History

“They say that the UK is the most constipated country in the world.

I’d like to see some hard evidence of that.”

If you teach history, you probably encourage your students to think like TV police detectives. This method of pedagogy wasn’t so popular in the 1970’s, unless your teacher wanted you to use casually racist terminology, kick seven shades of shit out of people and order women to either put their knickers on or take them off before making the tea.

Teaching history in the 1970’s and 80’s rarely strayed from the imparting of facts and the expectation that these facts were all remembered. There was no analysis, synthesis, comparison, evaluation, interpretation, enquiry or any other skill that required application of the knowledge acquired from copying lines from textbooks and undertaking simple comprehension exercises.

Nowadays, all of you find yourself questioning students in order to develop their own questioning abilities, whilst hoping that they don’t question you about anything that you don’t know the answer to.

Like history.

The difficulty you probably encounter when confronted by interested students with inquiring minds is that they expect you to know everything about history. Given that history is everything that ever happened to everyone ever, this expectation is a somewhat unreasonably weighty one.

Unlike Marmite subjects, such as Maths and Geography, people tend to either love or hate parts of history depending on the era studied. Adults will often tell you which bits of history they enjoy, although this rarely strays outside the ubiquitous Tudor, World War Two and Roman periods. You’ll be told at Parents’ Evening how a son or daughter (or to be fair, it’s usually a son) watches the History Channel a lot. But this channel only really exists to remind us that the Nazis were bad and to show us what brilliant weapons we had in the war.

Two of the most ignorant accusations made against History are:

“Why do we have to learn about stuff that happened in the past, rather than what’s happening now?”
and…
“Why don’t we learn about British History?”

If you’re a teacher worth your salt, you’ll answer a question with a question. To the first, you might respond with, “Do you watch the news?” If the student doesn’t watch the news, then you’ve identified the pointlessness in trying to answer when they’ve just undermined their own question. If they do watch the news, then you’re onto a winner.

The second question does have more worth. The answer is that we know people are naturally more interested in death, disaster, extremism and suffering and these characteristics are best served by studying slavery, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. All of which are important to study, but their very presence overshadows all the British history that you also teach, because students soon forget about our nation’s more moderate and gradual historical evolution over the centuries. The development of Parliamentary power, the social reforms of the Industrial Revolution, the conflict and consensus between political parties; none of these match the emotionally-charged badness of History’s evil bastards.

Death and disaster sell. The students who lap this up are the future motorway rubber-neckers. In showing the film “Mississippi Burning” to some 14 year-olds recently (yes, I know it’s an 18 certificate, but it was all done above board) a girl acted on our advice to leave the room when she found a scene too distressing. She sat through the close-range gunshot to the head in the opening scene and the racist violence and abuse thereafter, but told me that watching a fish being cut open was just too disgusting to bear.

Film and other multi-media have made History far more visual and (therefore) appealing than it used to be. Back in those less enlightened decades mentioned earlier, History books might have had a black and white drawing every fifth or sixth page. Some people might argue that at least in those text-dominated days students were encouraged to use their imagination, whereas now we can show them History in the manner of a form of entertainment. Arguably, we shouldn’t abandon visual stimuli when it is available out of some fear of strangling imagination, because throughout history the development of art, writing and performance only served to encourage imagination rather than replace it. (So, the old fart that once criticised interactive whiteboards to me, citing the restricting imagination argument, can go whistle out of his arse.)

And there is so much multi-media to choose from. You might want to avoid those TV documentaries that have a Simon Schama or David Starkey constantly on camera, walking across a historical site, trying to describe the events in a patronisingly, supercilious and annoying voice. Both of these wankers need to be locked up in the Tower for a decade before being beheaded by their personal gimp with a blunt hardback volume of one of their books.

Better than that is You Tube. A lot of what you’ll find, though, is some American kids’ High School projects; and for all the reasons obvious in that sentence, these videos will be as good as diarrhoea. So avoid that soft option and find proper footage of 20th century events or some nerds dressed up and recreating a Civil War battle or a memorably foolish song from the Horrible Histories franchise.

