot of planning next week and during the holidays to get things back on an even keel.

Nonetheless, there have been heaps of positive experiences, many learning experiences, and a general sense of doing the right thing with my life. The professionalism of the maths department at my school is superlative. It adds to my workload, because expectations are high, but it makes the job more satisfying as well.