Coffee? Chocolate? Wine? Humour? What busy teachers do to get through report-writing time.

True story...

I was struggling. I was behind in report writing, short on sleep, and trying to soldier on with a bad case of the man flu. I was sitting in the staff room looking blankly at my laptop screen, brain... dead...

Anita the Year 4 teacher waltzes effortlessly in and pirouettes her coffee mug into the top rung of the dishwasher. Mmm, I muse. She has a much heavier workload than me. "Anita, how do you do it?" She closes the dishwasher door, looks up at my tired expression, and with a wry smile, a twinkle of the eye and a flick of her wrist she mimics knocking back what I imagine is a glass of her favourite Semillon Sauvignon Blanc.

As she waltzes back out I determine I will drop into the local bottle shop on the way home.

Cheryl, my supervisor, walks in and asks how am I going? I reply with "I'm trying to shake this dreaded man flu". Her mischievous/sarcastic reply is "I've heard it's really bad". And, without pause for pity, she reiterates her question "Actually, I meant 'how are your reports going'?"

I decided not to go home via the bottle shop. Instead, I tanked up on high octane coffee, did an all-nighter and blitzed those #!*!#*! reports!

Got any survival tips or memes to share that might help teachers get through this extra-busy time?

Regards

James Phelps

My tip: laugh or you'll cry. I'm a big fan of cartoonist John Atkinson's work - https://wronghands1.com/