In fact, the only way to make students remember History and therefore want to learn more about it is to send it up. Granted, there’s not much mileage for humour in slavery, genocide or any wars within living memory; but everything else in history is fair game for ridicule. We all have a nasty streak to our sense of humour, and this should be exploited.

Open Evening

Bums on seats are what provide schools with the funds necessary to put you the teacher in the classroom with an interactive whiteboard, a set of textbooks and a pay cheque just robust enough to wave away the wolves from your modest middle-class front door. Every one of these bums squeezes out of the government a couple of grand a year and thus we have in simple terms two types of school – the under subscribed and the over subscribed.

Don’t be under the mistaken illusion that under subscribed schools are shit and over subscribed schools are good, even if the Coalition government seems capable of one day refining Ofsted’s inspection criteria down to these two base judgements. For those that have worked in both flavoured establishments, the difference is subtle and in many cases at odds with local perceptions. In fact, it is local perceptions that help drive a school towards one of these two poles. Parents, where possible, move home away from the Undies (as we might call the under subscribed schools) to live nearer the Overies (the places with such good reputations that the entry criteria is the ability to smell the PE changing rooms from your own back garden.) The result is that the Undies get the students of parents unable to move home, while the Overies find that the surrounding residential area has over-inflated property prices due to demand and therefore house only those students whose parents can afford to buy or rent there. The difference between the two sets of parents is usually therefore a socio-economic one, and this sadly creates different sets of baggage for the students in the two schools: the Undies harbour a greater number of students from less prosperous and/or less stable and/or less academically successful households, while the Overies get to feast on students whose parents actually use the term “and/or” in their correspondence. (And the word “actually” for that matter… And the phrase “for that matter” incidentally… And… ok, moving on)

Now, back to bums on seats. The Overies are not all complacent about remaining Overies, unless they are selective schools that cream off much of the district’s most academic (i.e. good at tests) kids. Many Overies were once Undies and had to work fucking hard to set the snowball rolling in the opposite direction. They know that the bum rush could one day dry up and so they must maintain their appeal to the local child-bearers. As for the Undies, they have to convince parents that they’re not as shit as they appear (from their shitty results and articles in a vindictive local press) so that they can attract as many bums on seats as possible that want to be bums on seats there and not just bums that have to settle for seats they didn’t want, because the seats where they wanted to put their bums have all been taken by bums sitting in bigger gardens a mere waft of sweaty arm-pits away from their local Overy establishment.

Therefore, for the Overies and for the Undies, Open Evening is the biggest night of the year. This is when a school slaps on its lipstick, takes out it’s most appealing low-cut dress and flashes the local community its most charming smile in an effort to say, “Come and plant that bum on my seat, mister.”

Yes, I agree. I know what you’re thinking. That’s not the most suitable metaphor for the process of attracting 11 year olds and their parents into choosing your school for their secondary education. But it’s correct. We do indeed spruce ourselves up and put on a good show, because we want to look our best. Which is why students are sent home early on that day and come in late the day after to find the school completely unrecognisable. All the displays are new, there are signs up showing the direction to each department, there are plants – yes, organic wildlife – dotted around the place and there’s no sign of even one stray coke can, bent chair leg or graffiti penis anywhere.

So, what happens on Open Evening? Each department displays its best resources and examples of student work and invites prospective students to take part in a fun activity that totally misrepresents what lessons will be like in practice once they join the school. But the kids don’t mind, because they win sweets.

The resources on show can sometimes offer an alternative reality as well. When a child is handling historical artefacts, or using some amazing technological gadget or getting to play with keyboards in the music department, you know full well that these things cost too much to risk taking out except in A’level lessons, because otherwise they’ll get trashed.

But the kids don’t mind, because they get to play with stuff and get sweets and the teachers are fun. Only, you know by half six when you’re face feels like it’s been stretched round the fat side of a tennis racquet that your smile has been false all Open Evening, because you’ve been here for 10 hours and some little shit is sticking a school prospectus into the Bunsen burner as an experiment while his Dad asks you difficult questions on account of him being a parent-governor and therefore an ill-informed nosey do-gooder.

