Ep 57: Making The Most Of Your Time Off: Say NO, Prioritise Tasks & Stop Comparing!

0:00 Hayden, should we do a skit for a while? Can we do the skit that we were just about to do in the first take, but now on the second take? Yeah, but when the first take, the skit was that, I wanted you to say no when we'd come into, yep. No. Hello, welcome back to another episode of Teach, Street, Repeat. My name is Dylan. My name is Hayden. And my name is Dylan. And how are you? I'm good, thank you. You okay? Yeah, I'm all right, yourself. I'm fine, thank you. Welcome back to another episode of Teach, Street, Repeat. My name's Dylan. My name is Hayden. What was wrong with us? And my name's Dylan. What are we doing? What are we doing? Are you all right? How are you doing? I'm sorry guys, we completely wasted your time. It's the Easter holidays. Yeah, so we've got enough time to waste, right? We're gonna waste enough time to the Easter holidays. We are absolutely loving life.

0:42 But before we get into today's episode, which is how to make the most of the holidays, I think something that's really quite important. Yeah, we're doing it, aren't we? Making the most of the holidays, we're doing a podcast and introducing ourselves seven times in a row. Oh, wow. You can tell we got a lot of time in our hands, baby. Oh, dear, anyway, are you all right? Yeah, I'm good. We've had one week off already. We're in the middle of the two week holiday. I gotta tell you now, straight away, everyone, listen, I bet you agree that the two weeks is life changing. It's so different to one week. Oh, gosh, yeah. It is crazy how you can switch off better. But we'll get into that later on. Hayden, how has your week been? You've been off? What you've been up to, pal? Well, I actually did something I've never done before at this point of the year. Right? I got my end of year reports done. Oh. Really, really, really early. I knew I was gonna, I planned this for ages. I was like, I'm gonna do my end of year reports in the Easter holiday. Cause I want - Must be a really good reflection of the kids over the whole year too far to the way through.

1:34 Well, no, no, no, because there was actually, in fairness, we've left a little bit where we're just gonna add in a little bit at the end. Just one sentence. Yeah, just a little bit. And in the last term, they were also good. Basically, yeah. But look, we already have the last parents evening. So, you know, in my eyes, it's not many people out there just look at their last parents' evening and go, okay, copy, paste that into a document. Yep. And that is the result. I did use them, because we, I don't know, schools are different, but we write notes for parents' evening. And they were really useful to me for. I sat there with my notes thinking, cause on our notes, we put things like - Cause you don't know your kids at all. Yes, I don't know, but no, it's like the stats. So we quite often collate things like how much they've read and they're doing their homework and things. And it's like, if we've got - Do you think that's a waste of time or not then? Because I'm on the side of, I don't wanna make notes. I just talked to you about the kids. I don't normally, I don't normally do it. I've just been brought around to doing it by not doing it.

2:22 Someone else does it for me. Someone else writes notes. I don't know, I quite like that. For the first time, they were actually useful for the reports. Cause I was like, oh, I don't have to go and, like when I'm writing about each kid, I don't have to now go and find these three different data. So because they already exist from parents' evening, you have used that to write reports. Yeah, yeah, it was like, I can already tell straight away, okay, do they read lots at home? They've been doing their homework regularly. So that time wasn't necessarily wasted. Cause my point on that is, when it's just for parents' evening, I sometimes feel like it's a waste of time. Because when you're sat in front of the parent, and maybe for a report writing as well, actually be interested to know what you hear. There's a lot of stuff that as teachers, we say it parents' evening, or we put in the reports, that I think is completely a waste of our time. Yeah, yeah, 100%. Because the parents don't care either. My number, there's two things that come into this category for me. Number one is telling the parents how much homework they do.

3:08 To me is mad. That is genuinely like the parents telling me how much maths I do in school. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, oh, you have to just find out through the kid and hope you're right. Because I don't actually know how much reading you do at home. Oh, did you know your child's not reading? Yeah, I do, cause they live with me. Oh, I have a home. Oh, actually, then they are reading. I just don't write it in the report, which is the only thing, the book that you get every week to go off because I'm guessing. And the other thing is when you're at parents' evening, nothing cringes me more than when you see a teacher sit there and say to a parent, or they're doing really well with their conjunctions, but they could very much work on their front -to -back verbal clauses. And the parents are just being polite and they're just like, hmm. And they've got no idea what you're saying. Complete waste of time, only in parents' evening. However, I don't know, with reports, is that information more useful then? No, I guess, I don't know, because it's written down like forever. It's a keepsake. I suppose it's more useful in terms of, it's easier to remember than when they've been sat there being told that kid can't do conjunctions. I don't know, I was quite particular with the reports this time. So in the past, I have done that thing where I've always ended up writing a few sentences where I'm like, why am I writing this? It's just jargon, it's rubbish. Got to fill the gap, mate. Yeah, genuinely, that's what's been in the past. I'll fill the gap with these, just pointless. So I was really quite strict this time with my general comments, which, if anyone not in the report world, the general comments is kind of like the one, it's not about a subject, it is just about the child in general in the class. The most important one, in my opinion. Yeah, definitely, definitely the most important one. Spent the most time on those.

4:29 But I just kind of wrote myself a bullet point list before I started of the types of things I want to mention. And none of them really were about like specific parts of subjects. You didn't mention how good they were at modal verbs. Yeah, no, not at all, not in general comment. I really just focused on things like their behavior in class, what they've been like as a person was like half the paragraph for everyone. Just like what kind of person they are. That's when you want to read as a parent. Yeah, that's what I think, that's what I think. And then if they had a particular interest in a subject, like if I thought actually that they really like, they loved our history unit system this year, then I'll just put a sentence in saying, oh, they really loved our history, you know, perhaps there's an interest there they can explore further. Do you do that thing where you hand out to your class like a pro -former of questions? Because, but the point being, anyone again who's not in the teaching mode, probably doesn't know what we're talking about here. And if you're a parent, we're opening your eyes at actually how reports work here, because it's really hard to write off the top of your head, really detailed, nice reports for every single child in your class without a little bit of help or a little bit of organization. But again, I always find it so strange when you hand out this pro -former and it might have questions on it to the children, like what was your favorite subject this year? Which project did you enjoy doing the most? Who are your best friends in class? All that kind of stuff. And then you sit through and when you write a report, you'll have that pro -former in front of you and you'll put that information into a report. I can see the benefit of it, but again, I don't like doing it because it feels weird. It feels really weird. It's basically like I'm not writing it almost. It's the children writing their own report. Yeah, and I'm pretending I knew it. Yeah, and how useful is it really for a parent to

6:02 read who their kid's friends are on a report? It's been asked your kid. It's been lovely to see insert name, socializing with insert name and insert name that you forgot to change it. I guess on that point, I guess I'm a hypocrite because I don't like that. However, the use of AI, I'm all for when it comes to reports. And I think there is a slight difference. And I think what we'll have to do again, you can talk about briefly in a second, but I think we'll do another whole episode on report writing. I think we'll do a whole episode around it. What's involved, the teacher's perspective, maybe get a few perspective parents, what they want to hear and stuff like that. So if you do have kids at school or you're a teacher, either perspective, do get in touch and let us know your thoughts on reports, how you write them, how you use them. But very quickly, Hayden, you were telling me how you were using AI again. We talked about this last year. It was one of our biggest episodes about choosing AI for reports. Big debate, not gonna get into it now, but you used it, how did you find it this time around? I just think it's so useful. But I can fully appreciate and understand the misconception around it though. Because I remember last year someone said to me, just on Facebook, a teacher, was like, I'll never use AI to write my reports. And their point was, it's just not personal. It's a computer writing it. And my counter argument was, no, no, no, it's absolutely personal because I'm telling the computer all of those personal things. And all it's doing for me is just putting it into a paragraph, like structuring it for me. Which I continue to argue. I think these are the best reports I've ever written in my life because I was really able to focus my time on thinking about the child. And informally, what I did was,

7:32 I used Teachmate AI, there are other tools as well that do it, but I used Mr. P's Teachmate. And I literally just listed with commas in between very informally, like didn't make any sense, just all of the nice things about this child that I wanted to put into the report. And if there were any areas for development, you put them in as well. And sometimes I won't, I just wanted, I literally just wanted to say all these nice things. I was like, no, this kid's just just, there's just nothing to work on. Just need to carry on doing what they're doing. And then I press a button, and then it takes away the next 10 minutes of my time, which is just formulating those things into nice formal sentences. Because you're not an author. At the end of that, that is like an authorial, like, you know, skill set. It's to beautifully present and be a wordsmith and make it breedable. Like that's not actually part of our job at all. You've done the part of your job, which is knowing your children, writing what you want to put in there. To me, genuinely, it won't be long before it's seen on the same level as spell check. Like no one now, if you write down definitely and you put an A in the wrong place, and spell check puts a red line and you click on it and change it, no one to, bloody computer wrote that, you don't know just about that. No, it doesn't matter because you know what, I still know what I want to write.

8:43 Well, I've got a question for you because this is what someone said to me last year. I have an answer for it, but I wanna know if you've got something on top of it. And I know the answer. No, no, just my opinion on this, right? So they said, okay then, Mr. Using AI, this person was not happy that using AI. He was like, okay, anyone that uses AI, I think it should stay at the bottom of the report. This report was generated using AI. Would you be happy to have that on the report sent to parents? Okay, would I actually care? No, but do I think it's remotely necessary? Also no. I would have no problem. I think if I had a problem saying to a parent, AI helped me write these reports, I think I shouldn't use it. So I think if I have a problem letting parents know that that was used, then that's something that I shouldn't do. If I'm trying to hide that fact. But I think I would have no problem saying to parents, I used AI. I think the problem would be on the end of the receiver, of them having these misconceptions and thinking that was wrong and them having a problem with it. That would be annoying. But I personally think if I'm happy to use AI to write reports, I also think people should be happy to say they used AI. I think that weird middle ground of, I'm happy to use it, but I know I shouldn't say it. Well, then you've got a disconnect there. You've something's wrong. I think it was a really loaded question because I think it plays on the fact that the majority of parents, especially last year when it was really new, absolutely don't know anything about how it works. And we'll just assume that it's not personal when it's just a computer. It's just generated your comment.

