Teach Your Children Well: stories, confessions and musings from the world of teaching

By Daniel Barron

A teacher, at the end of a Science lesson on wind farms, asks the question, ‘So, what do we think about wind farms now?’ A quick-witted pupil replies immediately, ‘I’m a big fan!’



Often amusing and occasionally candid or controversial, Teach Your Children Well takes the reader on a refreshingly honest journey through the world of contemporary education.



‘Teach Your Children Well’ has been written from the perspective of a teacher who has spent almost a quarter of a century teaching English in secondary schools. Featuring anecdotes, confessionals and musings from the author and many of his contemporaries, this book loosely follows the chronology of the British academic calendar. From recollections on what it is like to be new to the profession, through to dealing with challenging behaviour, parents, school trips, and the cynicism of not-so-old-timers, this book offers a fresh look at what it's really like to work with young people in the modern British education system.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Conrad Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839785245

Book preview

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Teach Your Children Well

Stories, confessions and musings from the world of teaching

Daniel Barron

Teach Your Children Well

Published by The Conrad Press Ltd. in the United Kingdom 2022

Tel: [phone]

www.theconradpress.com

[e-mail]

ISBN 978-1-839785-24-5

Copyright © Daniel Barron, 2022

All rights reserved.

Typesetting and Cover Design by: Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk

The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.

Preface

‘Y ou should write a book.’ So many people have said this to me whenever I’ve regaled them with tales of things I’ve seen, done and endured in almost a quarter of a century of teaching, that I simply had to do it in the end.

It doesn’t matter which subjects I’ve taught (I’ve taught a handful of them) or in which schools I’ve worked, things have happened to me, my colleagues and my students which are now indelibly etched into my memory. Students and staff have done or said things which will stay with me forever. Perhaps the whole chaotic venture of studying to teach, qualifying to teach, and subsequently learning to teach on the job was worth it for the stories. I’ll let you be the judge of that. After all, the world of education is a wellspring of comedy, joy and pain.

Not all of the stories in this book were born out of my own personal experiences. I’ve had to enlist the help of colleagues past and present to gather – and indeed to write – many of the anecdotes and musings you are about to begin reading. I can promise you, however, that absolutely everything retold in this book did indeed take place – no matter how bizarre or improbable – and each entry has been recorded as faithfully and honestly as I was able.

Some contributors to this book are now happily retired. When these teachers began their careers, the job was very different; many will tell you things have changed for the worse. Retention rates for newly qualified teachers are at an all-time low and more teachers than ever are choosing early retirement or even a complete change of career. If you are left with a negative impression of the teaching profession after reading this book, that was certainly not my intention. I set out to tell the stories which either brightened or blighted my days at work; I also wanted other people to speak plainly about their own experiences and thoughts, however harsh they might appear here in print. I have, of course, changed the names of all of the teachers and students which feature in these stories; all the names of schools have been omitted too, for obvious reasons.

When I began compiling the stories and collecting teachers’ and their assistants’ thoughts on teaching for this book, I wondered how I was eventually going to structure them. I initially thought about placing them into categories, but I soon found that there were so many crossovers and rogue topics that I had to abandon the idea. In the end I opted for a roughly chronological approach to the organisation of the stories and confessions section of this book. The accounts have been placed (again, roughly) into the three seasonal terms of the British academic year – the autumn term, the spring term and the summer term. There are of course many anomalies and overlaps, but this is the essence of teaching after all.

If you are familiar with the teaching profession (especially secondary school teaching) then I expect that many of the stories, confessions and musings in this book will have that hum of familiarity. You may well have experienced or thought the same things as me and the other teachers who contributed to this book. If your own experience of schools and teaching comes solely from your own time at school, or is/was viewed vicariously through the experiences of your children, then some of what has been recounted here may come as a shock. Either way, I hope you are entertained by what follows…

Daniel Barron June 2022

The stories – a collection of true accounts from teachers and teaching assistants.

Mr C, English

My first day as a secondary school teacher was almost twenty years ago. I began my career as a fresh-faced and enthusiastic NQT (Newly Qualified Teacher) at a notoriously difficult school in the heart of the West Midlands. I’d had a year of training immediately prior to this and had been placed at a pleasant school full of mostly cooperative students in Staffordshire. My time at this placement school did not properly prepare me for the horrors of my first days at this school – the first to offer me a full-time permanent teaching post.