Open Evenings provide teachers with their longest working day of the year. If you’re working in one of the Overies, then 45 minutes after the advertised finish time, with so many punters still loitering and asking about your policy for “pushing more able children” (and fuck me, everyone’s child is more able!) then your fixed smile looks so murderous that only those with social insight uncommon to their socio-economic group feel the need to climb back over the fence into their back garden before you say something mildly offensive to them. And if you work in one of the Undies, then you can start packing up an hour early, because the third set of parents have already been past your corridor and your exercise in futility has exhausted you.

The Start of Term

You were anxious that you’d forget to go back to work on September 1st because for the last 6 weeks, days and dates have dissolved into one big soup of inertia and apathy and you’ve lost any sense of time. Fortunately, you will be alerted to the fact that the start of term approaches by the following occurrences:

- Trailers on TV for the new series of The Inbetweeners and Waterloo Road;
- You can’t fit your trolley through the supermarket entrance without knocking into a display of special offer “Back to Skool” stationary (you curse the dickhead who suggested the deliberate mis-spelling of this slogan);
- There is a long queue of shaggy-haired young boys with their mums in the barbers.

The day the supermarket runs dry of “Back to Skool” stationary is the day you should be back at work.

INSET day! No kids. Every teacher wears their own clothes, women splash on fake tan and the men sport their summer beard for the final time. The Head, in casual corduroy trousers and mis-matched jumper, delivers his state of the nation speech, flashes up the exam results on a powerpoint and rallies the troops. Then he gets all the newbies to stand up to be introduced, while the rest of you ask yourselves in reference to each one, “would I?”

Then chaos commences. Because no matter what work and preparation anyone has done over the summer, the inability for anyone to liase with each other means that everything is only 80% ready.

Everything apart from the IT system, which is about 30% ready, because the network support team have spent the summer eating pies, watching porn, doing 3 hour days and hiding each others’ trousers round the school for a joke.

Two days later the kids come back. Starting with the Year 7’s. In the bad old days, you’d be bending over backwards to introduce the nervy little ‘uns into secondary school life with a friendly, gentle approach. Nowadays, you find your chin on your chest as you watch open-mouthed at how overly confident and cocky the new generation have turned out. What the fuck do they do in primary schools? Train them to be Big Brother contestants? As it turns out, this mouthy minority colour your view, you end up shouting at a whole class and 2/3 of them go home with piss-stains in their new “Back to Skool” trousers due to the trauma.

Then the older kids return. And it’s like you’d never had six weeks of daytime TV, hour-long baths at 2pm and making arse-moulds out of your sofa. All the behavioural baggage they took away last July, they bring back in September. You wonder about their lives in those 6 weeks and realise it was much the same as yours, but probably involved more hanging around McDonald’s and park playgrounds.

You plan your lessons for the first week: Give out exercise books, re-establish ground rules, draw a title page. By the 3rd day, after 18 lessons of this, the students crave intellectual challenge and start asking questions about the news. Like, why does everyone hate the old man in the disabled car? He’s the Pope, you say.

And then you get on with the job of starting to teach your new GCSE syllabus, which you spent many hours planning over the summer (between baths and the human abattoir that is known as The Jeremy Kyle show) knowing full well that the fucking Tories want to replace it as soon as possible with a different qualification which will improve standards of education in this country, standards that have fallen every successive year under Labour. (Based purely on the evidence of the Jeremy Kyle show rather than a less-sensational, media-appealing body of evidence such as exam results and Ofsted inspection reports, which tend to offer the opposite view.)

Finally, you open your new academic diary and with your fresh gel pen you neatly write dates for parents’ evenings and reports, before counting the number of days left until half term, when for one small week, you get to be a blob again.

Summer Holidays

There’s no shirking the issue, I have to deal with it sometime and that time is now. Controversial, arguably unfair or perhaps well-earned depending on the degree of your jealous animosity or guilty defensiveness, I refer now to the subject matter of a teacher’s 5 ½ week summer holiday.