10:08 So I think I'd quite happily put AI has generated these reports. If it also came with a bit of understanding explanation on how exactly AI was used. Because I think if a parent was told what we've just said about how it's all this personal things put into a place that we thought about and typed up and then it just formulates it into a paragraph for you, they'd be like, oh, that's nice. That's fine. And if they're not, it's sort of like, oh, I didn't realize you were reading the reports to judge my writing style. I thought you were reading the report to find out how your child is at school. Sorry, I'll make sure that my writing style is the forefront of it. Or if the AI somehow has like scandalled their books and come up with the thing themselves, then that would, to me, that would be an issue then, I think. And I think maybe eventually people will start thinking, that's not, like, I don't know. But right now at this point, as the teacher, I have full autonomy over what gets inputted into the AI. Then the AI does its work, then it gets an output, and I don't just put that in the box and not read it. I read the output, then I'll do any edits I need to.

11:04 I'm gonna say this a million times. I don't think it's an issue. Because I could imagine if there was an AI thing right where it was just a couple of drop down menus that was just like, are they, it was like scale of, are they nice or not? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So they work hard or not. One to seven. What's that behavior like? And then you press a button and it just makes up. It just like pretends as if it knows, but that would be different. Well, I'll tell you something. You've essentially described what happened previously. I know, I know. Which was like, you'd go into Twinkle. So again, anyone who's got reports of children is thinking, what a lovely report. Just like, get like seven from your class or me at all because what used to happen beforehand. And I never did this, by the way. And not everyone, by the way, but a lot of people do this. No, no, no, no, but a lot of people use it. And do you know what? I don't actually want to rip them at all because it's a horrible process that takes so much of our own time and it made it quicker for people. But I never liked using these because what basically you would get is this Twinkle document, let's say, it could be from anywhere, but there were some on Twinkle that a lot of people used. You'd go in and they would have these banks of sentences.

11:59 So you would have these columns, let's say seven columns to form each column's a sentence. And it makes a paragraph at the end. So you're on like the tab for maths, let's say. And then in this first column, it will have loads of pre -determined sentences about their place value knowledge. And it might be fantastic at place value, often pushing themselves to problem solving questions. Good at place value sometimes makes some mistakes with carrying numbers. All the way down. All the way down to needs adult support every day with place value, but trying hard kind of thing. And then you would pick a sentence from one manually, go to two, pick a sentence from two manually. And again, you're building it as the teacher, so you are still putting what you think. But it is very much more close to what you said, which is just pre -determined procedural, the computer's just completely working for you. Whereas AI is such a good middle ground to me because I can sit there with maybe some data or my own brain and my experience of these children and just write down, beautifully behaved, what's really well in the group, has a lot of close friends. And you can do specific things as well. Yeah, has represented the school of football. Yeah, I was even putting in things like, they've developed a really nice friendship with and putting a name in it. Like really, really personal specific things. And it just put it into a sentence for me. And if it didn't, and I'll tell you what, one thing I would say is though, there was not a single report that I'd just copied and pasted though. Every single one, there was still just a tiny bit of tweaking needed. Like just the odd sentence taken out or a little thing added in where I was like, I can't think of a way to word this for the AI to put in. So I'm just gonna write a sentence at the end myself. But it cut out 95 % of that time. Okay,

13:31 here's a question to finish off this report chat. You haven't used your AI for reports now from last year and this year. You've already said that you would rank them as the best reports you've written. 100%. But my question to you is, do you feel like they are more individualized than ever before? Yes, definitely. Because in the past, I would just get so burnt out from the sentence writing process that once I get up to the 23rd person that I'm doing. Who they seem to be. Yeah, genuinely, genuinely. It would just be, I'd literally be either physically copying and pasting someone else's report and changing names and just few sentences or subliminally writing the exact same thing. Cause there's only so many different ways you can think of writing at the same sentence about someone who's well behaved. Whereas AI, just every single one was unique. They are beautifully behaved.

14:19 They are amazingly behaved. Their behavior is beautiful. They are amazingly, beautifully behaved. They are behaved in an amazingly beautiful way. Yeah, I think that's just a weird stigma around it. I think report writing can be streamlined massively, kept very personal, but AI can do the groundwork. And you found Teachmate was good with that. Teachmate was really good. Yeah, chat GPT, really good. Any AI tools are just really good. I think what Teachmate does is basically just takes, I imagine it takes something like chat GPT and it just puts it into an already structured way. It just speeds up process a bit. Easy to use. Cause I used chat GPT last year and it was absolutely fine. Yeah, it was cool. That was a nice little side chat. I loved that. I loved that. Yeah, so - We'll come back to reports. Yeah, we'll come back to reports. We'll do a whole episode on that. Well, that was the episode basically. What we'll do is we'll put that 15 minutes into your chat GPT and say, can you write a script for an hour long episode? And it'll be a brilliant episode. No problem at all. It'll be quite funny to do that one day. Yeah, really? An AI episode. Like the way it's scripted. Fully scripted. God, I can't imagine doing a podcast scripted. Anyone who's listed as podcast like for more than three episodes, like you guys scripted. We don't even plan it. You'll be pleased to know guys that it's actually scripted right now. We're reading everything. Every single word off a prompt. So you'll be pleased to hear that. So apart from that, I've heard some news about you. Oh.

15:32 Yeah. I think, why is it we now? We're in April. I think it was in February, you said you were gonna join me on this No Sugar Crusade. That was in January. That was in January, was it? How's that been going for three months? Oh, well, you know, stuff got in the way. East was great. I had a lot of East. I mean, I really tried hard not to eat my Easter eggs. Did you? I tried hard. How many Easter eggs did you get as an adult 31 year old man? Probably like five. That's decent. That was good. Yeah, they went in two days. Past that, you'd be lucky to get one, honestly. They went in two days. Two days, two days gone. That is mad, innit? All five. Yeah, really crazy. So come on, what are you doing? Come on. Okay, right. Hold yourself accountable like you did last time and you did absolutely nothing. So come on. I'm sick of it, guys. I'm sick of it. I'm putting on weight again.

16:16 He's losing weight. He's like two stone down. I think if we both stood on the scale in January and now, same amount of weight still between us. What do you mean? I'm around. Just leveled out. Yeah, it's ridiculous. I've put on like a stone since January. He's lost his weight. Oh no, we'd be much lighter. So I'm joining him. I'm sick of it. I feel tired every day. I'm just, yeah, constantly. I wake up feeling absolutely exhausted. My favorite realization was on the tired thing. And you'll know what I'm gonna say because we said it before. And it was almost like an epiphany moment where I used to feel so tired. I think what didn't help was genuinely, and I know a lot of you guys out there still do this and I know how tough it is, genuinely working full time in a school during term time is unbelievably exhausting.

16:59 We'll talk about that later about holidays and stuff. But I used to then, okay, got to a Friday. I'd have a really good night's sleep. Like honestly, I'd go to bed at between eight and nine and I wouldn't get a bed till 10. This was pre -Rory when we could get up when everyone had, we stepped all the way through the night. I'd wake up after 11, 12 hours sleep and still feel like crap and still feel awful and still feel tired. And at that point, I remember we talking, we said, oh, it's not lack of sleep. That's making me tired. There are other reasons why you feel exhausted and it's not always just lack of sleep. And when we got enough sleep and still felt terrible, ah, it's a horrendous diet. And I tell you what, it's hard to compare now because since I started No Sugar, I've had a newborn and Rory's six months today, by the way. Half a year of Rory's crazy, absolutely love it. But I still, I genuinely, at any given point right now, feel much less tired than I used to when I didn't have Rory, but I was eating crap. I feel horribly tired right now. And I'm already all day. Do you know what I do? You actually do look tired. I'm finding that I'm getting proper purple baggy eyes every day, no matter how much sleep I get. And I'm like, yeah, it's diet, it's diet, it's sugar. Sugar is just so bad. So what do you think about sugar? I saw something recently, so I'm interested to your opinion, do you think sugar's addictive? Do you think you've got an addiction? Yeah, yeah, I think. Because it can undermine other addictions sometimes. I think people worry about that. That's the big worry of it. We'll come after that. I don't know if I'm addicted to sugar, but I don't know, I guess I am, but I'm addicted to chocolate.

18:29 Because if you offered me a bag of Harry Boe right now, I'd be like, no. But if you gave me an Easter egg, I'd eat a whole Easter egg right now. Right this day, just for context, it's the morning right now. I haven't even had breakfast yet. It's 26 minutes past nine. And I would devour an Easter egg right now. But I wouldn't even eat breakfast, right? Do you know what I mean? I see that as a problem, the fact that I eat chocolate. So you're not actually hungry? You're not actually hungry right now. But my highest priority of food at all times in terms of what I fancy eating is always, I'm not joking, it is always chocolate first. Like no matter what. So you made a good point now of like, you wouldn't scoff a Harry Boe bag. You wouldn't sit there with a bag of one kilogram sugar, scooping into your mouth like, I just really needed to shiver. It's not an addiction like drugs, like a class A drugs, like horribly, like life -ruining, like addictive. Is it like an amalgamation then? Have you seen this chocolate? Is it like, because I know exactly what you feel.

19:25 People listening to this will know the same thing. They really want some chocolate. They know they shouldn't, but they're like, oh, do you know what I'm saying? I'll have a bit, I'll have a little bit. And it feels unreal whilst you're eating it. Like when it's in your mouth, genuinely the texture and you just chewing away and you're like, oh, this is just what I wanted. And then how many seconds after you've finished that mouthful, do you revert back to a base? Yeah, like 30 seconds. It's such a small, whatever the word is. Go on, go on. I don't know what that is. It's a small, I don't know. What's the word? I don't know. It's chocolate. It's a small cool down. A cool down of like, yeah. But then I sometimes feel like, I feel worse. Like it doesn't get me to the base. It gets me to lower than the base. I want some more chocolate still. Yeah, then you get a massive sugar high and they always talk about, you know, sugar highs and sugar dips and that. Absolutely real. The amount of times we've been sat here doing some work in our offices and I've just devoured some chocolate and then half an hour later, I can't think. And I just think, I need to go and lay down. I'm tired. It's terrible. Basically, the crux of this story is, I need to grow up. This needs to stop. It's actually ruining my life, genuinely. And it's probably knocking years off my life because sugar is terrible. And I'm eating way, way, way over the daily recommended allowance of sugar every single day. Do you know, is it, someone said, I read somewhere, maybe it was your Lauren actually was talking about it. I think it's, you're allowed 30 grams of sugar a day.

