CONFESSIONS OF A CLASSROOM RENEGADE
Thick children (and even thicker parents), staff room humiliations and secret trips to the bookies. In his uproarious new book, teacher Hugh Reilly reveals the everyday horrors in Scottish schools
PARENTS’ evenings are pointless, most pupils are e stupid, and don’t even get HUGH REILLY started on the teenager who asked him who won the First World War. As thousands of Scottish teachers return to school after the summer ummer holidays, one veteran chalkie delivers the first part of a caustic and hilarious account of 30 years in the classroom.
WHEN asked what one does for a living, I would rather admit to being on the sex offenders’ register than confess to being a teacher. If outed as an educator at a dinner party, the inevitable question is: ‘What do you teach?’
‘Wee b*******,’ I reply drolly.
‘Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach,’ the ignoramuses chortle. It is a natural instinct to defend the profession but why bother.
There is an ancient Chinese proverb that states: ‘A man who has the time to examine his life, makes himself unhappy.’ As I enter my 30th year as a classroom teacher, I often doubt that I made the correct career choice when I opted for the teaching profession.
I wonder if the years spent in the classroom have, indeed, been the wilderness years of my life. They say you never forget your first teaching job and when I walked through the doors of my first school in August 1980, I was extremely unprepared for what was to come.
It was a temporary post at St Ninian’s in Kirkintilloch, Dunbartonshire, and being the new kid on the block, I was allocated a classroom next door to the staff room.
I found this agreeable for two reasons. Firstly, I could pop in and make a pot of tea whenever I needed sustenance. Secondly, if teenage wolves were ripping me apart, perhaps my colleagues would hear my cries for help.
I had my first lesson in school life from Charlie Higgins, the principal teacher of physical education. A former professional football player with Motherwell, Charlie’s antics were the stuff of legend.
He and the local turf accountant were on first name terms and, to create a window of opportunity to place a bet during school hours, he struck on the idea of sending his charges on a cross country race along the banks of the Forth and Clyde canal.
I suppose one could call it distance learning.
It all went horribly wrong one winter’s day when the new head teacher unexpectedly arrived in the department. As the pair spoke, fatigued runners began to appear, breathless and panting furiously.
Startled, the head teacher said: ‘Who are these kids and where have they been?’
‘They’ve been running along the canal,’ replied Charlie, unperturbed, as he continued to count the youngsters. ‘ Two missing,’ he said, nonchalantly.
A lad caught his breath enough to say: ‘Brown and Jones tried to take a short-cut by walking across the ice but fell in. But they got out OK.’
Just as the head teacher was about to explode, the stragglers appeared, soaked and with bits of reed on their kit.
‘Mr Higgins,’ said the head, ‘do you realise those boys could have drowned?’
‘ Don’t worry yourself, head teacher. My boys have been falling in that canal for years.’
My first year’s teaching was, I confess, a bit of a blur.
I was obviously keen to impress but I found the first 12 months whizzed past in a jumble of jotters and children, i nterspersed with school events.
One of those was the parents’ evening.
This is in essence a social occasion, a happening to impress other adults similarly cursed with having teenage children.
Mum looks out the glad rags and splashes on the Christmas Kylie perfume while dad drowns in Beckham body spray. To be fair, such fragrances help mask the BO emanating from sweaty teachers who have been working i n poorly ventilated rooms for seven hours.
I consider parents’ nights
to be worse than useless. For a start, the parents of the truly evil ones never appear. They don’t want to hear your prophecy that their ‘ wee Johnny’ will make a name for himself by becoming a serial killer. Parents of the lazy just don’t bother to turn up – especially if the evening coincides with a wedding or murder in Coronation Street.
So who does Sir actually get to talk to? Unfortunately, it is almost always the parents of the more able pupil. I say unfortunately because after relating their offspring’s grades, which they are already aware of through the school r eport, and making general comments about behaviour, presentation of work and so forth, there is precious little meaningful left to say. Yet stil l t hey si t t here. Unmoving.
You waffle on f or a f ew minutes more, managing to talk a lot while saying nothing of importance. Mum and dad synchronise nods at appropriate moments but make no attempt to leave. Looking past them, you see a row of adult clock-watchers, twitching, fidgeting and tutting at the length of your monologue. But your audience still sat across the desk are blissfully unaware of the gathering tension, blind to the outbursts of body language all around them. Meanwhile, parents’ evenings are demoralising for teachers of low tariff subjects – that is, every s ubject except maths and English. Herds of parents queue up to speak to the maths geeks and the egotistical English staff while the leper-like teacher of modern studies cuts a lonely figure, sitting as if quarantined from a virulent, airborne disease.
Of course, with fewer appointments I have greater opportunity to stare into space or, if any adults are nearby, doodle in a way that suggests I am furiously striving to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem.
