Confessions of a teacher: Because school isn't quite what you remember it to be... by Jane Salomon Read Free Book Online

there is no real way of isolating the culprits and it pretty much feels like the whole class has turned against you. There is no time to waste in this situation and the only way to stop it is to show them that you are not just angry but mad with fury. This is quite easy as I am actually mad with fury. My voice has gone deep and I'm quite sure that red laser beams are coming out of my eyes while every single vein in my body is pulsating. I am slowly but surely turning into a female version of the incredible Hulk. They can feel my madness and fall silent. "Any of that again and I will call Mr Larson!". Jack is very good with that kind of things and the kids fear him. Too often in schools, people are made to feel inadequate when they call for help with discipline. Yet, this is part of the reason why we have heads of departments. This is what they're paid for: to step in when all else fails. More often than not, they don't like to be disturbed and would do anything for a quiet life. So it's far easier for them to make individual teachers feel inadequate rather than be supportive when their help is needed. Luckily for me, Jack is an exception to the rule. His motto is: "your job is to teach and not to be prevented to do so because of a handful of unruly teenagers".
    No sooner have I mentioned Jack's name that one of them, probably unaware of my threat, resumes the humming. I send one of the more cooperative kids to get Mr Larson to come in. Jack arrives within seconds and has been filled in as to what happened by the messenger. As he reads them their rights, you can feel the tension in the air as well as hear twenty pairs of sixteen year old legs shaking under the desks. Jack issues each of them with a blank piece of paper. "Write the names of the people who were humming" he thunders at them. "And I tell you something else, if I don't get the ones who did it, the whole class is walking out of here with a punishment exercise". Needless to say they comply. Jonathan's name is written on every single bit of paper along with Marc, Steven and Louis. In any case, Jonathan has unwittingly made a full confession. I recognise his messy handwriting. Once we've managed to eradicate the spelling mistakes and transcribe what is essentially phonetics into something that makes sense, it reads: "I don't know who was humming. Honest! I couldn't hear anyone humming cause I was humming so loud".
     
    I head home quite tired that night. It doesn't matter how much experience you've got, things like that do get to you. They always lead to endless self-analysis: What if I had done it that way? Maybe I shouldn't have said X or Y. What if... That's the problem with teachers. They become so engrossed in petty incidents that their sense of reality becomes distorted. In which reality does humming suddenly becomes a crime of such magnitude that it turns your day upside down? As I get home and crash on the sofa Dave, my husband, notices how tired I look. He knows better than to ask for details and simply says: "bad day, darling"? Time to shake the whole thing off and return to a world where a million things other than what happened really matter. I just smile and say to Dave: "Oh, nothing much. Just a bad case of humming". Fortunately, there are only two days to go before the October break. Unfortunately that also means one week to go before the Inspection.
     

Part 2: October, November, December.
     
     

The inspectors.
     
     
    It never ceases to amaze me how days turn into weeks and before you know it, you're back where you started. The inspectors are in but spending the day with the KGB. It will be the next day before they hit the classrooms and pay us surprise visits. I have spent the best part of my holiday preparing all singing all dancing lessons for each class, complete with an amazing display of my technological prowess and an entire set of Bloom-type questions. I have read through pages and pages of documentation that made absolutely no sense and