The view from above.

I won't see my pupils for the next two weeks, at school that is, I might bump into them in town somewhere. As you might be able to guess, that's my roundabout way of saying that it's Autumn break.
It's early this school year, after only six weeks of class, but I'm glad that I've got a chance to get away for a while and to get a different perspective on all the exhausting bits of school.
The lessons I enjoyed most of the time, but I've been frustrated with some of my colleagues and there were lots of pupils that demanded my attention in different ways - personal problems related to their homelife, but also the way my form, or rather smaller groups within it, interact with each other and with some of their teachers.
None of this is especially new for me as a teacher, I've seen it before, but for the individuals concerned it's of course different, and some of these situations make me feel powerless, too. We're working on it: some problems have been delegated to those better equipped to deal with them; some we will tackle with the help of experts - I've got a meeting scheduled during the holidays to put things in motion.
For all of us though it's good to get a bit of a break, not to be in the middle of it all, maybe get a look at the big picture, and not be bogged down by the endless game of "He said, she said".