“I don’t get it. She and I were electric,” slurred a dejected colleague at a staff Christmas party long ago and far away. With the staffroom yucca plant blocking my escape, he must have repeated “electric” to me about 20 or 30 times.

I judged it not the time and place to suggest that the mutual colleague concerned plainly wasn’t experiencing quite the same level of voltage. The Christmas tree lights may have worked for him, but for her there was a loose connection. She had reportedly slid away that evening to go skinny-dipping with another.

Meanwhile, word reached the party that a couple of other colleagues had decided to embrace a cliché - and each other - in the bike sheds. There were similar reports of muffled yelping coming from a cleaning cupboard outside the toilets.

None of this ever seems to happen at the Christmas party anymore. The bike sheds lie empty, no naked teachers cavort in the local waters, no startling revelations are discovered when opening a cupboard door. No spicy tales to warm us when we return in January.

Elf and wellbeing

Why this change? Well, anyone who has been at the chalkface recently can answer that one: come the Christmas party, we are all just too dog-tired to get up to any nonsense.

Apart from enjoying brief respite at half-term, many teachers will won’t have “stopped” working in any meaningful sense during the day or evening ever since the 4 September Inset day, when they might have allowed themselves a brief reverie during the mindfulness training session.

Teachers used to take things called “lunch breaks”. They also used to rest and recharge occasionally during what were once called “free periods”. These have now been rebranded for the modern age as “non-contacts” and everyone works through them in a desperate attempt to keep on top of things.

Watching my friends and colleagues the other evening - as we wearily trotted back and forth to seasonal classics from Slade, Wizzard and the blessed Jona Lewie - I could see how much things have changed.

In the tidal wave of additional workload and high-stakes accountability that has hit teachers this century, sex was naturally the first victim. The staff party is now all about getting through to the end, rather than getting off at the end. Flings simply ain’t what they used to be.

In fact, the only reason I was dancing was to stay awake. Looking around the room, I could see other figures reclining in solitary state at the other tables, one or two perhaps not entirely alive. Friends elsewhere depict similar scenes at their staff parties. So the term ends with about 40,000 “zombie schoolchildren” left in the lurch by failed academy chains and maybe 400,000 “zombie schoolteachers” now about to go driving home for Christmas, rather worryingly.

That said, the September to December period is still my favourite time for teaching. By now, it may have come to feel like one of those over-long walks where the last couple of miles are completed with head down and one lumpen leg resolutely placed in front of the other (though that’s enough about me on that dance floor), but the earlier stages of the term are surely as rewarding as it gets.

Do they know it’s Christmas term?

Fired up with new-found energy and creativity after the summer holiday - and maybe boosted by some half-decent exam results - I feel that I am never a better teacher than in September and October. I’m probably not too bad for most of November, either, until some bug strikes, at which point the shutters tend to come down.

This is the term when I score my greatest successes. New teaching approaches are tried out and students are generally at their most receptive, with some of the trickiest making some kind of attempt to make a “fresh start”.

It’s also the term when the younger classes display a full crop of keen upraised arms, regardless of whether they know the answer. It’s the term when students take homework most seriously and when the youngest bring in extra books to show us, together with other sundry items loosely connected to the topic being covered.

If we don’t enjoy the buzz this term then we probably never will. Some of my lessons were pretty much as good as I can manage, even if there have still been duds along the way.

Now is a time us me to remember the times when it all went right this term, not just a time to reflect on how tired we are. We all work in the midst of a fairly grim and bedraggled back-cloth, but I am still keen to look back and cherish my minor victories. At my best maybe I do bring a degree of joy to the world, and maybe some peace and understanding along the way. This Christmas - if there’s any point to being a teacher - I should surely celebrate that. I hope others do likewise.

Stephen Petty is head of humanities at Lord Williams’s School in Thame, Oxfordshire