20:39 It's tiny, whatever it is. 30 grams of sugar. But my point here is, that sounds, that sounds like quite a lot of sugar every single day now that I don't eat any sugar, right? And I'm sure I obviously have some sugar in other things. I don't eat sugary stuff. But then, when you actually, honestly, you've seen this before, we all work in schools, most of us have listened to this podcast. You've seen the displays where they have sugar cubes underneath like the drinks and stuff. 30 grams of sugar is genuinely a quarter of an Easter egg. Like it's, and I know, I get it. I get it when people are like, oh, just enjoy Easter, just have fun. I completely agree, of course you should. And if you have three eggs in a day, don't worry about it. But you know what, you might be normal and then go the next two weeks without any chocolate. I'll do that 365 days a year. It's gonna be Easter eggs, it'll be other chocolate. But I used to, on the way from home, I used to nip into Tesco, pretty much every day or the corner shop, right? Simply to get snacks. Knowing I had dinner soon. But I was like, no, no, no, no, no, I want a whole dime share bar of chocolate. And I'll eat it, right? I'll eat it in the car from the way home, sorry, from the way from the shop to home. And it will be gone and I'll get in and then I don't have to tell Lorna I had any. And then I said, go on, that's shit. I'll eat my dinner anyway, then I'll have a snack after dinner. Or I'll eat one half of my dinner. I won't eat meat, because I'll be full then. And I'll have some. It's just such a cycle. And do you know what you've got to do sometimes? It's just break it and just don't do it. And convince yourself, I have an argument with myself probably four times a week, which is an argument against myself. Because I think, oh, I can't have a bit, it's been long enough, I can have a bit of sugar, I'll have a chocolate bar. And I have to argue with

22:10 myself at least four times a week saying, no, number one, you simply don't need it. Number two, it will not make you feel better. And number three, you will not stop after you start. This is why I think it is an addiction. Because you know how like, if you're addicted to anything else, for example, the most common addiction. Alcohol in terms of the type of drug. Alcohol is a very, very, very common addiction. And it's like, you wouldn't go up to an alcoholic and say, oh, well done, you've not had alcohol for six months. Here's a little bit of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's famously the opposite, isn't it? Yeah, like every alcoholic ever that's managed to stop drinking alcohol will tell you, they cannot have a single one. Like if they have one drink, they will spiral. And they always describe themselves as alcoholic still. Like they could be sober for nine years. Like I'm an alcoholic, I've been sober for nine years. And I know, I don't wanna, I don't wanna, pretend that me eating chocolate is as bad as that. It's not as bad, I get it. But there is a similarity in terms of, for example, in January, I did the no sugar for like two weeks, right? And then it was Lauren's birthday and stuff. And we had a bit of cake, a bit of chocolate cake. The second I ate one single piece of chocolate, I spiralled and I lost it. I lost it. And I've done that multiple times in my life where I don't take it seriously.

23:16 Which is why I said to you, because the other week Dylan was around and you were gonna eat a cream egg or something like that. I was like, I was probably not going to, but I was as close as I'd been in. Yeah, and I could tell you were quite close. And I was just really brutal with you. And I was like, no, no, if you do that, you'll put all your weight back on within three months. That's my bet. I'll put money on it. You didn't say three months, mate. You said like three weeks. Yeah, whatever I said, you know. But I was being serious. And I think you take it seriously as well in terms of knowing that. Because it's true. It's true. We're terrible. I am addicted to chocolate. We're in our thirties now, it's a pattern for us. Okay, it's a pattern. We've been chatting about this long enough now. I think anyone listening, if you feel the same way, let us know. Because is it just us? I don't know. But like I genuinely have a problem. And I have to, I spend some point every week arguing against myself, don't do it, because you simply don't need to. Simpler as that. It's really hard. I'm going to give it a go and we'll keep it accountable.

24:09 Yeah. We'll see how it goes. We will, we will. I love this. This intro is turned into like, not even an intro. Yeah, it's brilliant. I think for this episode, what I'll do, I'm going to revert back to our old little three parts and just we'll talk about all three different things. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, because then, you know, get more people listening. Guys, if you love this episodes, which I know you do, if you listen this one, if you've listened to 25 minutes of this absolute tosh, then you obviously love listening to the episode. Can you please give us a review on Spotify? And can you please get in touch with us on Instagram? It's the place to be. Okay, go to Instagram, send us a message, get involved in the polls, and like literally everything on meme I've made ever. My most recent meme was linked to what we're going to talk about today. It was a Who Wants to Be a Millionaire meme. And it was fun doing it, because obviously I've been on a real thing. So it was - You've been on the real thing? Oh, I didn't, sorry. I wasn't going to actually mention it, but - Dylan's been on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Sorry, I need your help. I'll tell you what, that question that I made, much harder than my 125 ,000 -pound question. I got the question. Honestly.

25:06 But yeah, so we're going to talk in this episode all about how to make the most of the summer holidays. School holidays. Yeah, yeah, the summer holidays. I wish it was the summer holidays. The school holidays in general. And have a little chat, because there's perceptions, there's ideas, and teachers spend it very differently. So I think it's going to be a nice chat. Shall we play the jingle here? Cue it. Come on, pal. Don't touch me. Oh, welcome back. I hate when he touches me. Welcome back, guys. You really thrown me off now. I don't have to say. Yeah. Oh, God. Dylan earlier, so I've got to say this. I know what you're going to say. When he got here to come record. I was waiting for him, and I just happened to look outside my office window, which goes out to the front of the house. And I'd looked out and just saw his car there, and I saw him in it, just looking really like grumpy.

25:56 And looking at my house, and I was thinking, what's he doing? I was just staring at him, thinking, I want to look up and see me, and he just didn't move. I was like, what is he doing? It was ever so slightly, lightly raining. You know when it's like that fine mist rain? It's not even raining, really. It was raining. And Dylan, I lose my phone, thinking, he's clearly going to text me, or he's going to tell me what's going on. And he texts me saying, I'm not getting out of this car till that front door opens. I'm like, get to the front door, because it's raining. I'm not going to want to walk in the rain for more than three seconds. Who wants to walk in the rain? I hate the rain, and I hate the wind. April is the worst month. Oh, April showers. It's not funny. It's horrible. And the wind as well. Oh my God. Just can you just, I don't mind if it's hot or cold, because I can dress appropriately. But if the wind is blasting 40 miles an hour in my face, I can't do anything about that. You be you mate. The main time, pit pitter patter. Who wants pitter patter, pitter patter, pitter patter on their neck? Anyway, join us after the jingle, where we're going to talk about the school holidays. OK, we've laid some ground rules. Hey, there's not going to touch me anymore, and we're not going to talk about bloody rain or wind. Anyway, guys, we're here. We're going to talk about the holidays, because we are in the middle of the Easter holidays. And for me, if I was to rank the holidays in order, Easter holiday probably comes top two. Yeah. I'd say it's up there.

27:12 Chris, nice. It's needed. No, I put summer first. Yeah, summer first, obviously. Oh, right. I see. No, no, no. I put, in my opinion, I genuinely put summer, then Easter, then Christmas. I suppose why? Why am I? Because the further through the school year, the more burnt out I feel. Yeah, true. Simple as that. And I think right now, I absolutely love these two weeks, because I also feel like the two weeks are completely within my control. Whereas Christmas, yeah, you get two weeks, but. Busy. But you're not, though, are you? Because you have to go and do stuff. Like, you don't actually have a choice, man. Christmas. Yeah. Yeah. Christmas, Christmas -y. There's all that to fair. There is lots of stuff on. There's just not, I feel like with these two weeks, I have complete control of the two weeks. I can manage what I'm going to do. I can schedule stuff. And we're going to talk about that in a second, how to make the most of it. But I would say my top three holidays of the school year, summer holidays number one, Easter holidays number two, Christmas holidays number three. I agree. I agree. I agree. And normally, I wouldn't even do reports in Easter. I'd actually have a proper break. But the only reason I'm doing it is because in the next half term, we're going to Center Park. So I thought, do you know what? I'm just going to try and get as much done as I can and just have that two weeks off. I might join you. I might join you as well. Or I might not. At Center Park. You are invited. I might do my reports at Center Park whilst you're off paying 700 pound for a 15 minute skiing, like dry ski experience. Let's talk about Center Park another day. Anyway, making the most of holidays. Yeah. So the first question to you is, what do you actually do in the holidays? Because we kind of had a little five minute chat before this because we knew we were going to talk about the holidays. We

28:44 spent a good like 60 seconds in our own head trying to think what we've done in these other days that's already happened. So for you, you get to the end of a long time. You're a little bit burnt out. You've been working hard. We all know teaching is crazy in terms of the amount of overtime we have to do. And it's not just a nine to five job. It's really intense for a good six or seven weeks. You finally get to your holidays. What are you doing? First couple of days, I try to do absolutely nothing. And by nothing, I don't mean just laying in bed all day because we can't now. We've got kids. And the version of nothing now is just like, we had a home day the other day. Well, I said to Lauren, I was like, can we just, let's just, can we just not go and see anyone or do anything today? Because we, so we quite often we'll take her out and go to my mom's or her mom's. I was like, can we just stay at home and just chill out? I just want to sit down for a bit. So a couple of those days. I mean, I thought it's different because I think with us because we've got our business as well. We don't really get a break with that. No.

