Last week, I blogged about some of the stress involved with casual teaching on a day to day basis. After I came home and wrote that post up, I worried about having to do that for a while - I was thankful to have a few days of work come in, but I was not looking forward to them at the same time. Funnily enough, that's when something random {and wonderful} happened.

Today I had my first day back in a classroom.

There are so many differences when it comes to teaching on a casual basis compared to working with your own classroom full of kids. It's the attitudes of the staff and the students. It's the complete lack of routines that are in place. It's the uncertainty of knowing whether you have a timetable to follow, any work left for you to plan. It's the unknown of where the classroom is, where you should park your car, where the roll is. It's the 'going in blind' approach, especially when it comes to children and their behaviours, personalities and strengths/weaknesses that you know absolutely nothing about.

It's a real eye-opener, that's for sure. You might remember that when we first moved to London, I started out doing some casual relief teaching there too. I stuck it out a few weeks, and really struggled to find a rhythm with it - which was when I started looking for other roles in education, and ended up working in an office environment for the majority of my time there instead. Well, today brought back flashbacks of coming home miserable and wondering what else was out there. It's early days yet, and I have potentially got a few more days booked in at a different school next week - but we'll see what happens there.

To break down some of today's more eventful happenings, I'm enlisting the help of some bullet points.

• Got a phone call at 7.30am, asking me to be in by 8.15am - got up, showered & dressed in ten minutes, threw together some random token food products and made sure I had a few resources in my bag ready to get going.
• Arrived at school early, only to find no parking spaces left in the lot or along the street. Parked next to a dumpster in the school car-park, went into the office to check that I could leave it there & was encouraged to drive right in to the car-park, blocking in several cars. (I wasn't too comfortable about that, but the instruction came from the Asst. Principal, so okay...)
• Found classroom - no work left, no time-table set. Decided to see about photo-copying some of my resources & told that school has a strict policy: casuals only allowed to copy 2x worksheets that have to be approved & signed off by the senior staff & only admin allowed to use the photocopier.
• Left without copies for first half of the day - so kept busy with other things, though more than a little stressful.
• Had a class of Year 1 students, which was nice. Kids okay, just kids. Quite a few personalities, though it felt comfortable teaching them - although we had a pants-wetting incident midway through the day, so that was fun.
• Administration staff not particularly friendly and/or helpful when it came to filling in my casual teaching paperwork. They treated me like a teacher fresh out of university, very patronising - and if it weren't for the kindness of a teacher that overheard our conversation & could offer some assistance, I may well have had to drive back there on another day to bring back forms that they should have provided.

And we're now back to our scheduled rambling.. with just a dash less whinging. I'm sure the job thing will work itself out eventually - and in the meantime, I'm going to keep looking, keep applying & invest in a few 'lucky' objects to push me in the right direction.

Moving completely along though, I'm doing my best to become a whiz in the kitchen. I don't cook every night - probably every other night? But I'm starting to experiment with different things a little more, and I'm like the results. Jase got a slow cooker from my parents for Christmas {such an awesome gift!... for me) & we broke it in last week - it is delightful! We had guests over for the evening yesterday and I whipped it out again - threw in my apricot chicken go-to recipe, and served it up to rave reviews. I even baked a chocolate cake in two layers! All it needed was some frosting. Plain, simple, chocolate frosting.

Unfortunately, this is my kitchen weakness. I cannot make icing. I've tried the simple icing sugar/liquid/cocoa powder ratio. I've followed recipes to make cream cheese frosting. And last night I experimented with a chocolate and sour cream (!) icing - and it STILL went runny. Apparently all of my cakes are meant to look like drowned, chocolate covered space-ship domed blobs. Lucky they still taste good.

Excuse me while I interrupt my lovey-dovey wedding happiness - I need to vent, and it's not going to be pretty.

Job hunting sucks, you guys.

It's still early days in the school term, but I've not had any calls for work. It's frustrating, that's for sure - but in actual fact? The more I think about it, the more I feel that I don't work well with this whole casual teaching thing. I did it for a while when I first arrived in London and ended up hating it - the waiting around, the different place every day, the never knowing what's been planned, the complete disarray that comes with it: all things that this uber organised girl struggles with.

I've come to the realisation that I need to find something stable. In my perfect little career bubble, that would be in the form of a full-time, permanent classroom teacher role. Unfortunately, finding a school in Sydney that will take you on as a permanent member of staff is harder than finding a needle in a haystick. It's pretty damn irritating too, considering all teachers ever hear about is the dramatic shortage of quality primary teachers in the Western Sydney suburbs. Ha. Well excuse me, but I know of a fully qualified and experienced teacher, with a car, who is ready to settle down with a classroom of kids and willing to work in some of the more 'challenging' suburbs and she is STANDING RIGHT HERE. Well, sitting, but you know what I mean. AND SHE IS NOT WORKING.

{deep breath}

Anyway, numerous permanent job applications that I've put in through the Department of Education here have led to nothing. The system is ridiculous - it really is. I must have applied for twenty different teaching roles on offer in the last two months, and only one has even got back to me, just one. The one response I got? Was that the position had been filled internally prior to the ad going live. This leads me to question if the jobs on display are actually even vacant jobs at all, or just ones that are advertised because they have to be. Chances are, they've already got their own teachers slotted in for the vacancy - so there's no real job there.

As much as I didn't want to do it, I'm going to have to start looking for work outside of teaching again, because I can't afford to sit around and not work. We have so many things that need financing, and I feel incredibly guilty that Jase is busy working and I am not. I've tried to keep busy - I'm doing as much as I can to help with home/wedding/life stuff, so that he can relax when he gets home from work. But what about me? This is ridiculous.

Feel free to send your good-job-vibrations this-a-way. I'll take 'em.

So... have I mentioned that I'm marrying the love of my life in oh, around four months time?  Can I just say how happy that makes me? So, so happy. Except that now, everywhere I go I see things I want to use in the wedding. I have bookmarks and photo files coming out of the wazoo. Everything is pretty! adaptable! would look perfect! Yep, I'm obsessed. And so without any further ado, let's get busy with the looooove.

It has been mighty, mighty hot here the past few days - and it's predicted that Sydney is going to have one of its hottest weeks ever. To that I respond with a resounding 'UGH'.