Don’t you just hate it when…

…you’ve just got your lesson ready and then you drop the box of paperclips all over the floor.

Of course, you might have been lucky enough to avoid this, but personally in 7 years of teaching I’m sure I must have done this at least 20 times. So, rather than just throw in the towel, I decided to take practical steps against those little annoyances that are produced not by other teachers (uncleaned boards) or students (“Teacher, I’ve done this grammar before”) but by the interaction between inanimate objects and myself.

First I’d like to get a few things off my chest. Don’t you just hate it when…

1. You have the best prepared lesson ever and then you arrive in the classroom without any pens
2. You have to cue a pron cassette
3. Your pens run out half way through the lesson
4. There are 25 pens in the room and none of them work
5. You are cutting up a set of cards and one badly lined up guillotine cut ruins the whole pack
6. You get to the listening in the lesson and the cassette recorder doesn’t work. After the class someone tells you, “Oh yer, that one hasn’t worked for weeks.”
7. You can’t find the book you need
8. You have to search the whole building just to find a hole punch
9. The photocopier breaks down just before you reach it

…or is it just me?

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