29:43 Like we're kind of just nonstop grinding the business a bit. So I feel like there's always something to do. But I know pre -business. I would try to have a break. Yeah, I don't know. I guess we can talk about the difference between pre and after kids. I think pre kids, when the holidays came round, I absolutely loved the complete freedom it gave me. And I think we shouldn't pretend as teachers that we like to talk doom and gloom. I like to talk doom and gloom. I like to complain about things. Yes, of course. But we have to sometimes, and I think holidays is one of those things, we simply have to just admit that it's bloody good. And it is, we are lucky to get these holidays. And I know that people are burnt out and I know we need them. People always say, yeah, but we need them because we do, we work so hard. Correct. But it's also still bloody good. And there's still a lot of people who do a lot of overtime. And I know it's not the same overall as teaching. People might be listening to this as teachers, be like, oh, you can't say that. It's like, well, I can. Can't I? Because the holidays are bloody good. And I don't know. I feel like pre -kids especially, when the holidays came around, I absolutely enjoyed cordoning off time. That was a big thing for me.

30:49 And I'm thinking how to make the most of the summer holiday, any school holiday. It would be taking, I'm going to say some holidays, hold up. To make the most of any school holiday. For me, I think it's about really controlling your time. And I think you have to cordon off things and say, okay, I'm going to plan when I do stuff. So I know I've got work to do, a little bit of work to do. I know I've got time where I just want to decompress. And I know I've got time where I want to see family. To me, they're friends. They're three very different things. And I think it's so important to just decompress as a teacher and have those days where you are not at a beck and call of anyone. And it's interesting, how did you find that with the baby? Because before the baby, you could very easily just sit in this room, play a game for three hours, go downstairs and watch Simpsons for three hours. The day where you just do yourself. Can't do that now. How do you find the difference now that we've got the youngsters? Like, can you actually switch off? Did you feel like you switched off? A little bit, but you have to plan. You have to properly plan ahead. Like, I was talking to Lauren saying that I want to do the reports this term, this half term. And she was like, okay, in the past, it would have just been, oh, just any old day where we wouldn't do anything, just get them done. Just we'll work on them across a couple of days. She was like, but this time she was like, okay, can we put a date in the diary with them when you're going to do the reports? Because otherwise we're just going to be waiting around, like maybe do stuff with her or it's not as fun now. Just staying indoors all day when you've got a child that will start screaming if you don't do things. So we, I finally have to be a bit more organized now.

32:11 I actually planned. So I did. I was like, okay, I'm going to do my reports on this day, by the way. Oh, when you're going out for this thing, so perfect. You go and do that. Go and see my family. And I'll do my reports. I'll say what happens. It really cracks me up. Hayden stays at home and we'll say, like, we'll be talking in the group chat and then your girlfriend, Lauren, will say, oh, I'm going to Hayden's mum's. Right. And I'll be like, oh, that's nice of the three of them. And then, and then like half an hour later, I'll jump on my computer and you're playing helldivers too. I thought you'd go, take his mum's. No, no, no, no, no. Lauren and River go and see Hayden's family without Hayden. Now I was, I never do it to play a game. I'll do it to do. Oh yeah. All right. Get stuff done. All right. I'll write my reports. Basically, she went to a family gathering of my family.

32:57 What sort of birthday was it? I was like, well, you go to that and that'll be a perfect time for me to write reports. In my head, it was a win because I was like, I don't have to go to the family gathering. That's the end of it. Horribly unsojourable. And also, if Lauren goes to that, who will enjoy it more than me anyway, I can also get my reports done, not in a time where we're actually going to be together, like doing our own thing. So that it was a win -win. I got a question on that because it's linked to the holidays, but also linked to having a kid. Right. Do you feel like in either of the situations, the fact you have a child or the fact you're on school holiday, do you feel like people kind of feel like they owed you time? Well, you're on holiday, so come and see this. Come and do this. Oh. You've got time. Or you've got the baby now. I'm going to come over and see the baby. And it's like, am I no longer in control of what I do with my time? I've not really experienced that, but I am quite stubborn. Yeah.

33:49 And I think I've built up the people know that I should be like, no. No, you don't want to go away. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I've not personally experienced that. I think sometimes in the holidays, it can be, well, you're off. So can you come and do this favor for us? Or can you? You're off. I don't know. I don't personally feel that way. I wondered if you did, because I hear a lot of people say that kind of thing, where, you know, there's a perception, isn't there, of teacher holidays where, you know, lazy bunch of buggers who you've been on strike. Yeah, I get taken the mick out of all the time, my family, but oh, on holiday again. Not working again, are we? Classic teachers doing nothing. And that's even worse when we only work three days a week. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not a good one, but there's a massive perception out there. I think if you find anything on Facebook, anything on any forum, right, that says, oh, just talking about teacher holidays, you look at the comments, 90 % of them will be people complaining that teachers get way too much time off and the job was way too easy. They're just getting all this time off, like, why wouldn't you want to be a teacher? Well, think of their perspective, if they've got kids who go to school, they've got to work, but now suddenly they're kids at home for two weeks. And their teachers off. That's really annoying, isn't it?

34:53 Really? Like, let's just switch up for a minute. And again, I know the vast majority of our listeners are teachers and stuff, but let's just be realistic for a minute. Let's just switch it up. Why wouldn't they feel resentful? Why wouldn't they? They're not fully informed about what the job's like. Well, that's just going to say that's why they shouldn't feel resentful, just to get informed. Yeah, but even if they were informed, there's going to be a lot of individuals out there who are like, yeah, I do 60 -hour weeks. Yeah, yeah, I work bloody hard. I work 60 -hours a week. I've got a 40 -hour contract and I do 15 to 20 hours overtime every week to make ends meet. And now my kids offer two weeks and I've got to find childcare, which means all the overtime is pointless. So I've got to pay someone to the car for my kids. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're getting time off. And you go on Facebook and the teachers complain in whilst having a glass of wine at home about, oh, I've got to do some planning this week. Yeah, so I don't know. Where do you stand on that? Do you think, you know, are working parents justified in their annoyance? No.

35:45 Do you not? No, I don't think so. I don't think they're justified in their annoyance. Why not? At teachers on a personal level, which is what it is. Sure. I think they can be justified in being frustrated by the education system, which means they have to look after their children for a couple of weeks. I'm not even saying that in a sarcastic way. But there's a lot of people who say that as well. Don't have kids if you can't look after them. So that's not really the sticking reason. No, and we've built a whole society around it. Like, I can understand the frustration of we've got to a level in society where both parents have to work 50 hours a week just to pay rent or a basic mortgage on a low -cost house. And they can't and it's not even built in that they can have the school holidays with their kids without having to take some financial hit. I get it. That's really frustrating. That's probably going to annoy us at some point. I don't know. It depends what we do at that time. If we leave teaching and we have our, we obviously have our children and they're off school for two weeks.

36:37 And it's like, well, I can't not work and Lauren can't not work. So either we've got to hope and pray that we've got someone who can have them for two weeks or take a holiday off where we only get four weeks and you're predetermining this. And by the way, I'm off when everyone else is off and stuff's more expensive. I can't have no control anymore. But it's annoying. But going online and then, and then getting annoyed at teachers on an individual level for their, for, because they get a job where that holiday is predetermined. We didn't choose to go on holiday. We chose this job, I think partly because the holidays are so good. And they're normally not even getting annoyed at that. They're getting annoyed at the idea that teachers are complaining about their job in any aspect because of this. That's where I'm like, no, it's not justified. Because I think that's just selfish thinking. It's just classic. Oh, it's a race to the bottom. My experience is bad. So how dare you? I'm assuming your experience is not as bad. So how dare you complain about it? It's like, you just don't understand the nuances of being a teacher. There's the reason hundreds of thousands of teachers complain about it and get upset about it and burn out and quit. It's probably, probably because it's true. And maybe it is actually tricky and maybe those holidays don't justify the workload that you as a non -teacher might think. Do you know, I just, I don't know. So I don't think it's ever justified. I think the frustration is understandable. But I think the slagging off teachers because they're complaining, they're trying to make the job better. That is the ultimate comeback for me is like, okay, whatever you think about the job, right, whatever you think based on whatever your experiences are, you can't say it's easy. You can't say it's Christy

38:10 simply because if it was, you'd be doing it. Yeah, that's the best one. And we wouldn't be leaving in droves. Like it's not even an argument. It's not even up for debate that this is an easy job. Constantly in the top three for the most stressed professions in the whole country ever. Constantly having a problem with recruitment. So it's not even viable enough to get people to come in. It's that people don't want to get into the job. And also people already in the job, people who have already moved up the ladder, by the way, and have actually got to what we would describe as a okay salary. And experience the holidays. And experienced the holidays and done the job. I saying this is too much. Goodbye. Yeah, still. There you go. It's not an argument anymore. Yeah. Basically every single ex -teacher that I know has unanimously said that whatever their new job is, is so much better for mental health and workload. Yeah.

38:57 And the same thing for we always, we talk about Paul sometimes in this podcast, who had a career before he got into teaching. Paul and I trained at the same time. And I just always remember in that year of training where I kind of brushed it off and I was like, oh, okay. Well, you know, that's what I want to do. But he would constantly say, you don't understand, this is not a normal job. He did a normal job. He worked 40 hours a week. In fact, he didn't because he used to have Friday afternoons off, very classic. You know, he would work all week and then Friday, he'd clock off at like one or two. Go home early, pick the kids up from school, take them home, have a dinner together and stuff like that. And he had earned more and he would not take any work home. And he just said it's completely different. It is not comparable. So I agree. I mean, I'm being a bit of devil's advocate here talking about it, but I don't think it's justified. I think you have to have a bit of critical thinking every now and then and think you cannot simply just point to these holidays and say, well, it's easy. It's like, you're allowed to be annoyed by the holidays and what it impacts you. Yeah.

