I was covering for an English teacher for two hours, which is two lessons. Those two lessons were both for Year 7 classes. These are a few things from that day that stick in my mind:

When I first sat down at the teacher’s desk, I saw that her last sent email was to reception complaining that her substitute still hadn’t turned up. I had been called at 8:30am to be there as close to 9:00am as possible, and she had sent that email at 9:02am. I had managed to be at the school at around 8:55am, and got to her classroom at 9:05am. She seemed to be annoyed that I had taken so long to get to her, whereas I was proud that I managed to get there so quickly. I’d like to point out that I had never been to that school before, so I was amazed I was able to find her classroom in less that 5 minutes.

After leaving, the teacher came back after 10 minutes because she had forgotten something, and she said something that made the students laugh. Instead of asking them to quiet down, she simply raised her voice saying, “I’m bored with your laughing now!” The class fell silent and stayed that way until she left.

A girl came up to the desk almost in tears because she couldn’t concentrate on her work because someone further up the desk kept calling her name. When I told her to try to ignore him, she started actually crying, so I let her go to the bathroom to wash her face and calm down. I went to talk to the boy who was upsetting her, and he said that he wasn’t calling her name. He said that she was just upset because he told her no when she asked him to stop talking. Turns out, he was talking and bugging people because he was bored and couldn’t get on with his work due to not understanding what to do. Once I explained the work to him again, he stopped talking and got on with it.

A boy came up to the desk and opened with, “This is just a suggestion, but…” I thought, ‘Oh, here we go’. He continued, “…those boys back there don’t work when sat together, so you need to split them up.” I told him that I thought they were fine sat together, as I could see that they were all writing, and asked him to sit back down.

Half way through the lesson, a girl got up out of her seat and walked up to the same group of boys and started telling them off. I asked her to go sit down and her response was, “I’m just doing what you won’t.” I informed her that I will tell them to be quiet myself when I feel the need to, and that she needs to go sit down. Everyone started asking her if she had been given a ‘warning’, and I told them that she hadn’t.

When the second class came in, a girl walked straight up to the desk and seemed pretty panicked. She said, “I’m really, really sorry Miss…” I’m thinking, ‘What on earth could you have done in the first 30 seconds of the lesson?!’ She says, “…my handwriting is going to be really messy because I broke my fingers yesterday while playing netball, so I’m really sorry if you won’t be able to read it.” I told her that it was fine and completely understandable if her handwriting was messy. She literally broke her fingers the day before, but her main concern was her handwriting?!

Because the second class has English again that day with their actual teacher, the work they were left was just a filler exercise. A boy kept asking if I was sure that they wouldn’t get detention if they didn’t finish it, even after I assured him that it was just something to keep them busy for the lesson and didn’t count towards anything. These students had only been at this school for 4 days and they were already preoccupied with, and terrified of, punishment.

This point is more about the school as a whole. As a white person, I was in the minority in the classroom among the students. However, every single staff member I encountered was white. Also, judging by the classroom conversation, the students only get two warnings before being sent to isolation. For those who don’t know, isolation is when they sit alone in a room to do the work they have been set, whether it be for the lesson, the whole day, or even the whole week.