Week 23: March mayhem

Here we are at the end of another week so it's time for my teaching reflection.

To re-cap: I teach twelve 90-minute GCSE English lessons every week to six groups of high-needs pre- and post-16-year-olds in our FE college. We use the AQA English Language exam board, and each term we alternate between focusing on fiction and non-fiction. This term, I'm reviewing how to tackle Paper Two (the non-fiction paper).

Seven days ago, Lady Gaga released her new album "Mayhem", and honestly, that word is the first one that comes to mind as I try to sum up my experiences this week.

If mayhem means disorder or chaos, then that comes pretty close to how it sometimes feels to work in an alternative provision setting. I'm in a pressure cooker environment where anything could (and does) happen at any given moment.

We're housed in an old building which means most of the classrooms can only be accessed by walking through adjacent rooms because there's no connecting corridor. This means that staff and students are frequently (through no fault of their own) interrupting lessons by having to access the classroom to get to where they need to be. It's distracting to have parades of people passing though, disrupting the flow of the lesson, but it's out of my control so there's nothing that can be done about it.

The alternative provision faculty I work with has this month implemented a new rule: all mobile phones must be placed in a holder on the wall, or in students' bags on the floor. It's an effective rule, but one that should have been in place since September; it has caused conflict with students who are battling against this change in policy. If I had a pound for every time I had to ask someone to put their phone away, I'd be a millionaire by now.

In FE alternative provision student eruptions happen all the time, and of course, there is usually an underlying reason for this: unmet needs, concerns outside college, miscommunication, complex circumstances, conflict with other students, or any number of other possible reasons. I am surrounded by supportive staff, but the near-constant barrage of issues does take a toll and by the end of the week I feel a little bit less resilient and a little bit more battle-scarred.

As ever, though, there have been shining moments to celebrate success: due to absences, one of my groups only had two students in it and they both worked incredibly hard and produced the highest quality work that I'd ever seen from them; every group managed to identify writers' methods and opinions in a piece of 19th century non-fiction writing, and most students were able to compare them to a contemporary article on the same topic; and some students have asked me for revision materials, which shows me that they are starting to think about, and prepare for, the forthcoming assessments and real exams. All these things are reassuring.

Looking beyond my college, I had a piece of writing published this week in the English Association's latest issue of The Use of English journal, and I submitted another piece for the next issue.

I have one more teaching week left before we have two weeks of assessments, followed by a mountain of marking during Easter. The GCSE exams will be here before we know it.