39:53 Without being annoyed at us as teachers. I don't think we don't even need to go into detail about how teachers do work in the holidays. I think that's so commonplace. Everyone knows that now. And everyone, everyone spouts that rhetoric all the time. Oh, I'm working in the holidays. Yes. Okay. We all know that. So do you think everyone works in the holidays? Do you think it's just, yeah, all teachers, because everyone says it like that. All teachers, we've always got tons of work to do in holidays. I've got two main points to make here about teachers in the holidays. And again, I love talking to the listeners like this every now and then because I think about who our audience are. I know our audience are predominantly teachers, but I know we've got a big following of people who aren't teachers. I love just opening this up to people because this is what I think about holidays. Essentially, if you break it down as a teacher and the work you've got to do in a holiday, okay, my first point is it is not remotely comparable from teacher to teacher. So if you've got one teacher coming up to you and saying, I've not got any work to do this half -term, you cannot then take that as gospel and say, well, teachers don't even do bloody work in the holidays. This might, I've got a friend who's a teacher who genuinely doesn't do any work in the holidays. So therefore, they will, what a cushy job. No, because we've talked about this a million times. It's the lucky day. The conclusion a lot of people say draw from that is that that one teacher that's not got any work to do in the holiday is clearly doing their job efficiently and right. And everyone else therefore isn't doing their job efficiently and right. Yeah.

41:15 And that's just not true. And again, the layers to this, because there'll be people in the same school, right, who do a varying different amounts of work, right? But it, and that is down to the individual teacher a lot of the time. Okay. Cause the expectation might be exactly the same, but there'll be one teacher who simply feels like they have to for whatever reason, or simply wants to do some work in the holiday. But there'll be another teacher who thinks, right, I know I've not got to do it. Yeah. Cause I know I can do it in my PPA in the first week back, or I've already done it in my PPA because I wanted to clear this schedule. Teaching is very autonomous for a lot of teachers as to when they want to do their work. However, what does not help, and I'm going to move on to this point very quickly because we've established it's down to what school you're in. It's down to what's expected of you. It's down to what kind of teacher you are. I also don't think we should ever, as people who aren't teachers or people who are teachers, take someone's word for gospel and, and compare. I don't think we should compare. I don't think that the amount of work someone does in their holidays should ever be a barometer for the amount of work everyone should do. Whether that's someone not doing any work. So no one should do any work ever in the holidays. Nothing annoys me more than when someone who's not even in the classroom turns around and says, oh, don't do any work in the holidays. What do you mean? Because I've got to teach on Monday when I go back. So how can that happen unless I've got some work to do?

42:40 Or similarly, there might well be an SLT in a school that I work for that have expectations of me to do something. And I know my life will be hell if I don't get it done. And I'm in this toxic work environment. And you saying to me, oh, don't do any work, it's going to make me more stressed. That doesn't help me. So I think it's really unhelpful sometimes when people try and be genuinely nice. It doesn't actually help because, you know what, as a teacher, I know what work I've got to do. And it might be a bit. And it might be nothing. Or it might be a lot. I know how much I want to do. I might want to go above and beyond and make this amazing display. Or I might want to invent this new way of doing times tables because I got inspired by watching this reel on Instagram. And I thought, wow, that'd be brilliant. And I wanted to spend my time doing it all power to them. Well, if we go back eight years, right, if we could just go and look at ourselves eight years ago and look at these holidays, we would see us to working almost every day and loving it. Yeah, exactly. That's the important thing. And you know, and that that's not the case now. It's different. You know, our lives have changed massively since we started teaching and our interests have changed massively. But eight years ago, I would have, I didn't, I didn't want anyone to come to me eight years ago and say, don't do that. And like belittle me for choosing to go above and beyond in my job. I was really enjoying it. And I was in that honeymoon period of teaching where I did live and breathe it.

44:01 My life was, I was a teacher. That was my whole personality at that point. And I loved it. And, and that's okay. I don't think we should stomp on people who do that. It's like Dylan was saying, the problem with with culture in in education that's so toxic is we use that as a bar setter all the time in teaching. And it's so annoying. Like some more experienced teachers listening will know this because you've seen it happening. We saw it happen against us when we were young. Like we'd have teachers wouldn't be in the staff room. You especially you because you've always hadons of workhorse. You've listened to this podcast, you know, and, and he was when he was younger, my goodness, he'd spent every hour under the sun working. But you would have this really cool thing that you'd make for everyone. Right. But, but you would see the older generation in staff meetings, genuinely rolling their eyes and huffing. Oh my God, why? Okay.

44:47 It's great. Because you know what happens and everyone's seen this. I've seen this in every school I've worked at, by the way, this is just a generic thing. And it's human nature. Someone does something above and beyond. And, and it'll be mentioned by someone else even in a meeting saying, well, actually, you know, let's say you're Lauren, you're Lauren, whenever they do, you know, we're trying to keep track of reading. Yeah. You're Lauren, she writes every single word count up on the board. So they can see and she'll change it and update it every day. And it's not really cool. That's awesome. And it is genuinely really good. And it's like, yeah, you know, that is gonna, that does like give them a little carrot and they can see how many words they've read. And that's awesome. And then someone like, yeah, why don't we all do it? And it's like, oh, what do you mean? It's nice. Yeah, because it is another 10 minutes on my day every day. And do you know what, if Lauren wants to do that, because that's part of her culture in her classroom, and she wants to encourage reading in that way. And she, and that is bloody brilliant. Yeah.

45:40 Is that is that hinge there where we turn and we go, why don't we all do that? Yeah. Oh, the baselines are the bars higher. Yeah. And that is a perfect analogy. You've got to imagine that happening 10 fold all the time in education. It's completely unregulated. Every school is different. Like it's got it's got so mad now that, you know, it is a gamble where you work. You can't even work it out now. Like what your work is going to be like, unless you literally go and speak to the people that work there. And they're honest with you. There's a gamble you can go work somewhere where that bar is already just up here. Because, you know, they got a few people that work really hard, great. But SLT like cool, that's the expectation now. And then you've got other places where SLT are way more understanding. They're like, no, no, no, here's the baseline. Thank you for going above and beyond this individual person. This is still the baseline for everyone else though. So you know, you need to at least do this great idea over here. If you fancy doing something, it might have a good impact. Still the baseline though, you know, and it comes twofold though, like you do get from the top down, that's the worst, that's the worst version of it, where the top down, there'll be someone in charge who'll see something and go, we're all doing that from tomorrow. That's fantastic. It might be fantastic, but it's just unreasonable to have that no kind of we talked about the workload balance kind of task force that would go completely against that because it wouldn't be balanced against time. We wouldn't if you're going to introduce something new like that, I think you have to look at something that isn't working and drop it. And then teachers don't mind doing new stuff. I love doing new stuff. And I think it's a real misconception even amongst other teachers. And I've had it personally before where I've said, guys, we cannot do this change unless we're going

47:10 to drop something else. And I've said before, we have to, I've said to the whole staff team that I worked with before, we have to realize that me as a year four teacher in our current setup of how we do sets and classes. And you, Hayden, in a year six, and the way you do your sets and classes and expectations, what we need to do is not pretend that this is equal. Let's not pretend. Let's not do this thing that all educators do where we just kind of nod and go, oh, well, I'm in year six this year. And I've got sets where I've got to do all my own planning. But in year four, we share work, load for English, and we don't have the satch preparation. Let's not pretend that's the same. Let's not pretend that over the holidays, it might be in some schools that the expectation is that year six teachers do satch boosters. The expectation is that you've got to plan the workload for planning maths and English is usually bigger than the workload for planning anything else. It's so intricate and there's so much. So when year six are doing more maths and English than anyone else in the school, they're also planning more than anyone else in the school. They're also assessing more than anyone else in the school.

48:13 Let's not pretend then that in the holidays, we have an equal hit. So we have to be outwardly saying this is happening. Let's tackle it. Let's not accept it. I can give you some real, real context for this, right? Which is depressing, really. I was messaging my head of year. So I'm in year six, as you just said, that wasn't, and that was real. That was real. Yeah. And I was messaging my head of year, who's also a really good friend of mine. And we were talking about reports because she'd noticed that I'd, she was like, you've done your reports already because you've seen them on the system. Yeah. And I was like, yeah, I've been working on that. I hadn't finished at that point. So yeah, I'm going to get them finished this holiday. And then I was just saying to her, I was like, yeah, you should really consider it. Like it'd be like, I've used this tool and it's been great with this new system. We've got our school. You should think about getting yours done as well. Like it rather than next half term. And her response genuinely was, I won't have time. And it not because she's doing things, but because her whole Easter holiday is already filled up with, oh, not because she's in personal things. No, no, no, no, it's already filled up with other work to try and get ahead on. Planning, and, and sat's basically is encompasses all of that a little bit of marking catch up as well. And I just thought, oh man, imagine how many of you are. There's only one reason, by the way, that she is doing marking catch up when you aren't. It's because when you were doing marking before, she was doing something else. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because again, that comparison about between the year groups, even in the year group, the comparison between my workload and my head of years workload is incomparable. It's she's doing stupidly more work than I am for, you know, pennies more because the pay is terrible in teaching in terms of like extra responsibilities.

49:44 They're like, oh, here's a thousand pounds for the whole year. It's laughable. There's like 50 hours extra a month and I'm getting it's, it's, it's about 50 quid a month after tax. Yeah, yeah, stupid. And it is, is laughable. And you look at, you see how much stuff costs a minute. I think overall the point there is you cannot compare teacher to teacher. You cannot compare school to school. You cannot compare within a school. And I think we are as a, as a, as a profession, we sleepwalk into these problems and ignore them. And I think as soon as we as a profession understand that, you know, we actually can have control because I was really shocked. No, I don't know. It's, I'd be interested in what people think about this because I was really interested, I guess, and shocked. Let's say shocked because I was when the response to me saying that. So I, I said, this is not an anecdote. This is really what happened. And we were talking about well -being. Our school is fantastic in my opinion, especially recently, we've gone through it off -stead. We all know it was a really tough time for teachers. A lot of planning, a lot of workload. And there's been a real push now post off -stead, especially to be like, right, we really want to get it right because we know our workload went up.

50:49 And everyone in the school understands that SLT to the bottom. We all know that. So everyone now is on the same page trying to fix that. And we were, but one of our staff meetings was simply about well -being. And it wasn't one of those. We did some yoga and got head massage. It was actually, let's sit down. There's no SLT involved. Open forum. Open forum. Let's talk about it. And, you know, my eyes lit up because that's the, these are the moments that we don't always get as teachers. And I've worked in schools where this would never happen. And we were very grateful. And what that was exactly my point was, I was just saying to people, you know, we want to change, let's say we want to change English completely now. And they'll be head of English who are doing a fantastic job at doing research, going to training, getting evidence informed. Cool.

