Wanted! Depressed and anxious adults to look after young people.

This is my lunch break from marking. It's Sunday and I've already alienated my family because of work and am missing the sunshine. Oh woe is me. (tiny violin) I really hate moaning teacher stories. It does my head in.

I know why they moan, but the lack of direct organised action is pathetic and the same people who moan are the idiots who mark all weekend and make the job impossible for everybody else who wants a sense of balance in their lives...

Wait a minute. Um... Er... 

I have become the thing I hate. Next I'll discover I drive an estate car and have a mortgage! 

Anyway, on a day when my 'happy place' is a bit difficult to find, I'm consoling myself by trying a new way to mark more efficiently and effectively (oh, the delicious irony of preaching efficiency on a Sunday) and listening to Terry Riley. The latter is wonderful and is just about the only thing stopping me driving to Dundee in my bare feet. The former seems to at least have novelty value that makes the mind numbing task of saying the same thing again and again with slight variations slightly more bearable. It's a bit like being Terry Riley. (one for the fans of avant garde neo-classical composers there.) Hey - I've got another one for you - wait for it.... Should I give them all a C? For slightly different reasons? (that's 95% of the blog readers gone then. Still, the joke was worth it)

Anyways, I was just chuckling wryly to myself as I stood by the kitchen window, allowing myself the guilty treat of seeing outside for a minute and thinking about teacher mental health in a different light.

https://www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-news/eight-10-teachers-have-had-mental-health-problems-and-workload-blame

Imagine the outcry if the government announced they were specifically going to employ people with mental health issues to teaching positions.

Could you imagine if a core requirement of the job description was to be 'currently experiencing or recently have experienced chronic stress, crippling anxiety or a total sense of hopelessness and overwhelming misery'?

Oh, we're all for inclusion of people with mental health issues in wider society but 'what about the children' etc...

It makes you wonder doesn't it? What if the powers that be deliberately constructed a situation in which young people were looked after by people experiencing the symptoms and reality of mental health problems? What if indeed? It makes me chuckle wryly. Or slightly insanely. I don't know any more.

The essays aren't bad to be fair. There's always that. It's worth flirting with semi permanent clinical fed upness for. I get paid I suppose.

File this under 'top teacher banter'