Sam Sunday #12: An Exhausting Week

I was absent from the internet for most of last week, busy having one of the most exhausting weeks I've had in a long time.  Most of you know that I'm a primary school teacher in the UK, and that I'm not allowed to discuss my job on the internet.  Well this week, we had OFSTED.  For the non-Brits, OFSTED are a national schools inspection service, who visit your school for two days and make a series of snapshot decisions on how good of a teacher you are and how good your school is.  Your teaching is judged in this way in a  twenty minute slot once every four years or so.  There are far-reaching and serious implications for the school (not least because the judgement lasts for years), so how you and the school do is crucial.

The things I could write this week, if I was allowed to write them!  All I will say is that I have been under a lot of stress and I'm now completely exhausted.  And my class have their SATs exams in just under a month, so I will need to keep the energy up.

This weekend I'm being kind to myself and having a proper break.  Yesterday was filled with gardening in the sun, reading, having a lie in, letting my husband cook for me and watching trashy TV shows.  Today I plan to do more of the same, plus watch the video lectures for my world history course on Coursera.  Thursday and Friday I had no room for anything in my head apart from teaching, so it's nice to slowly let other things back in :)

I've had less time for reading this week, but I'm pleased that I've finally managed to finish How to Read Literature by Terry Eagleton, as I've been working away at it for ages!  I had high hopes for it, but in the end it wasn't quite the book I thought it would be.  At the moment I'm reading an ARC of a historical fiction novel called Under the Jewelled Sky, for a blog tour I am participating in on Friday.  It's great escapism, so I'm definitely enjoying it.

This week, I've been reading:

  

Review posted:

The Novel in the Viola by Natasha Solomons