51:34 Fantastic. What we can't do though, and I was saying to everyone, we can't just say to people, willy -nilly, the English leads now have just decided we're going to change everything. Because the problem of that is, okay, cool. Well, I'm the math's lead. We're the math's leads together. We could have been simultaneously planning to complete the overhaul times tables in the school. And we would have the trust in the school to just do that. And it's a really good level of trust that we've got. And we could do that whenever we want it. But also, by the way, the afternoon curriculum that we've just spent ages planning has made some tweaks, which means every single lesson is tweaking now. All of these things happening at the same time is unbelievably tough for workload. And that is where we need to step back, look at the workload reduction thing. And we need to, as a whole school, look at what everyone wants to do, plan it out in a way that's systematic and spread out and doesn't overload workload. All of that everyone kind of agreed with, I think. But what really shocked me, and I want your opinion on this, was there was a bit of pushback when I mentioned that there's a difference between year groups. There was a bit of a pushback where, like, I just said, but it is like hours and hours of work. And let's not forget, guys, this is work. And we all have a fantastic attitude to wanting to help children as much as possible. But until we kind of break down that barrier of, this is a job, though, right? And I'm getting paid as a eight, nine year experience teacher, the same as you. I know we're slightly different, we're a year or more experienced, but let's just say we're the same, right? We're just at the same level. We

53:05 both take home however much money every month. But we then just pretend that it's okay that someone else does 10 hours more work a week. That's not okay. And someone else said, but, you know, we can't start tallying up hours and comparing it. And I was like, yeah, we can. We can, though, can't we? We just, we just don't have this culture of, oh, well, you've been put in year six, you've got to work hard this year. Oh, you and year three, I think having not taught year six properly, from my point of view, year three is the hardest year I've ever taught in a junior school when they come up for an infant school. It's so hard. It's so mentally draining. And they were like, well, it's more mentally taxing doing other jobs rather than the amount of time you put into something. Okay, cool. Maybe we are getting into the realm where it's hard to compare them. But we absolutely can just say that I have two hours of planning a week and you have six hours of planning a week. That's not okay. And that's not my choice or your choice. Yeah, that's not okay. Yeah. No, not really. In a real job. Think about it. I always do the test going out, G, which is, you know, you've got two employees in the same thing. Oh, you've got to stay for hours. You've got to do six aisles. I've got to do two. Yeah. Yeah. And that's not even that. That's more like, okay, if you want to use really quick loading, still go home at the same time, maybe, but it's more like, no, no, you're working till 10, you're working till six. Oh, am I getting paid more? No.

54:22 Because by the way, everyone in this analogy actually works from half eight till half four. And then it's just pot luck how much work you have to do after that. Yeah, it's pot luck. It's unbelievable. And it goes to all of those. We've gone off tangent a bit. But yeah, we talked, go and check out our workload episode actually, because that was, again, one of our best ones, I think, where we just really got into the nitty gritty of the problems with workload as a teacher. It's a really good, a good listen. How many times very quickly, going to do this point really quick, because I know we have gone off on tangent, but I've enjoyed this chat, one very quick point. How many times do you think you've seen a child in the school holidays out when you've been doing something? And they have been absolutely shocked that you exist in a form of Mr. Stevens, at least like in my old career, like 50 times. They're always, always shocked. Most of the time, they don't want to speak to it. So funny, isn't it? Considering I can have such a nice relationship with them at school. It's one of two. But I see you on holidays. But I get it though, because you're different, isn't it? Because when you're with your teacher, when you're with your parents, you are just a different kid. Well, you know that from parenting. So it does just break their world a bit when they're with their parents behaving one way. And suddenly they see their teacher who they probably behaved differently for. It's like, oh, most of the time, yeah, yeah, probably.

55:28 And I'm like, oh, I don't want to see them because I'm now I'm going to show my parents how I behaved to this person. It's one of two. Either you get back up the dark time and they're like, I saw you in Tesco and you're like, where were you? Yeah, yeah, or you you're walking down the street and you're Mr. Price. Yeah, yeah. You don't know where they are, but they've seen you a mile away. They're shouting like, oh, come on, see you, Mr. Price. Yeah, Mr. Price. Never in the middle. Do you like it? Not now. Do you not? I see. So not now when when it's like shouting across the room. Yeah. When it's like, if it's in Tesco and they're shouting, I'm like, oh, just come and see me. When I just see them, I love it. I love it more than that. That's what I meant. Yeah. Yeah. No, I still I thought you meant the actual acting like shouting across the especially ex pupils. I love seeing my old pupils. It's like, I've seen a lot of teachers don't like it.

56:12 Actually, they find it. They're like, oh, no, it's cringe. I don't want to. I love seeing pupils I've taught in the past. It's one of my favorite things. That's just a quick thing I want to talk about. So, Hayden, you know, people have listened to this. How to manage Saturdays, do that, everything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How do you actually manage to switch off then? Like ignore the fact we've got young babies and stuff right now. Just think about in the holidays, there'll be people out there going, okay, that's cool, but I can't switch off because we've just talked about it. I've got 17, you know, lessons to plan. I've got a deep dive coming up. Like I know this is happening at some point. I cannot switch off. How on earth can I do it? How can I switch off? So we're speaking to those people now, aren't we? Not the ones, because you know what, if you don't want to switch off and we made this clear, I'll make it really, really clear. If you don't want to and you enjoy doing that work, good for you. Carry on. Do what you enjoy. But this is someone who has to do work and really would rather just have a hold of it. Now we're speaking to us and the other teachers that are in that position. It's a tricky one, isn't it?

57:02 Because there's not a magic, there's not a magic solution to this. But you've got to stand your ground a bit. There is a line and I think you just need to know your embrace a little bit as well as a human being who is working for your trading your time for money. It's a job. It's a job. It is a job. It's a job. No matter what you can call it. Okay. I don't care what we call it. It is still a job. You are trading time for money, your services for money. There's got to be a point where you've got to stand up for yourself a little bit and put your foot down and be like, nope, I worked this amount of time during the term time, which was overtime every single week anyway. I've worked as efficiently as I can. That's the first thing. If you're not very efficient and you know you're not, try and work on that first. We talked about that before. Not every teacher is going to be perfectly efficient at that job. So if you think you're not very efficient, okay, work on that first. You might be able to get more done at your time at work.

57:58 If you're there already and you're in the holidays now and thinking, I've got tons to do, first of all, prioritize it. What needs to get done? What's the most important thing for doing your daily job? For example, for me, if I didn't plan lessons for Monday, then I wouldn't be able to teach. I've just got to do that. I have to. There's no way around it. I've got to plan the lessons. No amount of someone saying to you, just don't. It's going to happen. Yeah, you have to. And you have to as well. That's just tough. You've got to do it. But I can almost guarantee you there are other jobs that you could probably just leave to your first PPA or even just not do it, be a bit of a rebel. Because if you think, is it going to affect my teaching and learning? No, it's going to affect the kids. No.

58:39 Have I already done 10 hours over time this week? Yeah. Okay. No. Can they fire me over this? No, they can't because they're basically, because if they, if your ISE, you remotely say to you, why hasn't this thing been done? Yeah. And the only, and the only expectation was that you've got that done in the two weeks that you just had off, right? Yeah. Then you just say to them, oh, when was the director time that I was meant to do that? Completely. Then they'll never have a comeback. I don't care how, how savvy and how like, bolshe your SLTR, they will not do anything. Well, here's an example, right? I've had someone message us, we're going to do a Q &A at the end because we got some Q &A, ask for a Q &A section. And one bit of a spoiler, we'll talk about it more, I guess later on and we'll give her some advice, but we can kind of do it now as well. About to have deep dive. Okay.

59:20 And feeling really stressed. So the context I'm going to take from now is, okay, you've got SLT. It's the last week of Turn 4, just before the East holiday. And they say, oh, first week back on Monday, we're going to have a meeting with a school advisor. She's going to come in. And we want to go through our action plan for this, for this, for this subject. Okay. So that's booked in on the Monday. It's Friday now. So can you just get that done for me? Yeah. Yeah. My advice is right. Firstly, you need to have the confidence, I think you need to build the confidence in yourself to say to them on the spot. It has to be straight away. Okay. When would you like me to do that? Because if their response is the East holidays, then okay, cool. You can disregard them as a nice human being now because what the hell are they talking about? No, but they're really lovely because this is the point she was saying as well.

1:00:04 Her ST are lovely. Okay. Then the chances are that either you're wrong and they're not lovely because actually if they say, do it in your holidays, they're not as lovely as you think they are. Or two, if they are actually lovely, immediately recognize this. But it's the only time she can come in. It's the only time she can come in. So we need to get it done. Or is it? Okay. Well, I've got plans that this is the holiday. Yeah. It's as immovable as your holiday. Yeah. And you've got to consider it as that. And just say to them, okay, can I have some time out? I think teachers sometimes need to be a bit proactive. We treat our SLT like they're our parents and they have to organize everything for us and baby us. We are adults in today. We can also just say and just assume maybe the SLT who's got a million other things to think about. Sure. It just has overlooked this for a second. Not malicious. Yeah. They're not malicious. And you just say to them, okay, cool. That's going to take me probably like three or four hours.

