Schools need lessons in banterism

HOW times change. Being shouted at, slagged off, sworn at, ridiculed and insulted was accepted – even expected – when I was at school. And that was just by the teachers! It was part and parcel of your school day.

In the main, it was treated as humorous banter by pupils and teachers alike.

A brutal participation sport with the teachers having an unfair advantage of being allowed to physically punish you when you over-stepped the mark.

Not any more. If a teacher so much as breathes the wrong way on a pupil, they will be pulled up.

Swear or make offensive (though very funny) remarks, as one west of Scotland teacher recently found to his cost will see you suspended and banned from teaching.

Game over, career in ruins, unable to teach or work with children again because he joked to a pupil in a response to goading from the class about his weight that he had slept with his mum and was fat because she’d then make him sandwiches.

Banter! Base humour that the class hooted along with, everyday language that they are not unfamiliar with, in school or out, but now a sackable offence in the eyes of their humourless, zero-tolerant PC authorities.

And we wonder why there’s a teaching crisis?

TURNS out that if we want to live longer and be healthier we should be eating 10 portions of fruit a day, not five. I don’t know about you, but I found five raisins a day was hard enough to swallow, let alone 10.