Out of deference to all you normal folk who get less annual leave in a year than we teachers are gifted in July-August, I will try not to complain about it. I will merely paint a picture using a variety of colours. Like Benetton.

First of all, yes we do work in the summer, the conscientious more so. But without a time pressure work tends to expand to fill the space you shove it into. Like a tampon. Thirty minutes work can fill four hours, because you tend to build in a varied programme of regular breaks, one break every time you get bored. So, if you’re marking, that tends to be every 3 minutes.

And it’s amazing what you can find to do to punctuate your time with. A cup of coffee, ten minutes of Jeremy Kyle, a poo, twenty minutes on twitter, reordering your CD rack, another poo.

Now, for the sake of comedy rather than accuracy, we could divide teachers into a small number of groups based on likely summer holiday pastimes.

Group 1 – the under 30’s with no children and expendable income. Sub-group 1A, singles. Travel. Usually South-East Asia.
Sub-group 1B, those in couples. Travel. Anywhere hot for a week, some dutiful visits to respective family members and a festival.
Sub-group 1C, those engaged to be married. Stay at home and paint the walls.

Group 2 – the over 45’s with adult children and expendable income.
Sub-group 2A, Heads, Deputies and Assistant Headteachers. Four weeks in France, returning in time for results day.
Sub-group 2B, middle-managers. Two weeks in France.

Group 3 – the thirty-somethings with young children.
Five weeks of visiting the park (when its not raining), soft-play centres, swimming pools, cinemas etc… one excursion every day or two, and lots of time at home feeling like you need adult company, but knowing it would be morally reprehensible to pay for it. So, you go on Facebook instead.
Then one week in Devon in a cottage by the sea.

Group 4 – the forty-somethings, with children who are able to piss off out to play on their own.
Work, a cup of coffee, ten minutes of Jeremy Kyle, a poo, twenty minutes on twitter, reordering your CD rack, another poo.
Then one week in France.

Taking away the structure of a normal term-time week is like a fat person removing a corset. Your life gets flabby. You embrace procrastination like a religion, almost like a holy war on urgency. You know there are lots of useful jobs you could do round the house and lots of family members you could visit, but there’s never any need to do any of it today or this week. There are a lot of tomorrows and a lot of next weeks to put things off until.

If you have a partner who does a normal job, then you might experience the following:
A phone call at 10 o’clock in the morning to see how your day is going. You have of course not long got up and have absolutely nothing to say in reply;
Your partner wanting to go to bed at 11, and you agreeing out of politeness, not wanting to seem unsociable, and then reading for about two hours while they snore, because you simply haven’t expended enough energy to need any sleep that particular night;
A dutiful urge to do housework… thirty minutes before your partner gets home, so it looks like you weren’t sat on your arse all day;
A need to have a list of about four things to tell your partner you’ve done when he/she gets home, which sound like they quite conceivably could have filled your whole day (suggesting that you lead a purposeful existence) when really it only took a combined total of twenty minutes to do all of them.

Most of us do actually go into work in the summer, usually to create some rubbish by clearing out cupboards for the site team to lug down to the skip in between doing all the jobs they had planned to do. Any work on computers in work is forbidden, however, as the network team (aka The IT Crowd) also require 5 weeks to do three days work in doing whatever they do to the computers in that time. Stuff, I think it is. (They tell us, but who fucking understands what they say?)

And that’s the summer. A leviathan break from work in which you don’t finish your novel, don’t have anything interesting to say about what you’re doing (to your partner, on twitter or on facebook), don’t do enough work or jobs round the house and generally question the whole purpose of your existence as a human being.

I’m sure Satre was a teacher who wrote his books in August.

Right, I’m off for a poo. I may be some time.

Philosophy, Twitter and Big Brother

If you studied the history of philosophical thought, then you’d realise that someone has something original and worthwhile to say about every 50 years.

But some people on Twitter seem to believe that they have something philosophically profound to say every 50 seconds.

We’re all entitled to mould and perfect our own individual philosophies in life and I’m not undermining our freedom to share these with the world; but I am humoured beyond annoyance by the apparent presumption by so many that they are the thought-prophets of the new age.