OVER the years, I have encountered many difficult, stupid and terrifying pupils. An outsize young l ad called Hammer was particularly intimidating. Around six foot tall and 14 stone, his IQ was somewhere between an idiot and an imbecile, but no sane person would tell him this and live to tell the tale.
A hand- wringing guidance teacher with a soft spot for this potential serial killer told me his bark was worse than his bite, and that he had acquired the nickname Hammer due to his stunning resemblance to Rangers player Jorg Albertz. Her version was at odds to the one given to me by several staff who knew of his nocturnal habits.
In the evenings, the excitable scamp liked to participate in social exchanges with other teenagers who lived in neighbouring enclaves of the housing scheme. Yes, he was a keen gang-fighter and a hammer was his weapon of choice.
Like most disaffected teenagers, he had the good grace to rarely attend school, but even dullards such as Hammer could only take so much of daytime TV and shoplifting in retail centres before he felt compelled to come to school to noise up teachers and bully pupils.
He was sat in his chair the day I started a history unit on the First World War. I’d only uttered a few sentences when he shouted (he never spoke in any other manner): ‘Who won that war?’
At first, I hesitated to reply, believing that everyone knew that Germany lost both World Wars.
‘ The unit lasts around four months and you’ll find out in due course,’ I said, softly.
‘Ah want tae know now ’cos ah’ll be aff a lot,’ he bawled.
In not my proudest moment, I said: ‘Britain.’
News that Britain had triumphed soothed the less than gentle giant. On another occasion, aware that the class reacted violently to any classroom activity that could be seen to be educationally worthwhile, I distributed cut- outs of cars as part of a lesson on transport from 1880 to the present day.
On a piece of poster paper, the kids had to make two collages under the headings: From This… To This.
For the more able pupils there was the opportunity to research the improvements made, such as wooden wheels to pneumatic tyres. With such a class it is always problematic issuing pairs of scissors but I am a great believer in trusting pupils until they lose it.
Inside a minute or two, a girl was screaming that someone had shorn a lock of her hair. Naturally, nobody owned up to restyling the lassie’s tresses and after a warning that the activity would cease if the nonsense didn’t stop, the kids took a slightly more serious approach to their learning. I strolled up to Hammer’s desk where he was busy gluing cars onto his poster. Unfortunately, even this childish task was too much for his brain.
Under ‘From This’ he had stuck Porsches, Volkswagens and Ford Mondeos. Under the heading ‘To This’ he’d stuck 19th century cars and a Model-T Ford. I said nothing: I wanted to live.
Years later, I learned that Hammer had been accepted by the British Army but had lasted less than six months, receiving a dishonourable discharge following his court martial for punching an NCO.
Like most people of my age, I’d been through an education system where witnessing a terrified child being thrashed by an irate teacher was a normal daily occurrence.
And like most teachers of my vintage, I can still recall the first person I ever belted.
DESPITE umpteen warnings and the issuing of minor sanctions – isolating him within the room, giving him a punishment exercise – this lad was determined to make a fool of me for the amusement of his friends.
Finally, I declared I would belt him if his unacceptable behaviour persisted but instead of conforming, he just sat there and started to snigger, content in the knowledge that he was taking the mickey out of a classroom pacifist.
A truism in teaching is never bluff because a pupil will call it and you will lose all face with that class forever. I trembled as I told him to fetch a belt from the teacher next door, a diktat that clearly surprised him. He returned holding the tawse and still exhibiting a swagger.
Perhaps he expected me to back down but the die had been cast and there was no going back. He put up his hands and for the first time, he seemed a little apprehensive. I put the belt over my right shoulder, a move I’d seen on many occasions from a pupil’s perspective, and swung.
‘Arghh!’ I screamed. I’d missed the b*****’s hands and hit myself on the shin. My inadvertent act of self-flagellation went down well with the l ad and his mates. Stripped of my dignity, I tried to apportion culpability onto the miscreant.
‘Move your hands away from the belt again and I’ll send you to the P-p-principal T-t-teacher,’ I stammered.
The puzzled lad looked at his mates for support that he had not pulled his palms away but finally offered them up for a pasting. I gave him two strokes and I hate to say this, but at the time I was pleased that he appeared to be in great pain because his moaning certainly encouraged les autres to take me seriously.
In the two years I could have used the tawse, I belted a total of five i ndividuals, something I greatly regret. I could say that it was part of the school culture, that it was a survival mechanism but the truth is I hit those kids because their behaviour had made me angry or made me feel humiliated.
Striking someone in the heat of the moment was a release mechanism, revenge for a perceived wrong but in the final analysis, it was an abuse of power. In the spirit of reconciliation and redemption, I wish I could meet and say sorry to the victims of my shortcomings as a human being.