You know I mentioned that feeling “oh GOD Linda, WHY did you do this….” Well I’m having it again in bucket-loads. I am very much of the “chuck me in at the deep end and see if I swim” school of learning new skills. This was what prompted me to volunteer to run an hour long maths lesson last Friday when the class teacher was off sick and I would have to fly solo and without the use of a parachute. The deputy head volunteered to sit in but as it was my first whole lesson, I wanted to avoid blotting my copybook by messing it up in front of him. I told him that I’d be happy to go for it alone more to save my bacon if I did a rotten job than out of bravado. (I'll never forgive you if you tell him that...I'm hoping to get a job at this wonderful school at the end of my training!)

Anyway, it turned out he liked my gung-ho spirit and as a reward, I got my own group to run for the whole of this week. These are a high attainment group who are learning something brand new. The other children won’t be covering this topic for another couple of weeks because they are going to be consolidating the work they all did last week. So, I have nine bright young things and I get to be their maths teacher for a week. Five hours of me and them. Five hours of potential pitfalls and disasters. It took me 12 hours yesterday to plan the 5 hours of lessons and I will need at least another hour each day to translate from the weekly plan to the daily plan. Right now I am thinking “why oh WHY”. If it goes well, I will be buzzing with adrenaline for the entire week and if it goes badly I’ll want to crawl into a hole and die.

My fingers are crossed. I have what I’d consider to be much, much more than a healthy dose of nerves and I can’t imagine I’ll get much in the way of sleep. I’ve packed and unpacked my briefcase and packed it again. I’ve checked my files are in dropbox, on my memory stick, emailed to myself over and over and I still can’t bring myself to go in without taking my laptop in case the files I’ve placed elsewhere don’t work for whatever reason. It’s a bit like me taking ten pens into my finals because I was so worried about multiple pen failure or sending myself my dissertation in case I accidentally left it on the train etc etc.

Looking at the photo, I notice my beautiful wedding ring and wonder if I’ve told the story of DMs lost ring? It’s not for today but I’ll try to get to it soon!

Wish me luck and send me good vibes…