Autumn Days

^{Autumn Days when the grass is jewelled and there’s silk inside the chestnut shells…}

^{(“Autumn Days”- Traditional)}

Life has suddenly become a bit more interesting as my latest teaching practice is school has begun. This week we had four preliminary days in preparation for 6 weeks of teaching from the 5th of November onwards. The school I shall be teaching at it is pretty good and the staff have been really welcoming. I shall be teaching a joint year 5/6 class- that’s 8-10 year olds. They are a challenging class but I’m actually quite excited to be teaching them. It kind of feels that the last two and a bit years of training have been building up to this point and for once in my life I have confidence that I can actually do this. I have been saying for a long time though that this placement needs is the one where I will either flourish or fall apart and I know which of those I want it to be.

It was a fun week in school practising songs for the harvest assembly and doing all sorts of other things. They were doing some RE and one of the questions asked was “Who gives us salvation?” One child’s response was“the AA” which was pretty funny. There was also a special football thing where a guy brought in a big inflatable goal and all the kids got to have a go at kicking the ball into it and it would measure how fast they kicked it. I got to have a go and I managed 39 mph though I know I could have done better than that.

It’s not been all good though as I’ve been having to get up at 6AM every morning which is considerably earlier than I would otherwise be getting up. My body is allergic to this time of the morning. That may sound silly but it seems to be true. I’ve now thrown up at all three of my placement schools because I feel so ill in the mornings. I’ve tried eating breakfast, not eating breakfast, getting more sleep, drinking more and even some more bizarre things but nothing seems to work. I cannot work out the cause. Maybe it is just the early mornings messing with my body though on the other hand it may be some kind of physical manifestation of anxiety. I don’t feel particularly anxious but maybe I am subconsciously and that’s the way it’s coming out. I’ve tried desperately to get a Doctor’s appointment but there is none at all available before I go back into school so it looks like I’m going to have to just try and get through it. It’s not good at all though.

Recently I’ve got into watching the BBC Breakfast news in the mornings. I get to hear all the main headlines and then laugh at the pure randomness of the guests they have on each day. It can be anyone from the stars of TV show Merlin to two hygiene experts explaining how to wash your hands properly (yep, that second one really happened). I also like the drama it contains because it’s live in the mornings sometimes there are live announcements and speeches during the programme and they often try to guess the news: “_____ is expected to say that ________________ today”. It’s a barrel of laughs.

It’s now feeling very Autumn-like outside and the temperature has finally begun to drop here. I love this season more than any other- the colours make everything look particularly beautiful. I went for a long walk in the cold today, wearing my scarf for the first time since the Winter and I captured these great scenes:

^{The colours make me feel all warm inside}

^{More fantastic colours}

I was thinking earlier how much things have changed since the start of this year, since my last placement ended in March. Back then things were terrible for various reasons and I was the lowest I had ever felt. Now, after an amazing summer I’m pretty upbeat and looking forward to gradually taking over a class pretty much full time. I feel so grown up now and finally independent. Things aren’t perfect but they are better than they have been for a long, long time and the future looks pretty bright!