As evidence for my claim, I will randomly browse Twitter now and report to you verbatim some of the 2-bit, fatuous and puerile philosophical utterances that I encounter. I may even be tempted to rip apart a few of them:

“Don’t change yourself for anybody but yourself… be happy with who you are!”
Well, I wouldn’t encourage your average rapist, paedophile or drug-dealer to adhere to that clichéd teaching.

“The world’s a playground. You know that when you’re a kid, but somewhere along the line everybody forgets it.”
So this arsehole wants us all to be irresponsibly hedonistic? In my playground at school there was bullying, casual racism and sexual harassment (I kicked Tracey O’Brien up the bum to show her I fancied her.)

“God is too good. I don’t care what ur going through right now! Tell him thank u :) “
Tweeted by some bloke showing off his six-pack. I’m not sure people from the over 30 stone obese and depressed fraternity would empathise, nor the one third of the world’s population living in poverty who this c**t doesn’t care about.

Now the thing is, the culprit of this last crass comment had 107,000 followers. Fuck me, Jesus only had 12 and look what happened as a result of that! Is there a danger that one of these tossers will become the fulcrum for a new world religion?

In truth, no. Because nowadays people care far more about what they have to say than for what others are saying. We talk (or write or text or tweet) with far more concentration and attention that we listen. If I’m wrong, then try to remember what the rest of this blog is about, you self-obsessed narcissist!

So, to briefly link this to the subject of education, which is my clothes peg for such random rants as these, we don’t teach the history of philosophy very often, but we do encourage independent thought. After all, teachers are generally upper-working class, reasonably educated converts to lower-middle-class liberalism with socialist pretensions, ashamed of our darker more conservative thoughts. It’s not like we have an agenda is it?

Ok, that’s rather cynical. We are broadly humanist and humanitarian, or well meaning at least and our tolerance allows students to form their own opinions. We deliberately leave a void for them to fill, which is better than the bad old days when organised religion and submissive obedience filled most corners of that philosophical hole.

I think we do “values” very well in schools and philosophies very badly. And so enters Big Brother to fill the void.

My favourite pieces of crass philosophy from Big Brother, universally shared by every housetwat ever to appear on this show since it began targeting the lowest common denominator in the viewing public are as follows:

“Be yourself. Be genuine. Don’t try to be something you’re not.”

“Say it like it is. Be honest. If you got a problem with someone, say it to their face. Don’t be nice to them one minute and slag them off behind their back the next. That’s two-faced.”

“I’m just saying my opinion. I have a right to express my opinion.”

I don’t think Big Brother is to blame for expounding this shit and encouraging our youth to adhere to such insular, vain and disharmonious values in life. These philosophies are the bastard children of society and the programme-makers have inadvertently chosen only disciples of this ego-religion with which to populate the house and propagate such crap.

To start tearing at the edges of these trite attitudes…

“Be yourself.” As a natural form of development, in the search for one’s own identity, teenagers will often try to be anything but themselves. We’ve all created personas for ourselves until we’ve found one or more that fit and realised that’s who we are. We’ve all wanted to be someone else, but most of us grow out of that by the time we are 20. Those who don’t, apply for Big Brother.

“Be honest… say it to their face.” Can you really imagine a world where we all say what goes through our heads? How upsetting would that be for people? Most of us think bad things about most people at least some of the time. But would we really advocate that students in schools tell the fat girl she’s fat, the smelly boy he stinks, the stupid kid that he’s thick as poo? Would we say to people that we find them annoying, selfish, thoughtless, lying, attention-seeking, sleazy, etc… etc… unless we really had to? Of course not. That’s hurtful and not always necessary, so out of respect for people’s feelings it is usually better to express these views out of earshot. That’s not being two-faced, it’s showing some thoughtfulness.

Maybe I am wrong and this attitude is confined to Big Brother, because they can all be caught out by not “saying it like it is to your face” when their gossiping is played back after eviction. In which case, then the show “is “ poisoning young viewers’ values rather than reflecting them.

