A day in the Life....

I am a very lucky man. I have a job I love, I live in a place I love, with a person I absolutely adore. Life is beautiful. Take today for instance. A normal Wednesday for me starts with a class at 8am before school starts properly. This means getting up about 6.30am, getting ready and driving to wherever I have to teach. En route to my first school I pick up a coffee to start the day, and if I get to the school early, then I just sit and read a book to kill the time. So it's a pretty relaxed start to the day, and as I love my job as a chess coach, things don't get much more stressful. The first lesson, in a primary school goes sweetly enough with a mixture of kids who I taught last year and some raw beginners. Teaching groups of mixed ability is perhaps the most testing part of my job, but I've had plenty of experience and things run pretty smoothly.

9am and I leave my first school with a 4 hour break before my next class at about 1pm. Today I will not finish work until about 7.30pm, which some people would consider too long a day. However, the breaks I get in the day compensate these things for me, and during the morning break today, I visited Port Melbourne to check out the World liner which is docked in Melbourne. It was a beautiful morning, about 20C with mainly blue skies and a pleasure to walk along the promenade. While there it seemed natural to grab a coffee and some breakfast at one of my favourite cafe's in nearby Albert Park, and I was still back home for about 10.30am.

The World in sunny Port Melbourne

This gave me some time to do some admin work and preparation for my classes. Again, I got to admit that as my job involves teaching my favourite pastime, chess, preparing for classes is quite enjoyable for me. Then came the hard part of the day for me. From about 1pm through to 7.30pm I am either doing classes or travelling between classes. These were on the whole pretty good fun, as the classes had a range of different level kids. I have one toddler class, a couple of Primary School classes, and a Secondary class. These classes need to approached and handled differently, so I have a great diversity in the material I show and the teaching methods I employ. Boredom does not enter my job but with the amount of classes I do There is a fatigue factor, which can almost be described as burn out which usually starts to happen around week 7 or 8 of the 10 week terms we have in Australia. Luckily, to compensate for this I get school holidays mostly off to recharge. That works out as about 12 weeks of holiday per year, so I don't suppose I can grumble too much if my hours are slightly antisocial.

I'm currently at home writing this article and looking at some chess articles partly for work and partly for pleasure. It's 9pm and I'll be awake for a few hours more, relaxing with my wife and 2 cats and at some stage, I guess I'll wonder how it was that I became so lucky as to end up in this idyllic life.