Next term sees my return to the relief teaching pool. Not a fact I greet with any great joy. If you remember the shite that you heaped on relief teachers when you were at school, things haven’t changed.
Actually they have, I never called a relief teacher the names I’ve been called.
It’s a job that requires a certain amount emotional distance (for self preservation’s sake) from the students that you have to simultaneously watch over/engage/attempt to teach all without the usual benefit of being a cornerstone of their lives.
You get the constant passive aggressive conflict mixed with the occasional “ F*ck of you c*nt” thrown in just to keep things interesting.
Frankly, if shovelling shit paid as much as relief teaching I’d happily wade knee deep through crap.
But with endings come new beginnings.
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I finished the rough draft of short story Saturday for the workshop with Lisa Hannett that I mentioned here. It will be critiqued by Lisa and my peers in the course this week. It may not seem like much, especially for some of my readers who are experienced authors and short story writers, but it’s the first decent work of fiction I have completed to draft 1 stage since 1990. Frankly everyone could tell me its shite and I’d be happy just to have proven to myself that I could do it again.
Thankfully, having passed it out to an Alpha reader who is not related to me, and who has some pretty good story cred herself, it came back with some good constructive criticism and a suggestion to polish it up and consider submitting it for publication.
So despite the creative soul baring that I am going to engage in at the weekend I am feeling a little excited, the holidays and a bottle of red might also have something to do with that.
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The end of the contract also means that I am likely to have more time to review and interview and I feel like I’d like to ramp things up. I already have some interviews pencilled in for Galactic Chat. But I want to do more. So I have some ideas that are kicking around in the brain pan.Did you enjoy this post? Would you like to read more? You can subscribe to the blog through a reader,by Email or Follow me on twitter.
