The English exam is on Tuesday and there's not much you can do for your students other than feed them, encourage them, run them around, pick-up after them, listen to their quotations, statistics, Quizlet responses and complaints while copping their bad manners because of procrastination, burnout, exhaustion, numbness and poor sleep discipline.

There's a high probability that nothing you say will be right and your Year 12 may be quite sure that you have no idea what they are going through.

Just keep turning up, loving them and forgiving them.

You aren't perfect and you never said you were.

At least you didn't break two sewing machine needles trying to attach new elastics on your Year 12 Dance student's pointe shoes, lose one of the broken needle halves and then send your dancer off to rehearsal, where after a stressful day which included a bad mock exam, she jammed her foot full bore into her satin dance slipper and made direct contact with the sewing machine needle which embedded itself deeply into her flesh, only days before the presentation of her two choreographed pieces in Melbourne, representing months of her work and made up a whopping 50% of her study score.

If you'd committed a heinous crime such as that, how would you live with yourself?

I'm doing okay thank you.

The wound healed, and the exam went well last Thursday.

I'm not perfect and I never said I was.

Making my own mistakes is hard, but watching my teenagers make mistakes I want to save them from is much, much harder. It's difficult but important to remember that I learnt from my mistakes.

Obviously, it's entirely impossible for us to stand by and watch this happen though, so we frown, lecture, growl and full-on freak out when we are shopping, washing, cooking, cleaning and paying for everything so our offspring have time to study, but then they seem determined to spend as much time as possible on TikTok!?

I give so much unsolicited advice that even I am thoroughly sick of myself.

Bite your tongue, until it bleeds if necessary, and hand sew your pointe shoe elastics, it's an art form that needs to be saved.