The ink is black, the page is white/Together we learn to scream and fight...

Imagine the shortest 'o' you can. Imagine the 'o' in 'hot', and then imagine yourself cutting the sound off rather than letting it trail away. And then - well, you can imagine someone else doing this bit - imagine them saying 'tee-chair'. 'O tee-chair'.

This is how the kids in my classes get my attention, and although 'O' is not as nineteenth-century-poet as it sounds and in fact is more akin to 'hey', the way they say it sounds so sweetly plaintive to my English ear that I have to suppress a grin every time I hear it.

Some of the younger ones can’t quite manage ‘teacher’, and call me ‘Tia’ (auntie) instead. This just makes me laugh.

N-N-N-N-N-NINE YEAR OLDS

There are some things you don't really know unless you're a parent. I never know when it’s half term back home, for instance, and am always unpleasantly surprised by the sudden flocks of pygmies noisily infesting shopping centres and public transport.

And when I accepted an offer to take over a class of nine-year-olds from a pregnant colleague, I discovered that I had only the vaguest idea of what nine-year-olds actually look like. I mean come on, fellow non-parents: how big are they, for instance?

What I wasn't prepared for was that they would be so adorably cute. On my first day, confronted with a circle of enormous shining eyes and little, spindly, delicate limbs, I felt as if I was teaching a classful of Bambis. Or… or… baby seals, or something.

An hour later, having shouted more in that period than I have in the previous *fifteen years*, I was almost beginning to sympathise with the Canadians. If only the little buggers would just shut the fuck up for thirty seconds, they'd be so lovely that I'd have wanted to take them all home and keep them as pets. Hmm... perhaps that's why God made them that way, eh? *strokes beard philosophically*

Anyway, I have discovered that making them sit boy-girl-boy-girl rather than in the same-sex groups they’d have chosen has an almost miraculously calming effect on the volume levels. I’m sorry, Dan, I know you were railing against the sexism of ‘sugar and spice’ versus ‘puppy dog’s tails’ at five years old or whenever it was, but it turns out to be true. Little boys are monsters. Little girls are nice.

THE TERRIBLE TEENS

"If you want a man to eat for a day, give him a fish. If, on the other hand, you want a man to stare blankly at you and then copy his friend, try and teach him to fish." You deluded fool.

It’s impossible not to be emotionally engaged with your class. If, half an hour into your lesson, the kids are politely smothering yawns and surreptitiously looking at their watches, it’s hard not to feel as if you’ve failed. On the other hand, when they’re so engaged they’re getting flustered when it’s their turn, and taking the piss out of the others when it’s not, and even come and argue about who won after the class has ended, it’s a brilliant feeling.

My other class are aged 13-15, and some of them are terrifyingly cool. It's hard to judge what teenagers are going to like; some of the games I think they'll enjoy cause them to nearly dislocate their eyeballs, rolling them around. And yet when I gave them an exercise which involved cutting pictures out of magazines, they all fought over the scissors. Work that one out if you can. It's certainly taking me a while.

I can't even fall back on what I would have liked at their age, since I wasn't a very cool teenager. In fact, I was so insufferable that Dan, who was apparently also a bit of a geeky smart-alec at school, has questioned the wisdom of our having children at all. I can see his point; with our combined genes, we'd spend all that money on nappies only for them to be lynched within minutes of arriving for their first day of school. And who wants to spend nine months worrying about giving birth to Eugene from Grease?