Ugh

Not my greatest day today. Felt thoroughly deflated by lunchtime, courtesy of a pretty poor lesson with the third year. It's a big group (32) with a wide range of ability. Right now, it appears to me that the range of ability splits neatly into two: those who get it and those who don't. What was really demoralising was that after the lesson, the same number of pupils seemed not to get it as at the start. Plus I didn't handle some of the classroom issues very well: I let the noise level climb too high while I was helping individuals and was too soft on the pupils who had not done their homework.
The second one of those is more easily remedied - I'll just have to make them do it in lunchtimes...
The first is issue is a bit more complicated. For one thing, I've been accustomed to working in noisy environments (try working in a newsroom in the days of manual typewriters...) so I wasn't really aware that the noise level was rising. But the main issue, which the class teacher made me aware of as it hadn't impinged on me, was that they were making a lot of noise because they really didn't get it (perimeters and areas of compound shapes) and the conversation that starts with one pupil asking the neighbouring one "How do I do this?" slides swiftly through "I don't know either" to something entirely irrelevant. So tomorrow it's back to the drawing board to get them back to a level at which they can achieve something. Because they need to be moving on to the next stage pretty soon - volumes of prisms. Three dimensions sounds like fun when they can't cope with two...
On a slightly more positive note, I ended up teaching 2R again because their regular teacher wasn't feeling very well - still in the room but asked me to lead. I thought I did OK in the circumstances as I hadn't done the lesson plan and didn't know what the slides said. One pupil got sent out but that was his problem not mine - I warned him as they were coming into the room (not at random, he deserved it), he continued to misbehave, so I took him out and gave him a final warning and he still carried on so the class teacher sent him to the PT.... he'll be out of that class for two weeks now, working solo in the PT's room. The rest of them managed to get the hang of dividing fractions pretty well.