1:00:47 Can I have some time out on the, I can see on the Monday on Tuesday, the diary is a bit more free. You know, you've, oh, you've done a bit of work for them. Okay, that's fine. You've, you've, you up managed a little bit. That's not, you can do that. It's not a problem. Because they've, they've got 57 ,000. Yeah. Yeah. And that's fine. And if they say yes, and problem solved, it didn't need to become a massive problem. If they say no, don't do it. Don't do it in the holiday. It is as simple as that because they've got no leg to stand on. So when, when, when the meeting comes in this, in this situation, if that meeting comes along and you go to it still, because the person's booked in and you don't have that plan, do you know what you're doing instead? You use that meeting to come up with a plan with the person. Like you don't, you, it becomes your time to do that job, which you've been told to do over the holidays. No, no, no, you've got the person there. Okay. You don't have to talk through. I guarantee that person will be like, okay, well, let's have a think. That person doesn't, that person's there to advise it. Like they don't care. Like just, and they'd understand if you just said the sentence, oh, only found out at this start of the Easter holidays. So obviously I haven't had time to sort it out yet, but maybe we can look together. It doesn't need to be the awkward thing because what you'll do, what I do is I build up this, I build up the worst scenario in my head made up of this crazy awkward conversation where I'm the really unconfident week one and they're all so confident that they'll, you know, like patronize me in my face. Most people aren't that confident, even on this, but even if they're thinking, oh, for God's sake, why haven't they done the work? They won't even say it to your face in that moment. They just won't. And do you know what, if they do, they're not worth the time of day. They're genuinely not, you're right. If they actually have a problem that you haven't spent six hours in your holidays doing this, this work for them, they are the problem. And remember that. Don't think you're the problem because you want to have a bit of a backbone and some

1:02:17 time off. I honest to God, 99 % of teachers I've met do more than enough work already. So if someone actually has a problem or something not getting done, that is that arbitrary that can just wait, then that is not your problem. Don't let the broken system and the broken funding education and the broken everything that we don't have enough time to do our job affect your mental health. I really do think that works your needs. And like we said, everyone's different. You might want to, you might just want to do it. Okay, do it then. If it's really not going to affect your holidays that much and you're thinking, oh, I don't mind doing it, do it then. Okay, if it's not affecting you, then do it. But the problem then is, do not expect the history lead and the geography lead and the R lead to have done the same thing over the last, it's not reasonable. And if you want to do it in your own time, okay, it doesn't mean everyone else has to. And if then you've done it in your own time, but your time you're wasting it. But if you've done yours in your own time, and then week two, you see in the on the diary, they're booked out for art to do the same thing you did for history. You can't then be resentful because they went and asked for time and got it. You have to be proactive. And like you said, yeah, it might be frustrating that SLT have said, yeah, sure to that person and didn't do it to you. But you know what, it's probably because the art lead went and did it. I've had it a million times. Like again, I'm not trying to throw people under the bus I've worked with because I really like my colleagues and people. But I have had people to my face tell me before that something happened or I got something done as math lead or, you know, we introduced something or I was allowed to do something, right?

1:03:44 Anything that I've been allowed to do. And they said to me, oh, just because you're a bloke. And I've been like, no, no, it's because I went and asked for it. Yeah. Did you go and ask for it? No, no, because they would just tell me no, no, no, no. Oh, no, because I went and asked for it. And they said, yes. Have you asked them for it? And they said, no, no, well, then it's nothing to do with me being a man. It's not a comparison anymore. Okay. Or you can only you're only confident enough to do it because you're a man and you'll know you'll get it. Maybe we're getting into a conversation that's worth happening at that point. But do you know what, until you've actually gone and done the same thing I did, don't say it's because I'm a man. That's really annoying. The bias doesn't come into play until we've done the same thing. And you've got no and I said, yes. Yeah. And there is a, and we're not going to pretend there's not a bias. Of course. There was an advantage of being a man. 100%. It's built in cultural bias. It just frustrates me when that gets, that's the go to when something's different. It's like, well, is there a more obvious reason why I got time out? And it's because I put a request in for it. Yeah, that's much more likely. Or did the SLT go, well, he's a man, he needs time out. His time's available. Probably not. Because you know what, the SLT is a woman. So I don't know. I just think it just frustrates me. If, take away all of the gender stuff now, that was just a side point. But if you as a teacher aren't actually doing the minimum, which is, are you efficient with your time? As you could possibly be. They spend an hour chatting after school because I used to do that and then get annoyed. I didn't know my stuff. Have you asked for help? Have you said no? They have to come first. The world's not going to bend to you in this profession. No, no. And I know I mentioned earlier,

1:05:14 but managing up is a thing. And I feel like teachers just don't really do it. In loads of other professions, you get people managing up all the time. And it's not a bad thing. You don't have to, you don't have to then be resentful. Oh, I had to go and ask for this time. It would be nice if it was just built in for me. It's like, yeah, it would have been nice. It would have been nice. But they are just a human being doing a job at the end of the day. And if you managed up and they still gave you that time, do you know what? It shows that their intentions probably weren't that bad. Because if they really didn't want to give you that time, they would have said no to you when you managed up as well. I wonder how much of teacher resentment and annoyance is through misunderstanding and miscommunication rather than actually, I think most of it, yeah, I think that we can't pretend that we've got enough money for stuff or enough time to do stuff. But I think there's a lot that we could solve by just being more open and less timid, I suppose. Yeah.

1:06:01 I think there are a lot of SLT, but I think it's the minority still who are just genuinely not very nice people. Yeah, very very minority. And they would say no, and they would have not planned it. And they will just expect stuff. We've been there where people like we've worked with people who just absolutely abuse their power and will just work people to the bone, not caring about their well being. Because the outcome is simply they got stuff done. Yeah. And I've had stuff before of I've had stories of these kinds of people in SLT almost bragging about how much work they got out of the stuff. Yeah. And it's like, you're a horrible person. Yeah. Like if you genuinely are just like, that's your end goal, it's just how much work can I eek out of these people without any kind of sentience of looking at your staff and thinking, well, they're all burnt out and the half of them have left. It must be them. That's the problem. Yeah.

1:06:51 No, probably not. I'll finish with one analogy, because I love this thing. And I think about it all the time and it really impacted me. And I think I've said it on the podcast before, but I'm going to say again, which was when early on in my career, when I was getting a bit burned out, and I was and I was genuinely struggling to get the workload done even when the weekends and holidays, right? Because I was just setting this stupid bar for myself. Was this when you like had to plan everything from scratch or is this just because of your mentality of just mentality mainly, but also it was it was at that kind of school where where we were just expected to do a stupid amount of work, unholy amounts of change all the time. And, and you know, being quite fresh to teaching, I was like, I must do all of this to the best possible level, which was completely unmanageable. It was taking up all my holidays and stuff. And I was speaking to our deputy head at the time, who was someone I very much admired then, I still do now, I just don't speak to him. But you know, at that time, I was thinking, I he's a really, really, really nice person, genuinely nice. And I just said to him, I was being honest, and I was just venting saying about how I'm struggling with all this workload and stuff.

1:07:44 And I've got to get this done. And the head teachers now asked me to do this. And my year group leaders asked me to do this. And he was just like, and this was weird coming from the deputy, he was like, Oh, just don't do it. And I was a bit sort of taken aback thinking, surely he's someone that's going to be telling me to do it. Like he's the deputy head. He was like, Oh, yeah, no, no, no, no, no, just don't just don't do that, that or that one. And I was like, but they've got you've sent an email out saying they've got to be done. They've got to be done. Yeah. And he was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, they haven't got to be done. He says, just don't don't do them. I was like, what? He was like, if they need to be done, they'll email you again. I don't know. And and and he's but but he was there is that's not very useful. No, I know. But he was he was joking around. But he was the serious point behind it was stop taking everything on this personal level of like, you are you have to get the you have to get this thing done because someone else has now told you to do it. And I know you've already got a massive list of jobs to do to do your daily job. All of these things come in your if they're coming in your own time, then they can't actually dictate you to do those in your own time. So do you know what? If it's your own if it's your weekend and you've done your entire job and you still this list of things to do that people are saying for you to do, don't do it. And if it's that important, they'll email you again next week. And if it's really important, they'll say, we really need this done, we've booked you some time out to do it now, because we really needed it done. And we can see that you're so busy. I think the problem I get it completely because again, it's just it's basically about being proactive about your time. But the thing that frustrates a lot of people is, you know, you need to do that to protect your wellbeing.

1:09:06 Like there is a certain I think there's a certain argument there to say to protect my wellbeing. I shouldn't have to be that proactive to ignore instructions from my superiors at work. And then for my superior at work to turn around and say, Oh, I know I've said do it, but don't that to me is gasoline. Like that is the definition of being a bit of a gaslighter because you're not implicit. If you actually think that in the email, what should be said is this needs to get done. Let me know if you have time. I know you don't. So actually, let's book it. Let's skip all this play where I kind of hope you push yourself to your wellbeing limit and do it for me. Because that is all that's happening by me not saying that in the first place. If I already know, oh, you don't actually have to do this, I'm playing a game right now to get as much work of you as possible. Knowing that 20 % of the people will just ruin their weekend to do it for me. I know that they don't have to because I'm telling you that that's actually really annoyed me. And I think that's terrible. And I think what you are doing there is basically playing the game. And I see this all the time and it boils my blood when really, really, really good people, excellent teachers who really care are the ones who do the most work ever because they don't want to let anyone down. And the people who are exploiting that are the people who simply think don't think about it and like, oh, well, I'm just I am a lovely, dovey person.

1:10:21 I'm very nice. I would say not to do it. Yeah, but you didn't. And every week you know this happens. You know that they like work themselves to the bone. You know they've done six hours of art leadership planning over the weekend. And you're just grateful they did it. And you know for well that the mass leaders won't do it and we'll just give them time. There comes a point as a leader where you know that's happening. And if you're not proactive about it, you're actually enabling it. There's got to be systems in place. Yeah, I think for people to be treated. But the system isn't you've gone to mode to deputy and they've said, I actually don't do it because you come to my no, I think you I think you've blown out of proportion in terms of what really happened. I think you've made a separate point. I've made a separate I'm not actually I'm actually not talking about I think just going back to what his advice there was that what he was actually saying to me was stop putting everyone else's job at the top of your priority list. Learn to prioritize and learn to say no, I haven't got time to do it. I think I've seen the other thing happen to a lot of people and I've just got frustrated. But you know, yeah, have a backbone yourself and say no. But there does come a point where actually, like we were saying beforehand, there are people who brag about how much work they're reeking out of people. And it's like, when it's said a detriment of their well being, it's nothing to brag about. Yeah, you are in control of that. Great.

