One way to help the teaching week along is to try to make the weekends (and half-term holidays) as rich and relaxing as they can be. 

However, I would also recommend committing part of the time to something far more stressful and unrewarding than teaching. The following week never seems quite so bad if I have just returned from my own version of hell and back at the weekend. 

My weekly journey into the abyss involves me volunteering to be the flag-wielding linesman for my son’s local football team.

Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the role will know that teaching really is a walk in the park compared with being stalked in the park by packs of fuming predator-parents.

Appreciating teaching

While the occasional parent might sound a bit rude in their communications with us at school, those exchanges are mere pleasantries compared with how some of them address officialdom when watching their children play sport. 

At school, there is at least half a chance that the mum or dad might support us in our decisions concerning their child. 

There is little chance of this when parents are alongside their children on the touchline. The general assumption is that we are wrong about everything - at least, that’s the common view of every opposition team’s parents. 

It’s almost taken for granted that the “other” team’s linesman will either be hopeless or hopelessly biased - or both. (In fairness, the job has contained many bad apples of both ilks for about the past hundred years, so the association with corruption and ineptitude is not entirely unfounded.) 

The parents find different ways of telling us this, whenever we flag for an offside. Sometimes it’s a shrieked, “You must be joking, lino!” Or it’s a snide remark to another parent, sometimes deliberately within our earshot. At best it’s that contemptuous smile and a shaking of the head.

Winter civvies and a woollen hat

While the job of teaching might still carry some authority with it, the same cannot be said here.

We don’t even look the part. The referee (his match fee: £30; ours: £0) is qualified and is thus allowed to be fully togged up in the full black-sheen FA regalia.

Meanwhile, as dad-linesmen, we just trundle up and down the line in our winter civvies and a woolly hat. 

I did once dig out an old tracksuit to try to make myself look a little more professional, but it was a blustery day and the legs began billowing out ludicrously at the sides. It merely confirmed the clown-like image. 

As with teaching, clubs tend to face a chronic shortage of volunteers.

Most parents are so fearful of taking up the flag that they often hide behind trees and hedges before the game starts, just in case the regular “lino” is away and they are asked to stand in. Being asked to fill in is their worst nightmare. 

There are worse jobs

Monday and beyond never feel quite so bad after my Sunday afternoon jaunts up and down that touchline.

It’s obviously not the only way we can make teaching seem more enjoyable, but it’s definitely one way. 

And, potentially, it’s also of some use to others. Maybe the Department for Education might benefit from a little more of this pragmatism in their recruitment ads. 

Perhaps they could ease up on that dreamy, idealistic and manifestly untrue “Every lesson changes a life” message.

Some alternative slogan, along the lines of “Teaching: tough, tiring, but more fun than a load of other things you could be doing” would have much more of a ring of truth about it. 

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