I could hear them as I walked down the corridor. You can always hear them. A low hum that spreads through the building like swarming insects. The walls vibrate with the energy of 1,600 people talking, moving, breathing. Even when every student is occupied with their work, and lets face it that never happens, the noise is still there, like something alive. The school itself lives through the thousands of lives that seath within its walls every day. Occupied with such thoughts I hurried down the corridor, the noise rising as the students revelled in my absence. I reached the classroom door as the noise resolved itself into one voice.

“And bam, right there,” exclaimed the voice of Johnnie Mitchell, followed by whoops of laughter.

I took a deep breath and placed my hand on the doorknob, squaring my shoulders, I walked into the room.

The scene that met my eyes was one of frenzied excitement. Most of the class were clustered around two desks at the back of the room, some sat on chairs they’d moved from behind the desks that ran in four rows along the room and were now arrayed around the desks in the far right hand corner. The door was situated on the left hand wall of the class room, the room ran longways away from the door to the left so that the first thing my eyes focused on was the throng of students sitting and standing around the two figures seated at the desks farthest from the door.

I couldn’t see the figures clearly, those that surrounded them mostly hid them, but I had no doubt who they were. Even if Johnnie’s voice had not announced him as the prime instigator, precedent would certainly have brought him first to mind, along with his luckless cohort, his right hand man, Matt Ryan. The two were the centre of attention in any situation, class clowns who thrived on the admiration of their peers and frustration of their teachers.

I glanced around the rest of the room to gauge the extent of the disruption. All the remaining desks were unoccupied, not a good sign. I sighed as I walked to the large teachers desk that faced into the classroom and placed my bag on the desk. A data projector sat on the desk, ready should any teacher choose to plug a laptop into it, it pointed behind the teachers desk to where a white board was attached to the wall, a tray with white board markers arrayed beneath. I stood behind the desk and surveyed the length of the room. The desks were arrayed in four rows across, two desks to a row and 6 rows long. Many teachers chose to seat the students in assigned spaces in an attempt to stop them from distracting each other. Personally I found this attempt pointless, the students only wrote notes to each other and passed them the length or breadth of the class, thereby distracting the whole class instead of just their immediate neighbours.

Nominally this was my classroom so I was free to decorate as I liked. The walls therefore featured posters for various art exhibitions and plays and posters of the covers of the penguin classics collection, books like Tosltoy's Anna Karenina, Orwell’s 1984, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Dickens’ Great Expectations; things that I’d loved that I hoped might inspire the students in some way. I shook my head as I surveyed the scene before me; inspire them by osmosis maybe.

Gaining students attention after such distraction had been allowed to build was never easy, one of the many reasons why being late to class was really not an option, but year 9 English was not the easiest class to manage on a good day. I had the sinking feeling today’s lesson was not going to happen.