AFTER three weeks hard graft in school, I returned to college with a sigh of relief on Monday.

The time in school has been vastly rewarding, educational and enjoyable, but it has also been taxing, stressful and tiring. The three weeks, and especially the last week when my teacher's absence meant I was responsible for the whole class, felt like months; conversely the next month away from school will probably feel like days.

However, while it's nice to reacquaint myself with Flog It!, Murder She Wrote and The Rockford Files, the main benefit of our break from in-school training is that it gives us all the chance to reflect on our practice.

While in school I found it virtually impossible to analyse my own development, I felt like a man trying to stay on a Rollercoaster ride without the aid of a seat belt - I certainly didn't have a hand free for any other task. At this stage, planning lessons seems to take an eternity, choosing resources requires endless trips to the stock room and any time outside of lessons is spent in assessing the class's learning and updating our training folders. My three training folders are now each full to bursting with notes and observations that I know I will barely look at again. They sure will burn nicely once the course is over.

Now that we are back in the safe confines of the lecture hall, there is time to reflect. The lectures themselves seem to make far more sense now that there is some concrete experience to link them to, while the course reading list, an overwhelming series of charmlessly titles books, suddenly feels more important and relevant. It is back in college that you realise that your own experiences are by no means isolated, that everyone has some good lessons and some that are not so good and that no-one is finding the course to be a cakewalk. Actually, that's a lie. As on any course, there are those one or two people who admit to no problems and profess themselves to be superteachers in the making. Naturally these are the one or two people that everyone else seeks to avoid and secretly wishes all manner of misfortunes upon.

For most of us, though, this week is extremely useful as we swap tips on classroom management, planning and all manner of titbits from where to park in the office carpark to how much tea money we should have to pay each week. Personally, I pay '1 per week, which doesn't sound to bad for seven cups per day.

The other big topic of discussion, or at least the other big topic that's remotely linked to education, has concerned coursework. The course features the usual diet of essays and assessments while for each core subject we have to complete a wide range of vastly different tasks. In a way it's a bit like the Krypton Factor, only without Gordon Burns or the sanitised army assault course. This week saw us handed back our first two essays, though to be honest I'd quite forgotten ever writing them as they were given in over a month ago. As ever there was that fake panic as the essays were handed back, people who spent weeks researching every word pretending that they might fail, but of course no-one did. There was no drama, no squealing or sobbing, just rows of contented students reading and re-reading their comments pages or quietly chuckling as they glanced at their elongated bibliographies.

I might even read mine again at some point, though I'm not sure how much I would gain from them now. They were written at the start of the course, before I had done any real teaching or spent more than a few days in school. Blimey, just writing that makes it feel like ages ago. It shows how far we have all come on the course. While you're in school you don't really notice how much progress you're making, you're quite happy just to do the best you can and survive. However, the time back in college is the exact opposite - you're actually learning less but there's far more time to reflect and think 'blimey, aren't I quite the bee's knees.'

And so that's what I'll be doing for the rest of this week as I settle down with a vat of tea and look forward to two 'study days'. To anyone driving by my house it may look like I'm sat watching Trisha in my dressing gown while eating porridge and reading the Argos catalogue, but I'll actually by working hard, reflecting on the past there weeks in school. In about three weeks times I might have finished reflecting (or I'll have run out of porridge) and then I'll feel ready for a return to school and so the whole process will begin again, only with one slight change. I'll be that bit more confident and, hopefully, that bit more competent as a teacher and increasingly ready for the big challenge. Taking my first teaching job in September.

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