After a few days of settling in, in which the younger pupils arrived first for their integration, I found myself facing a full day’s teaching. I had to teach five lessons straight with a lunchtime playground (yard) duty. With the exception of the eager-to-please Year 7 students, I found the other four classes hellish! Those who knew how to play the system and were masters in the art of preying on fresh meat, singled me out as a new member of staff and did all that they could to test my patience, almost to snapping point. I had food thrown at me during that lunchtime duty; I was called names; one younger lad even walked up to me in the corridor and said, ‘Hey, sir, your jacket’s shit!’ Four out of those first five lessons went very badly, with me having to send for help to settle at least two of the classes. It was a horrendous baptism of fire.

At the end of the day I sloped down the school’s sweeping drive to the bus stop. Making sure that most of the students were out of sight, I reached into my trench coat pockets for my cigarettes; I desperately needed a smoke. No sooner had I located these I realised, after rummaging again through pockets and my army supplies store bag, that I didn’t have a light. There were no other people beneath that bus shelter and, rather symbolically, it started to rain. I spied a box of matches on the ground so I surreptitiously bent down to pick it up. Time slowed as I slid the box open. There were no matches left in the box. I did, however, read the warning, given all too late:

‘Keep away from children.’

Ms S, Science

On one of my teacher training placements all of the following happened within the space of six weeks:

The school library and drama block were burned to the ground late one night. A small of pupils were arrested for arson the following day; they were actually taken out of lessons by police.

One pupil deliberately drank copper sulphate (not in my class) and threw up a fountain of green vomit all over the lab before being taken to hospital.

The Head of Science burned through his demo bench and deep into the lab floor whilst trying to ‘use up’ the phosphorous that they wouldn’t be allowed to use from next year.

Another pupil was on the roof of the school stealing the lead and throwing it down to his dad and uncle. Another student saw them at it, was fairly enraged by the damage being done to his school, and so went and got his air rifle and shot the lead thief kid in the leg. When I asked the gun-toting vigilante, ‘Why did you shoot him in the leg?’ he answered, ‘’cause I’m not a very good shot. I was aiming for his balls, Miss.’

Mrs L, Teaching Assistant

On my very first day as a Teaching Assistant I was assigned a lad in Year 10 to do some one-to-one literacy support. I had already been told that the school had its fair share of what might be called ‘characters’ but nothing prepared me for the answer I got to the second question I asked this young man.

The whole point of the session was to help the student construct a basic framework for the plot of a piece of original creative writing; little did I realise quite how difficult that would prove to be. As this lad was slumped across the desk, unresponsive and uncommunicative, all I could think to do was ask him questions. ‘Do you enjoy English, Wayne?’ I asked him.

‘No,’ was the mumbled response.

I had to think fast so I hit him with the timeless, ‘What did you get up over the holidays?’ question, believing that this could perhaps prompt him to base his story on his own life experiences. He shot up suddenly, staring at me through glasses as thick as telescope lenses, and said –almost in what seemed like one syllable – ‘I nicked a three litre Senator car, pissed on the seat and set fire to the fucker.’

Mr B, English

I remember, with a mixture of amusement and confusion, being unable to silence a group of poorly behaved Year 8 boys who were arguing. It was the last lesson of the afternoon and my PowerPoint presentation on Shakespearian insults had triggered an interesting exchange of ‘your mom’ jokes between these challenging, low ability boys. They began by using some of the easier to read Shakespearian jibes to insult each other as per my lesson plan. This very quickly descended into a slanging match which will stay with me forever!

There were the usual ‘Your mom’s so fat…’ lines, peppered with expletives and becoming more and more sexual in content, but things were about to get rather surreal. The first insult to really make me laugh (which I actually found quite original and genuinely demeaning) was, ‘Your mom’s a thug!’ Nothing, though could prepare me for one boy’s timelessly classic killer line; I still laugh at it today. A short and wiry blond lad, who shall remain nameless, scrunched up his face, the concentration visible through his jam-jar-bottom-thick glasses. He faced another boy and blurted out, ‘I’m gonna dig up your dead Nan with a spoon!’

