In the slightly eerie gloom of my blind shrouded room I am sitting at my desk, surrounded by empty desks as my class is taught music. I am gathering my strength for the intellectual onslaught which is my maths class.

The numerical universe populated by my hapless pupils is a different one from that one which is creatively and imperfectly understood by those able to read these lines with a modicum of fluency.

To be brutal, for my class a sum such as “three plus nine” is as powerful in its intellectual challenge as trying to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem and never having heard of Sir Andrew Wiles.

Getting the class to make an effort at telling the time has been as searing a teaching experience as I have ever endured. I have used every technique that I could think of and which the internet could offer; I have used animations and worksheets; I have been reasonable and demented; exuberant and suicidal.

We have gone through times when (at its best) understanding was almost in sight and I, like a frankly more healthily sceptical Moses, glimpsed what might have been the promised land of time telling on every corner. I have also endured times (at their worst) when what we teachers know as an ‘answering frenzy’ takes place.

To those less than au fait with the minutiae of high level education an ‘answering frenzy’ is when a pupils gives an absurdly wrong answer and the rest of the class is drawn into what amounts to a bidding competition which involves throwing ever more tangential numbers at the teacher in the belief that some mathematic god will prompt them to speak in tongues which will involve the correct answer.

This is the teaching equivalent of my shocking ascent of a staircase in new The National Theatre when, having unwittingly stored a vast reserve of static electricity by walking across a vast expanse of nylon carpet in the foyer, I foolishly touched the metal handrail while stepping on the first part of the staircase.

The electric spark my hand produced propelled me to the other side of the staircase where I instinctively grasped the opposite handrail which sparked at once and the pain propelled me to the other side when, having learned little in the previous millisecond I reached out and . . . . Well, you get the idea. I fell up stairs in a series of galvanic twitches which would have brought tears of joy to the eighteenth century experimenters with frogs’ legs.

Falling upwards into oblivion with my maths class, rather than the rather nice, but pricey restaurant that was my destination in the National.

My class has already had one practice test on mental maths where the idea is that a problem is read out and the pupils have five seconds to respond by writing down an answer. This created the equivalent of mental melt down with each question being greeted with squeaks of outraged amazement that anything so demanding could be asked of mere children.

Today we have a practice of the real maths test and I foresee innumerable problems with, well, everything. With some of my class the simple effort needed to obtain a sharp pencil takes up the whole of their intellectual reserves. To ask them to do computations as well is frankly ludicrous in their eyes.

Wish me luck! They are almost back and raring to go. God help!

The reality was much worse than my most dismal imaginings. The idea of sustaining a church-like calm in the classroom was almost as difficult as obtaining such quietude in a Roman Catholic place of worship. The Anglican attitude to things ecclesiastical is polite but disengaged respect and keeping the children quiet. This is not echoed by their Iberian counterparts where noisy participation and unchecked children shock the Anglican atheists!

So my maths class will have to be policed with a light touch as I do everything but tell them the answers on Thursday!

The latest threat lurking on the near horizon of our misery is the Summer Concert. This lurking horror is to take place during the lastish week of term. Or the last week in which children are in school. Or might be considered to be in school in a way. As you will know if you have been following the inexplicable mystery surrounding the precise date of the end of the term there are at least four or five separate ‘endings’ depending on your ‘contract’ and whether Saturn was in the ascendant with Venus on the cusp in the House of the Rising Sun at the hour of your birth.

We wait with something approaching hysterical nervous collapse the Presentation of the Final List. This is the (by all accounts) voluminous (and still growing) list of tasks which departing teachers are expected to complete before they leave our august establishment and (more importantly) before they qualify for their holiday pay.

Holiday pay is of course a vulgar misapprehension of how teachers are paid. Our salary (even the risible pittance paid in our place) is paid in 12 equal monthly payments. Holiday or teaching it’s all the same, it doesn’t matter; it’s the way our pay is divided up.

We are getting closer to crunch time with our employer. People seem inclined to wait until their May pay is in and then, if necessary start taking some sort of concerted action during June to ensure that we are at least treated with something approaching professionalism. A bit late, but there is more joy in the TUC over one complacent, quiescent worker who turns to the truth faith of Trade Unionism (even in its debased Catalan form) than in ninety and nine who continue to make a meal of employers’ less savoury bodily areas.

From past experience I will believe professional radicalism when I see it!

Ever the cynic.