True Gits

Being a teacher is bloody weird. It doesn’t seem like five minutes ago we were all slagging and bitching about our own teachers and now I’m the one being slagged and bitched about. Not that I’m suggesting for a moment that in my other workplaces I haven’t been slagged and bitched about as well – being both a slag and a bitch makes this a given – but I suppose the main difference is that in these other places and when we were kids, at least we had the decency to do it behind their backs.

The first thing that struck me about teaching these days is the barefaced audacity that the kids have in their 21^st century slagging and bitching. As a teacher, particularly as a new teacher in a difficult school, you can go to work confident in the knowledge that you will definitely be abused, tormented, ridiculed and humiliated – the fun is guessing which one it’ll be that day. ‘You’re a prick, Sir.’ Yeeeee-haaaa! ‘Hope you’ve got AIDS, Sir’. Whoop-whoop! ‘Fuck you, Sir’. Wheeeeee! It really is a joyous pursuit. What I particularly like about it is the duality of being so incredibly rude, but then following it with the cap-wringing, floor-staring and almost Victorianly polite suffix, ‘Sir’. It’s like someone slowly and sadistically inserting a red-hot door knob up your arsehole and then offering you a beautifully-embroidered handkerchief and chancing, ‘mop yer brow for you, guv’nor?’

I remember, in my first week, a few boys were walking up the corridor and behaving perfectly normally until they saw me there. Seizing a chance to look good and, more importantly, make me look like an embarrassingly ineffectual fool – easier than you’d think – they began to shout, swear and eventually fight their way towards me with the subtext of seeing what I was going to do about it. Being new and a massive coward, I really didn’t know what to do about it and so, quivery and fearful voice at the ready, I just started shouting.

It’s a funny thing, shouting at teenagers. They live in a constantly loud world filled with loud music (God, writing that couplet makes me feel about a thousand years old) loud opinions and loud clothing and so what the hell kind of impact would a slightly amplified middle class voice – which sounded a lot more like I was asking for a wine list in a noisy, but lovely, restaurant than reprimanding a group of out-of-control bastards – have on them?

“Boys! Boys!”

So my first question is, is there anything camper than that? It sounds more like a proclamation of sexual preference than castigation and the ‘boys’ in question reacted in precisely the manner you’d expect. Mimicry and ridicule. “Boys! Boys! Oo’s dis guy?” they shouted to each other as they continued to barrel down the corridor, pretending to be oblivious to my obvious discomfort, but really almost visibly growing in size because of their hilarious parody and my resulting shame.

My point is, if there is a point, that we would never have done this sort of thing when we were at school. I lived in perpetual fear that my slagging and bitching would eventually be found out and I would be seized by those in power and viciously dealt with. Sort of like a free-speaking Libyan – topical alert! Topical alert! These revolutions are really helping with my similes at the moment. Their lives have not been lost in vain. The fact is that this fear just doesn’t exist anymore in schools. Kids don’t care if you see them being rude about you these days and, in fact, actively pursue situations in which they get the opportunity to make you look like a twat in front of as many people as possible. That’s part of the game now and one of the reasons I can’t take it. I don’t want to play anymore. I’m going home and I’m taking my dignity with me.

Anyway, this post was about all of that, but really it’s about the fact I got a new haircut, which may as well have been the word ‘victimise’ tattooed on my face. There it is. My life is over.

Thanks for the comments for the first posting last week. Nikki, you managed to be funnier than the whole thing in one sentence there. Thanks for that. And, Rob, it was a Tuesday. Until next time, my lovelies!