Mr D, Physical Education

I used to work as a PE teacher in a relatively small rural school. One of the Year 10 football teams were very skilled and successful, managing to win a county trophy with me as their coach. When the day came for a photo opportunity and an article in the local press a female journalist attended the school to interview them and take the customary team photo with their captain holding the trophy aloft.

The team were marched outside to the sports field where the photo was duly taken and the captain interviewed by the journalist. At this point, however, I was called away to take a parental phone call. Unfortunately, this call took longer than expected, so by the time I returned to the sports pitch it was roughly twenty minutes into the next lesson of the day and I had a free period. Intending to catch up on some paperwork I headed to my office. To get to this office I had to pass through the boys’ changing rooms, which should have been empty. They were not!

Thinking that they’d been granted a rare opportunity to skive their next lesson, the team had elected to stay in the changing rooms, hoping that no one would find them until the subsequent lesson commenced and they could mingle with the rest of the school on the move. ‘You lot, outside now!’ I bawled. The lads shuffled outside to where I’d instructed them to line up – along the fence at the edge of the pitch which was bordered by a field.

I shouted at them for a good half a minute, probably lecturing them on issues of trust and responsibility. I’m pretty sure I said, ‘You’ve let me down, you’ve let the school down but most of all you’ve let yourselves down!’ One line I definitely remember shouting was ‘So, what have you got to say for yourselves?’ Precisely at that moment a large Fresian cow thrust her head over the fence at the end of the line of boys and said, ‘Mooooooooo!’

Priceless!

Mr G, History

I heard a joke at a gig many years ago in which the teller of the joke was staying at an imaginary remote cottage in the middle of Dartmoor. After at least a week spent in self-imposed and gleeful solitude, they were troubled by an unexpected knock at the front door. When they nervously opened the door they were faced by the ugliest old farmer they’d ever seen – he had wrinkled, walnut-brown skin and one eye bang in the middle of his forehead. The farmer then proceeds to invite the joke’s teller to a weekend party at his farmhouse ‘over yonder hill.’ His interest piqued, the storyteller invites the farmer over the threshold to hear more. The farmer goes on to further glamorize his forthcoming social event.

I decided rather foolishly to tell this joke to a top set Year 10 History class I taught and recounted it with the zest, verve and physicality of a Shakespearian actor. I was at the front of the class having established the joke’s setting, characters and general premise when I arrived at the description of the farmer’s party: ‘There’ll be drinking, there’ll be dancing and there’ll be…‘

Just as I growled the words, ‘and there’ll be wild sex,’ ensuring that the word ‘wild’ was as guttural and drawn out as possible, I turned to see that my head of department – a distinctly humourless woman some twenty years my senior with a terrible bob haircut and a backside like the stern of a battleship – had entered the room and was staring at me in disapproval!

Once she’d gone and the class had calmed down I told them the rest of the joke: ‘I was very interested in this party as I’d seen no one for a whole week, so I asked the farmer what I should wear. The farmer stared back at me with his single bloodshot eye and said, ‘That won’t matter, it’ll just be the two of us.’

Later that day I endured the ‘What’s appropriate and what’s not’ conversation from my head of department but it was worth it!

Mr B, English

I never intended to go into teaching. At no point during my time at university did I make a conscious decision to pursue a career at what is often anachronistically referred to as ‘the chalk face.’ I graduated many years ago with a degree in psychology and philosophy and found that I still lacked any real sense of direction; all I knew is that I definitely didn’t want to work in an office (I’d had quite enough of that in between years at university when I worked for employment agencies on minimum wage) or factory or warehouse. Eventually, and quite by accident rather than design, I took on a few hours at a local college as a support worker. I found the work to be rewarding and enjoyable. This was the first job I’d ever had where I wasn’t clock-watching.

A few months later I applied for a job as teaching assistant in a local secondary school. I was appointed in spite of being told that I was over qualified; all of the other TAs were middle aged mothers returning to full-time work. Getting along with these people was easy; I was mothered, if not smothered, by them. They showed me the ropes and I began my career in education.

After a year of working