1:11:32 Anyway, well, that was a good chat. Long episode. I like that. We've got a quick Q &A. We're still going to do it. Oh, yeah, go ahead. I'll wish for it. So play the jingle. We'll wish for the Q &A. Guys, please follow us on Spotify. Share this podcast. Please, please share it. Please. Share it. Let us know what you think and messages and show your friends. And let's grow this podcast. Thank you so much. We've got a jingle. We're going to do a Q &A. Stick around. It's great. Right. Quick one to finish off Hayden on our Instagram, which you can follow us at Teach Sleep with you podcast. Please do have a 3000 followers now. I love talking to you guys on there genuinely and Hayden is no longer involved. I did a little Q &A. So my question, I did a few polls and stuff about what you're getting on in the holidays. And my Q &A was simply quick Q &A. Send us a question. Doesn't have to be related to teaching. It can be whatever. And we got a whole bunch. I'm going to read out a few now as quickly as possible.

1:12:23 Okay. Cool. So I'm not going to name drop them because I never said I would. You might want to be anonymous to some people. So if you hear your question, message us and tell us how you heard the question. First question. Three hours. Three hours. First question. This is going to be quick guys because we are, it's a long episode already. Tell them how quick it is going to be one time. Quick. Go on. It's going to be quick this one. Okay. When will the government increase funding? We're stretched to the limit right now. Never. I'll never do it. I'll never do it. Do you think that election will actually change things? No. Because I don't either. No, 100%. I haven't actually ever done it in the last 20 years. Nobody has. It has. New Labour put so much money into education. No, they've last like 20 years. Yeah. Because it's the same Tory government. That's what I mean. Okay. So my point is, if we get a brand new party and a new government, do you actually think it will change? On the fence. On the fence. I think with this current party, I'm not actually no. I'm not convinced of the fact that Labour are not remotely fit for this. They're playing it way too safe, in my opinion. Next one. What would your death row meal be? Three courses and drinks? Chicken roast dinner. Starter? Starter. Starter will be chicken roast. This is like I'm a slave, isn't it? Sometimes it's a starter and I'm a slave, but I have like a burger. Just playing the game. Yeah. Okay. My starter is chicken roast dinner. Okay.

1:13:30 My main is a nice Nando's. Oh, really? Yeah. Anything in the world that you've got for Nando's? Yeah, I just love Nando's. What's your order from then on? I'd get my four chicken fries. Yeah. Medium. Yeah. Medium. Yeah. The whole sauce goes through me. I'd get anything that's for you. Garlic bread. You know what I like to do? You are so basic. You know what I like to do, you know what I like to do? I like to put two of the chicken fries in the garlic bread. I make a halloumi sandwich. Yeah. Yeah. Same sort of thing. And peri peri chips. I'd have that as my main. And then for my dessert, I'd probably have an Indian. I'd have a full curry. No sugar, baby. Oh, yeah. Drink? Drink. I don't care about drinks. Yeah.

1:14:14 I don't know. Fanta. There you go. Done. Okay. Cool. You? You doing that? I would have for starter. Move on. I actually don't know. For starter, I would have probably, what's my favorite starter? Do you know what? I'm a bit boring. I do like a good soup when you're out. Good soup. That's the meme, isn't it? No, my starter would be some banging chicken fillets. Good soup. Some banging chicken fillets that are like Southern fried Texas in some sweet chili, like old mayonnaise dip. Yeah. Nice. So KFC. Yeah. My main was a quarter pound burger. No. My main would be a fat roast. I love a roast in that. But I wouldn't, not just chicken. I would want like all the meats. Bit of chicken, bit of gammon, bit of lamb. Oh my God. Yeah. You could do good gammon.

1:15:00 Or, you know, caramelized onions, caramelized parsnips. Oh my God. Mash, creamy mash. Oh baby. Roast potatoes. Broccoli. Oh my God. Sweet. I love mashed sweet with pepper. I'm actually salivating. I'm sorry. And for dessert, I would have a massive chocolate fudge cake. Imagining that. I don't have any sugar in it. I love chocolate. Moving on. Next question. What's your favorite Easter egg? Something Cadbury's. Anything Cadbury's? Anything Cadbury's. Probably all fruit and nut. Okay. Do you miss the fact that they don't come with mugs anymore? No. No, that was, I was like, what, I'll waste the money. We're teachers. We do not need any more Cadbury. Yeah. I mean, I didn't have an Easter egg this year because of obvious reasons.

1:15:41 So my favorite Easter egg is clean sugar. I said, I said to this person, I replied to it, oh, I'm actually, I'm doing nose sugar at the minute. And I meant to say no sugar. Nose sugar. Wow. This next one, I'm going to name drop because he is your friend who we met and went to Nando's with. He's doing some writing at the minute. He asked, this is really interesting because he's doing a book on this. So he's actually going to, he said he's going to listen and hear what he said. What would you almost use a useful superpower to have as a teacher? I know. I've always a great, he's told me about this, but I'm really looking for Mr. woman, by the way, writing kids books at the moment, friend of ours, ex teacher, yeah, really cool books. And I'm looking forward to this one. So he said his was hypnosis. Hypnosis.

1:16:26 Yeah. That's cool. Which kid of kids do you want? Do your work. Can you imagine like the teacher look, but it was hypnosis. Just give them the look and they're just like, yeah, I don't, what, give me more time here. What would you, did you have an idea? I think, I don't know. I think personally, as a superpower, I think for me, it would be something where I could just basically engage the kids. This sounds ridiculous. I don't necessarily think it would be something that can help me with my job. I suppose slowing down time would help a little bit. If it was showing off, I'd be like super strength or flying. Here we go. I think that's what I want. I'm trying. That's the first thing that came to my head and I thought, come on, you can't say that. I want to be able to go water pistol hands. What water all over the book. Yeah.

1:17:10 How funny would that be? Brilliant. Well, sorry, mate. If you were, if Mr. woman, if you were thinking of getting some ideas for your book, there you go. Okay, listen. We got the, we got the death row question quite a lot actually, so I'm going to skip over that one. As in what would your meal be? Not do you want to go in death row? No, this one I thought was such a good question. What do you wish you were taught in your teacher training that they did not cover? Not to be a teacher. Because to get out, get out of this game. Here's your first class on what you could be doing instead. What I wish I was taught as a teacher. I thought that was great because we've talked about how much we're taught that is so useless. I've still got paper mache tortoise that I made in my DT lesson. So I didn't have a minute to learn how to do DT. I don't know. I honestly don't know. Like I feel like I learned nothing about teaching in my teacher training. For me, I would do it behavior maybe like my behavior management was terrible when I started. Behavior management. I did not learn enough about like really taking that seriously. I would like to have learned what to do exactly if a bee flies into the classroom. No one prepared for me that first moment. What are the dog steps on it? There are about three people. Is there a dog steps on a bee? My dad knows Tai Chi. This is linked to what I said earlier. How do you actually get out of being a deep dive subject lead? Because they're due off -stead and they just can't cover the pressure. I was like, wow, I mean, I wish I could tell you my honest advice would be go to your SRT and say exactly that. I am crumbling under the

1:18:42 pressure and I'm going to quit teaching if I have the camera and doing this job. It's killing me. And see what they do. Linked to the next question then. So I have a primary teaching degree. Well, what are the career paths? So this person's thinking of going down doing the master's route, which I know you did. And I replied basically saying, you should do that only if you want to put off for a year, because it doesn't actually help that much. Like you said, you enjoyed the process. Yeah, it was good love. It didn't actually help your practice too much or going into the army or something. What would you do if you got a teaching degree? Do you know what? I'm going to answer this myself first. Give you a minute. I would honestly ignore the fact you've got a teaching degree. Don't let that sunken cost fallacy come into play where you're like, well, I've got a teaching degree.

1:19:25 So I've got to use that somehow. Okay. If you actually don't want to do teaching, the worst thing you can do is try and shoehorn teaching into something. Yeah, yeah. Just pretend you didn't do that degree, even though you've got the debt and stuff. It's annoying. Just go and do an apprenticeship somewhere. Do whatever you want. Now being more experienced in life. If you were this old or you've got a career. Yeah, because right now, if I'm answering these questions, right now, what I'd go and do genuinely find something I'm interested in, which for me is like computer -y stuff. I'd go and learn to do coding. I know you've been interested. I'd go and learn to do coding or something to do software engineering, software development, because I just find that sort of stuff interesting. There's so much stuff online. I think I'd enjoy it. So much stuff online. And it's high pay if you get good at it as well. And you can go into that late. You really can. You can just learn because there's not many people learning. I've been learning how to do a bit of Python. It's really hard. Yeah, it's really hard. The snake. Yeah.

1:20:13 Jeff's cake. Is it a cake or a biscuit? Cake. Yeah, it's in the name, isn't it? It's very cakey. It is cakey, but it's in the biscuit arm. It is called cake and it's full of cake. I think it's a cake, I reckon. Is there any crunchy biscuit to it? Oh, is it? No. Is a rich tea biscuit a biscuit? Oh, is a crunchy biscuit. I reckon the cake is a cake. I'm sorry, everyone asked that question. I think it's a cake though as well. And it is in the name. Last one. I'll just finish this one. What's your go -to snack at school pre and post sugar? Well, it's the same thing. Pre sugar. No, pre sugar. A yum yum. Yum yum. When someone brings in yum yum, I'm like, yes, I'll eat two of the four. Yeah, yeah. And there's four people in the team. The last three I have to share too, somehow. And post? I don't know, because I'm so addicted to chocolate that nothing is nice. Yeah, I used to have, I used to get a pack of four rice buns from the co -op and I'd eat two before I got back to school. I'd eat one on my walk to my classroom and I'd sit down and be like, oh, and I spun. And when you're eating the last one, you'd say, oh, I only got one, mate. Sorry. It's a meal and I asked for one. And there's the pack of empty room for four. Sorry, buddy. I don't know. Do you have a snack that you enjoy eating now that you've been off sugar for ages? Or do you just eat snacks now? I just don't eat snacks now.

1:21:34 Probably an apple. I'm not going to lie. I actually really like apples when I've not eaten loads of chocolate. Well, on that unbelievably boring note of apple being your favorite snack, we're going to round up there. As the apple of your eye, let's finish up this. Right, guys. Thank you for listening for this long. It hopefully has been a useful one. I've quite enjoyed that. The title is going to be like a pow pow pow because we covered so much. What is the title? I don't know right now. The title. The exact title that you're going to play. The title is...