That's an actual headline from the News of the World. Copied and pasted, unchanged, unadulterated, exactly as you can read it here:

http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/news/article38640.ece

It comes from a union leader saying that teachers who have sexual relations with sixth formers shouldn't be criminalised, though it's nopt something they should be doing as professionals.

It's a bit of a non-issue as far as I'm concerned. If you're the sort of person who would want to sleep with someone only seventeen years old then teaching probably isn't the right career choice anyway. The legal and professional issues associated with doing so should be irrelevant, just like there'd be something wrong with you if the only reason you can think of for not murdering your nextdoor neighbour is because you might get in a spot of bother with the police. I'm not even going for the moral viewpoint here, more of a 'why would you want to?'

Even having said that a national newspaper running a headline like that is a little over the top, albeit slightly predictable. I would like to take the opportunity to make it very clear that I'm not interested in having the right to bed any of my pupils, no matter how old they are.

My year sevens are very special. There's so many pupils in the group who for one reason or another have that bless 'em factor. It's terribly patronising but they just make your heart bleed.

At number five: The girl who constantly puts her hand up to answer questions... but gets half of them wrong. At least she's giving it a go and doesn't seem to get discouraged.

At number four: The boy in the wheelchair. It's an obvious choice really, but it speaks volumes for how nice and normal the boy is that he only appears at number four.

At number three: The boy who has no idea how to relate to other pupils. I think his home life is pretty bad so he struggles to get along with the other pupils. In one lesson on probablity last week he was describing something that was impossible and said it was impossible that he'd ever go out with one particular girl in the class. He genuinely didn't understand why it wasn't okay to say that.

At number two: The boy with extremely poor vision. He has a talking calculator, a special computer magnifier and the thickest glasses you will ever see. Nuff said.

At number one: The girl who got 2% on her SATs test. It's hard to describe how much she struggles with maths. I gave her a test to do to see where her strengths and weaknesses were but she struggled to do any of it. An example was 9 + 5 = 13. The shocking thing is that whilst she appears on the SEN register it's for behaviour. This term can cover a range of different things but I'd say that's the least of her worries. She was handing out worksheets the other day and couldn't even manage it so that everyone got one.

In order to gain an extra day's holiday in the summer we postponed an INSET day to several twilight sessions. This evening was the first of these and was based on Teaching and Learning - which might sound obvious but it's amazing how often teacher's overlook this as an idea in itself. The model for it CREPE, which stands for Challenge, Risk-taking, Engagement, Progess and Enjoyment. In short the five things that our lessons should involve, leading to lots of jokes that the evening was going to be crepe or that it's all a load of crepe etc... We can be a cynical bunch, us teachers.

I quite enjoy such sessions as we invariably get to try out lots of different activities and I sometimes come away with lots of good ideas. I do have some reservations though as the big movers in Teaching and Learning at our school are based in the humanities department, so we had lots of quite wooly ideas that don't necessarily translate well into the maths classroom. For example in one activity we were shown a picture and had to come up with answers to: Who? What? Why? Where? When? It's the sort of 'In my opinion...' approach that doesn't work when the answer is sixteen.

Some of the other maths teachers are quite grumpy about such evenings as they hate being told how to do their job. My own view is that we should use any good ideas but not stress too much about doing things for the sake of of fitting some criteria.

My 'highlight' of the evening was being put on the spot by the school's Teaching and Learning coach. We were shown a picture of a banana and had to come up with two questions to which 'banana' was the answer, one low order (name a yellow fruit) and one high order (name a fruit high in potassium, or as one teacher suggested: complete the film title 'Herbie goes...') When put on the spot to say a question though I struggled to think in front of over a hundred teachers and support staff and came out with 'what is, er, that a picture of?' which got a laugh at least. It'll make me think very carefully about my questioning technique in the classroom as I couldn't concentrate for the next five minutes. I now understand why some pupils look daggers at me when I ask them even the most straightforward of questions.

Occasionally on INSET days we are required to go off-site to another school. This can either be an exciting opportunity to meet other maths teachers, to exchange ideas and learn about new innovations in teaching. One such INSET is approaching in a month or so but unfortunately the majority of teachers in our department have the same level of motivation towards the idea as my year nines have for simplifying ratios.

Thus I was nominated to go on account of my 'being good at feeding back on things'. It's safe to say that this is the first time anyone has ever described me as having this quality and it falls in line with such compliments as: 'you're really good at washing up', 'you're good at being the designated driver' or 'you'd make a really good human sacrifice'. In short if you don't want to do something make out that the person sat next to you is really good at it and they'll get lumbered with the job.

I was in the middle of explaining some quite difficult work on indices to my year tens. They were focused and keen to learn and I was trying my best to get it across, making sure I was patient if they struggled.

Suddenly the door swings open and in comes the Head of Science with a boy from my form behind him. Why had he dragged this boy to see me? Had he tried to singe a girl's hair with a bunsen burner? Had he called his teacher a wanker? Had he blown up a science lab? If so then I'd certainly want to know, but there's a time and a place. We even have a system of PINs (Pupil Information Notes) to inform tutors of any misdemeanors. However it was none of these things:

'Do you know this boy?'

Well, yes of course I did. I would imagine the Head of Science was intelligent enough to ask the child whose form he was in rather than taking him round every classroom in turn until he found his tutor.

'He hasn't go a pen, I thought I'd bring him up here to save writing a PIN.'

At this point I look around the room for a hidden camera, wondering if this was some sort of set-up. No one jumps out from underneath a desk. None of my pupils zip back their skin to reveal themselves as TV presenters. It genuinely was a case of someone interupting my lesson to tell me that someone in my form hasn't got a pen.

I am then left in peace to get on with teaching a class who looked as bemused as I did.