Fianally, this shit about our right to express our opinion. Yes, we do have this freedom, but as normal the constraints on every freedom are ignored by some in this regard. This is when this apparent right or opinion also entitles us to the right to insult others:

“I think you are a wanker. I’m not being rude, I’m just telling you my opinion.”

No, you’re being rude. And in some cases, your opinion could be racist, sexist or downright depraved. Let’s not let people grow up believing they can express “any” opinion please!

To end, going back to philosophy, I shall dip back into twitter and share with you one more example of bullshit:

I found this within a minute. A certain person, sadly indicative of his stereotype, in one tweet preached to us that it makes no sense “the way men downgrade women and don’t recognise a woman’s worth.” In his very next tweet he say he “tucks every female follower in, while kissing them softly on the forehead.”

Sleazy arsehole.

Goodbye.

End of Term

You will find it painfully difficult to give a shit about anything in the last week of term.

In the bad good old days of the nineties, the nineteen nineties that is, the end of term was essentially the final seven weeks after the May half term, when you could confiscate some kid’s bike and ride it around the staff room during a free lesson; or play pac-man while on exam invigilation; or generally abandon book marking as a comparatively pointless pastime in favour of disrupting a colleague’s lesson by walking past the window and staring skywards with a look of frozen terror on your face.

They’ve stopped you invigilating these days, plus you now have to account for all free time gained as a result of Years 11 and 13 leaving after their exams, with evidence of how you have used your “development time”.

Always have a problem with the concept of “development time.” What, is it like puberty or something?

You’ll be asked to teach right up until the last day, by which point 10% of students are already with their families on some beach or poolside soaking up some Med solar rays, and the other 90% know that reports are written, tests are done and they could write an essay in their exercise book on why teachers enjoy eating each other’s toenails as a coffee accompaniment at break, and they won’t get in trouble, because you’ll never read it.

They’ll ask you for a fun lesson, you’ll ask why, they’ll remind you it’s the end of term, you’ll claim that every lesson is fun and then add that is for you anyway. Then you’ll cave in and put Shrek on.

When it appears that the boy in the class who looks like Shrek is being cruelly and heartlessly taunted by everyone, including the nerdy kid with a surname for a first name, who does chess club in the library every lunchtime, then you dust off a more educational video.

The students are too dumbfounded by the artefact in your hand, the VHS tape, to take the opportunity to protest, as you slide into the VCR a many-times-shown copy of Blackadder, which you claim is funny and historical. There isn’t even a titter of amusement, as the poor quality of the tape and the too-swift and too-erudite Elton-Curtis comic similes leave students frowning and demanding that Shrek goes back on.

You know you still have one more lesson with these cultural-trash-hungry teenagers and you’ve kept The Simpsons on DVD (no less!) to treat them with, so you have to resort to a wordsearch for the final 15 minutes.

The wordsearch is without doubt the final refuge for a teacher that has given up on everything, except maybe breathing. The wordsearch has all the educational value of 7 hours sleep and can be successfully completed by invertebrates and blind dogs whose paws have been hacked off.

But it fills a gap. You go to the staffroom and fall asleep, wake up when the bell goes for the final lesson, sign everyone’s leaving card before you amble back to the two 6th formers bothered to turn up and tell them a long story about years ago you used to love the end of term and really and truly speaking, once it got to half-two Friday this week, you’ll be half on your way to a hangover that only 6 weeks in bed can cure.

Stereotypes

Somewhere in the PSHE curriculum, it says that you have to teach students about stereotypes.

Undeniably, there is an ideological agenda at the core of such teaching, which the cynical might label as political and the more reasoned might describe as enlightening, humanitarian, egalitarian or something else soft and nice, which I generally agree with, not being a bastard that is.

Let’s face it, the country is awash with prejudice, because it is a very natural flaw of human nature to lazily categorise people into simplistic groups and cast barely substantiated judgements at them, while deep down we don’t actually fully subscribe to these glib thoughts that prop up our prejudices.

