Being Me

Happy New Year to you all! Yes, I know it's the 8th already, but saying Happy New Year only at New Year is so Last Year.  I thought I'd kick off 2020's blog posts with a story from the classroom about two boys called Scott and Randall. It's fictional but not fictional .... there are Scotts and Randalls in every school and I've taught many of them. People like Scott and Randall are what make teaching both extraordinarily joyful and extraordinarily maddening.    Imagine yourself in a secondary school classroom on a rainy Thursday.  The pupils are hard at work delighted when there's an 'incident'.  Not an accurate representation of the scene to be described below  Scott and Randall provide a welcome 'incident' Within two minutes of entering the classroom, Scott had to be ejected. 'What d'you do that for?' Randall had  swung round, clasping his shoulder, to face Scott. I'd managed three words of my introduction to...

I watched a wasp die on the bus yesterday morning. I know, as an opener, it's not the same as 'Hey, did you see the latest episode of Game of Thrones? but it's all I have to offer. I'm nervous about wasps. I'm sure, if they could talk, they'd say they were nervous about me too. But all I have in my armoury is a rolled-up newspaper and a bad aim. They have a stinger. And, close up, they're pretty scary. A wasp in a field, I can cope with. A wasp in the garden, just about. But a wasp on the bus is a cross wasp. (Move along, Dr Seuss.) I saw it progressing along a window two seats in front of me. It was crawling my way. I don't mean, crawling in the way I'd crawl, as in 'Oof, oof, my knees, and how will I ever get up from this position?'  I mean, crawling towards me. I expected a confrontation. I picked up the copy of the Metro I'd collected when I got on the bus and began rolling. It crawled nearer. But it was slow. ...

This is a scene from a novel I hoped to get published. But I've moved on now and am writing another book which will be published in 2020. Watch this space! I really like the scene, though. So I thought I'd let you read it, rather than having it fester on my laptop.  Enjoy! It's very much based on my personal experience, and it's a scene that's played out in real life in many, many classrooms across the country. And perhaps the world.  Setting: a secondary school classroom, England. Friday afternoon.  Characters: an English teacher and her class The pupils, as they did every week at this time, drifted from all corners of the school, in spits and spots like a gradual, hesitant build-up of rain. They seemed weary, as did their end-of-the-week uniforms, which drooped and slouched on their bodies as if drained of life.   Indeed, some of their blazers had died and slidden off their bodies like thin corpses, hanging now from the ends ...

It seems like an ancient craft now, akin to basket-weaving or the making of quills, but I learned to write Pitman shorthand when training for my first career as a medical secretary in 1979. (I also learned to type on traditional typewriters with their clatter and bash and 'ting' as the carriage went back and forth when one started a new line.) It's hard to imagine now, but in my role as a medical secretary, I would walk into a doctor's consulting room after he (in the 1980s, invariably 'he') had finished the morning surgery. He'd dictate fifteen or so letters to the patients' general practitioners or to other consultants, reporting on what he'd found or on a diagnosis, or referring patients on, and I'd scribble them down in shorthand in my little notebook in squiggles and dashes and lines and dots. Inevitably, mistakes were made in transcribing the letters back. Doctors often dictated so quickly - some while pacing up and down while eating...

Someone stopped me in a corridor at school last week to say, 'Oh, I hear you're retiring. Congratulations!' Retiring? Retiring? How old does she think I look? Is my new make-up regime not effective? Have I chosen the wrong plastic surgeon? 'Not retiring,' I said, graciously, while thinking 'One more insinuation like that and I will bop you over the head with this Oxford English Dictionary.' 'Oh?' she said. 'Moving on from classroom teaching, though,' I told her. 'After the summer holidays, I'll be working in a learning centre which provides one-to-one GCSE teaching for pupils not coping in mainstream education.' 'One-to-one?' she said, with a breathy sense of wonder as though saying, 'Five years' holiday on a remote Greek island with Sean Bean?' I can't believe it either. I've always thought my choices for my main day job were a) teach whole classes in a school or b) leave teaching as ...

