Our new college semester started this week. Yes, the last week in January, just when you’re at your lowest ebb. The winter chill still has us in its grip; we still waken to darkness; the Christmas jollities are all over; and the New Year resolutions – well, let’s not talk about them. And the garden is a horrible heap of brown goo.

Five of my classes ended last week. But every group has some tail-end-Charlies who somehow didn’t get themselves to college enough to finish one or more assessments. Or they did, but they didn’t quite complete them or didn’t pass or lost various relevant bits of paper or... And I can’t finish filling in my resulting documents till I’ve established if these t-e-Cs are actually going to come good.

So this week I have five new classes – 125 new names to learn and five programmes of study to make up. And five new registers to fill out and lots of marking to do for the 125 new students, who are at the honeymoon stage of their college careers and, having convinced themselves that they’re going to work hard this time, are still doing their homework and attending class assiduously. And five new rooms to teach in, all with subtly different variations on the equipment: interactive whiteboards and computers and projectors and DVD players. This is tough for a not-very-technical person who signed up to be a teacher in the days of paper and pens. And of course the very people you don’t want to look an idiot in front of, by failing to get the equipment to function, are these new students whom you’re trying to impress with your competence and wit.

And at the same time you can’t properly tidy away last semester’s stuff because the tail-end-Charlies keep drifting in, wanting to do the work that they didn’t get round to last semester.

And then there are the six classes who’re continuing from last semester who don’t realise that you have any particular reasons for being a collapsed heap.

Memo to self: next time, be a cat.

But it's the weekend!