Therefore, you will assume that students have these prejudices, and so you teach them – or rather challenge them – to think deeply about their opinions of other (groups of) people in the hope that they become a lot more enlightened than their parents (and a great fucking amount more enlightened than their grandparents) in their attitudes towards people who are superficially dissimilar to themselves.

This is how it might go. Lesson one – write down every word you can think of to describe a homosexual.

The flood gates open. To challenge prejudice you have to bring it out into the open. Like a séance. Call up the evil spirits and only then can you exorcise them.

Only, to the students, it appears that you’ve given them license to write a plethora of abusive and insulting words onto sugar paper. It might even become competitive, with efforts to out-do each other in terms of how many forms of homophobic abuse they can think of.

Once this catharsis is complete, you are able to start tackling the tricky subject of stereotypes, in which you preach that everyone is in fact different and you blindly ignore the truth that we all conform to a stereotype to some extent at least, because if we didn’t then the whole concept of stereotypes would not even exist.

It’s too dangerous to tell students that they are in fact “not” completely individual, forming independent opinions and endowed with unique tastes and talents.

It’s better to let students find out the dark and bleak truth for themselves.

They all assume that they’re different, but in an effort to fit in, they try to be the same as each other and end up casting suspicion on (or systematically bullying) anyone who seems significantly different to them.

The evidence confronts them everyday, because like it or not, you as teachers often conform to teacher stereotypes. Beyond the shared capacity for weird humour, talking too much, use of obscure “Teacherspeak” phrases and the wearing of smart casual clothing from supermarkets and Matalan, you do tend to dip a toe, a foot or a leg into the subject-stereotype puddle. In some cases, you plunge in up to your ears.

This is not where I fall into the trap of picking on PE teachers for being illiterate, beer-swilling, overly-butch, pseudo-rebels. Even though the odd female one does manage to fill every gap in that particular mould. (But none that I work with now, should any colleague be reading this. In fact, far from it, to be fair.) That would be a cliché. If anything, PE staff demonstrate remarkable literary competence in the application of suffixes, by adroitly adding a Y or O to the end of each others’ surnames. (PE teachers refuse to recognise that anyone has a first name, even students.) Linguistic dexterity can sometimes lead to the use of “–ers” where a pronoun ends up sounding too Brazilian or just too daft when buffered with Y or O.

Just imagine if some of history’s greatest individuals had ended up as PE teachers! US Civil Rights leader, Kingy; English playwright, the Bard, Shakeso, and British War-Time PM, Churchers. There’s a suggestion that Gandhi was in fact a PE teacher, named Mahatma Gand.

On the subject of History, people who teach this subject provide the strongest evidence against the accusation that “those who can do and those who can’t teach.” Because although there may occasionally be some truth in the stereotypical view that drama teachers are failed actors (Luvvies without the luck,) who would ever think that any History teacher ever wanted to become an historian? This might also stem from the fact (my view) that History teachers are perhaps the most normal of all subject deliverers and the least teacher-like. In fact, anyone teaching a Humanities subject by default is more human and better able to relate to other members of the species. Probably because at university they did the least work and had the most time to sit around talking and drinking with other people.

In contrast, Scientists at university were in the lab on campus all day 5 or 6 days a week, many ending up with an inability to communicate with humans. Mathematicians are the same. That’s why there is a shortage of teachers in both these areas. Only those who managed to demonstrate human characteristics and some awareness that living organisms can be communicated with outside of a petri dish, have felt tempted to apply for teacher training. Mind you, that doesn’t stop the majority growing beards.

Which brings us – as I wonder if I spelt petri dish correctly – to the most unbearded of staff, English teachers. Women whose love of literature just slightly outdoes their love of small children, plum for secondary over primary education and swell the ranks of English departments leaving no room for men to get a look in. Only a confident man would enter an English department office anyway, because the sheer magnitude of combined intellect and femininity can be too intimidating for most males.

Finally, a mention for languages teachers. They pretty much defy all stereotyping, because they are only united by their ability to speak another language, so they tend to be a diverse breed.

So, there you have it. Students are confronted by stereotypes, students fit stereotypes and yet students are taught not to stereotype. Now, write down all the words that might describe teachers…