Expect the unxpected
NQT. Year 5. Week 1. Bloody hell. I thought (naively) that I was over prepared for this first week back. In theory, I was. But what I learnt very quickly was that no amount of planning, preparation, organisation and panicking can truly prepare you for this week. So this is a little recount of my first week, including what no one told me and what I could never have anticipated. 1. Firstly, my biggest error was spending a majority of my long summer holidays from ending uni to starting work panicking about the job. I spent days, weeks, on my laptop writing reams of plans and frantically saving fun games and activities to my now maxed-out memory stick. I came into school at least once (three times) a week to familiarise myself with the system, schemes, and buildings. I tweaked every element of my classroom a thousand times to achieve perfection (I'll come to this later). With my heart in the right place, excitement and motivation drove me to - in short - exhausting my