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1. Lunchtime. Also known as The Fastest Hour of the School Day, lunchtimes are typically spent inhaling a soggy sandwich at your desk, and that’s if you’re lucky. Tales of teachers scoffing a samosa on the toilet, making their way through a muffin while grading and sneaking candy into their mouth during the last class of the day are quite common. 

2. A full weekend’s worth of sleeping in. Ah, the weekend. Teachers have heard about this mystical land of daytime slumber, but have never got to sample it for themselves. This is partly because they have too much to do to waste time sleeping, but another cause is the fact that qualified teacher status seems to come with a free alarm clock for the brain that wakes teachers up at 6am (at least). Every. Single. Day. 

3. The best concert tickets (Or really, any concert. Or show. Or movie.) As much as you would love to sit waiting in an online queue for Adele tickets at 9am, that tricky English class is not going to teach adverbial phrases to itself. As for getting off early to travel to that gig in a distant town, forget it. You might make it for the encore, but only if someone swaps detention duty with you. 

4. Doctor’s appointments. Ask a teacher who their primary care physician is and you get the sort of blank look you get when you tell your students something is “totally rad!!”: it’s clear they recognise the words you are using, but they’re not quite sure what they mean. This is because teachers don’t go to the doctors. They have no time to be ill. And if they do get ill, they have no time to go to a doctor. If you want to see what happens when modern medicine has no role in human existence, visit the teacher’s lounge. Superbug? Teachers LAUGH in the face of an outbreak! (And then maybe cry, but only when no one’s looking.)

5. Spontaneous mid-week social events (Refer to 3)  Let’s say by some miraculous effort of pre-planning, begging favors and chance, you manage to make it out for a mid-week drink with some friends (who obviously could not be fellow teachers). You now have two challenges: drinking enough to stay awake later than 9pm and not drinking so much you can’t function the next morning. Inevitably, though, you fall asleep before 9pm and have a hangover so bad you don’t notice you just wrote out your entire lesson on the dry erase board with a permanent marker.