Lying on my bed is a pair of black trousers. They need some sewing work done but I am to needlework what Donald Trump is to coherent discourse and am putting it off. I bought the trousers one summer, several years ago. The label said 'medium length' but when I first wore them, the hems smothered my shoes, dragged along behind me like two recalcitrant children, and yelled to the world, 'This is a shortarse if ever there was one. There's enough spare material here to cover a three-piece suite.' I turned the trousers up to a more reasonable length but, that day, didn't have any black cotton. So, I waited until I could get to the shops to buy black   used silver-grey cotton instead and kidded myself that the stitches wouldn't show if I was careful. Wouldn't show? Wouldn't show?  Perhaps if I was to needlework what Donald Trump is to verbal gaffes they wouldn't have shown. But - I wore the trousers to school the next day and taught the firs...

Two things that happened today. 1. In one of my English lessons, the students were experimenting with pronouncing the word 'monologist' (the speaker in a monologue). None of them could get it right, because if you start the word with the stress on 'mon' as in 'monologue' the word runs away with you and the 'g' ends up as a hard 'g'. I had an epiphany. 'Think of the Muppets theme tune,' I said. 'Uh?' I sang it. 'MonoloGIST, doo-doo-dah-doodoo, monoloGIST, doo-doo-doo-doo ...' Here are the Muppets doing it. Ma-na-ma-nah One or two of the girls laughed. Others smiled. Some looked worried about being in the same room as me. That's a shame, because they're trapped with me until the summer exams next year. 2. I'm lucky in that our school has a proper chef to cook the lunches, so the food is usually yum-yum. But today I chose a slice of ham and some pasta salad. The pasta was nearly-raw. Sometimes i...

Last year, my teaching timetable went like this: in school every day by 8.20 except for Wednesday, my day off. This year, it's: Monday: start at 9.55 Tuesday: start at 10.55 Wednesday: start at 10.55 Thursday: start at 8.45 Friday: start at 9.55 Those times indicate 'start teaching' so usually I'm there at least half an hour before lessons to give the photocopier chance to run out of paper, the coffee machine chance to give me hot water with milk in it, and the computer a chance to give me nothing at all except error messages and the urge to whup its screen with a HAMMER. *calms down* Anyway, as you can imagine, with all those erratic start times, there's room for confusion. And that's why I was sitting on my sofa, in pyjamas, one day last week, slurping a second cup of tea and wiping toast crumbs from my lips, convinced I had acres of time before I needed to be in school.  I'd even filled in a couple of crossword clues.   ...

I caused a panic at school on Friday. I went to my classroom, expecting to teach a class of 14 year olds. They were late arriving. I laid out on each of their desks their marked books and an A4 resource page for the lesson. I turned on the projector and put in my password to display my lesson notes. Where was the class? I peered into the corridor, sure that I would see them come hurtling round a corner, puffing and panting, worrying about being late dawdling along from Art or Science as though on a beach in the Algarve. But, no. Not a fourteen year old in sight. I waited another few minutes. Perhaps another teacher had lost track of the time or not heard the bell. When they were ten minutes late, I scurried along to the school office to see if I had missed a newsletter item saying they were on a school trip or having immunisations in the hall. Perhaps they had voluntarily signed up for immunisations in preference to learning about irregular sentences. It was possible, and...

Is someone who steals other people's work mugs a cup-leptomaniac? There was a cup-leptomaniac in a previous school I worked in. You could try to keep your own, dedicated mug in the staff room cupboard, but it wouldn't last long. Someone would lift it, perhaps thinking, 'I'll bring that back later.'  Or perhaps, 'I'll sell that on e-bay with the other ninety-six.' Even now, eight years since I left that school, I'm sure teachers are unearthing stolen mugs in dark corners of classrooms, cultivating a foot of green moss over a spongy layer of prehistoric coffee. However, it was a boys' school, with mainly male teachers, and I found a cunning plan to make sure I kept my own mug for most of the time I was there. I bought this. Four years. Four years, I managed to keep this mug for myself before it was stolen a fortnight before I left. While I've been writing this, I've remembered. I put some verses about my cheesy kitten mug in...