What's going on?!

I sometimes ask this question, especially at times when pupils come and disturb my lessons and destroy any possibility of learning. The last couple of days have been noisy but fairly good-humoured, other than a few moments, for example when a group of Year 7s, a few Year 8s and a couple of Year 10s, came to disturb my lesson with a small group of Year 7s. It had been a good opening fifteen minutes, and we were trying out different physical positions - standing, kneeling, bowing etc - to see how they made us feel before beginning our study of Muslim prayer. The pupils were quite enjoying the physical activity, and some of the pupils who occasionally don't find it easy to join in were getting involved. Then two difficult pupils arrived late, followed by this disparate group of truants, who proceeded to sell sweets, or packaged plastic enumbers, to my Year 7s, and this was obviously more interesting and colourful than anything they could learn in my lesson. Another teacher came and moved them on, but they came back later and danced and rapped to the tinny mobile music that they "illegally" carry around with them, completely wrecking any chance I had to regain the lesson. So, yesterday's lesson was spoiled by an unnecessary and pointless assembly telling them to behave themselves and today's lesson was spoiled by a bunch of truants who hadn't listened to a word that was put to them yesterday. Which leaves me one lesson to explain the intricacy of Muslim prayer before we move on and begin to prepare for the assessment.

And that's just one incident ...