Don't get me wrong, I really do love my (voluntary) job to pieces. Teaching a fantastic bunch of kids how to swim? It's great, I promise. However, there are those days when it feels like everything's going wrong. Take my last session, for example. With my first group, it seemed like everyone had a different problem. Several were ill in some way. We had various goggle complaints. Someone I didn't recognise turned up halfway through to swim in my group. Whilst I was trying to sort everything else out, a child hit their head, and we had to get the lifeguard. It was little short of a disaster, really, though I took comfort in the fact that none of it could really be helped, that's just how it was.
I thought that, after that, it could only get easier. Oh, how wrong I was! In my second group, I had full attendance. That's got to be unheard of. Full attendance. Ten children, all under the age of 8, and only one me. As utterly fabulous as they all are, it was a pretty full-on forty minutes, particularly as I came up with the bright (?!) idea of working on breaststroke legs. Ten children, not quite enough space, breaststroke legs, several screw kicks, a Sunday afternoon... Yeah. Lesson learnt.