Maybe a little background then. Something to make you feel powerful, enduring sympathy and pity for the pathetic teacher boy. Yeah, teacher boy, what’s your problem anyway? All those holidays; finish at 3:30pm – you don’t know you’re born! But quite the opposite; I can confirm I do know I’m born and I know this well because I feel the unmistakeable and unbearable burden of life booting my wobblesome pink arse until it skids painfully across a bumpy tapestry of disappointment every day. I was born and that was actually OK – it’s just the rest of it that became problematic.
Thinking back to the day I got my acceptance letter onto the teaching course at Canterbury, I was over the moon. Trembling hands tore open the envelope and slowly revealed that my future was saved! I was no longer to suffer at the cruel hands of shift work – I could enjoy holidays like the rest of the world and weekends were mine again! It felt good to escape the relentless and unforgiving clutches of subtitling (charity work really, which I obviously don’t want to talk about) and now a whole world was opening up to me of opportunity, hope and lovely little childers. Come here, you lovely little things. Don’t cry, Mr Mills is here and he will help you. Aid you. Guide you through the difficult times. Sure there’ll be tears along the way, but in the end we’ll look back on our time together and laugh so hard the eye tears will start coming out of other places and then finally the blood. The endless blood and screaming.
I really was happy though. Both the school and the university had had to bend a little to accommodate me as I applied so late for the GTP programme, so I was honoured, privileged and humbled all at once. That’s the middle class for you. The group interviews went well, after some expert tutorage from the Head of English – although the interviewers did try to put you off by pretending to be disruptive pupils during the presentation of what you’d prepared, which I couldn’t help equating with (and then seeing all too clearly during the interview) blithering adults in nappies searching for an elusive and confusing sexual thrill – and my place was fixed. I was to teach and God help them all.
The speed at which the whole process had taken place meant that I was woefully underprepared in terms of research and understanding about what the course actually entailed. I knew it was training ‘on the job’, but the details were fuzzy after that and I just thought I’d learn as the year progressed. This, in retrospect, was a mistake.
On day one I should have known something was wrong. It felt wrong, but then what did I know? Literally nothing and, being so middle class, I wasn’t about to rock the boat by having even the merest hint of self-belief so I just let it slide. Week after week after week. It felt wrong that on the first day I was immediately in front of a class. It also felt unsettling that I was teaching four separate subjects. Surely it was perverse for me to be on practically a full timetable at such an early stage? But still I carried on without questioning, keeping all the building indignity and fury inside me in preparation for the inevitable massive tumour or frenzied bloodbath – whichever came first.
On my first university day, which I nearly wasn’t allowed to go to because of cover issues, it became painfully clear that the school had been taking the piss. As a ‘supernumerary’ member of staff I wasn’t supposed to teach anything until after Christmas and certainly not several different subjects – acting as a poorly paid education plug to fill the gaps for cheap. Then came the moral decision of whether to say anything. Would it make me a bad person? It wasn’t the department’s fault, rather that of the Headteacher (terrible, awful, scratchy arsehole) but it was the kids who’d feel it. They would get a series of supplies in until the situation was rectified and there’s no doubt their education would suffer as a consequence. But what to do? What to do? Happily this didn’t interfere with ongoing Operation Tumour though – as I squirmed over my decision I just swallowed hard and felt the familiar purr as it swelled inside me.
More next week, if you can be bothered. Thanks to Al for tipping his hat to Garthe Knight on the last post. Ironic post-modernism means we can laugh again. Au revoir.
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