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!

The Pursuit of Happiness

Sooooo…….. Last time we met I was full of hope and ambition. It was the last week of a life-changing trip down through the Americas continents, if I remember it rightly, and I’d seen enough awe-inspiring sights to ensure things would be different from now on. No more would the crutch of television hold me up as I merely existed my way through life. It was about experience and living and I wasn’t about to waste that opportunity in front of the fool’s lantern, drinking and sneering at the next batch of Big Brother cock snots as they paraded around the new fucking room, which was actually called the Fucking Room. Where they were encouraged to fuck.

Any guesses where this is leading then? Well, you’re wrong, you bunch of bloody doubters. When I got back to the UK I did make changes. Didn’t like the job, changed it. Relationships in turmoil, changed them. TV in the bedroom, changed it. So, as you can see, a lot of bonafide alterations from life as it was, to life as I wanted it to be. And no TV in the bedroom as well – may seem like a little thing, but to me it was like losing a testicle. My favourite one too – ol’ lefty. You remember him. Juts out a bit, but he’s all heart. And gross hair and veins.

Sooooo…… Does all of this equal happiness? Is this the final posting where I superciliously bestow my secrets and wisdom to enhance your experience on Planet Patronising Bastard and then flick a casual V sign in your direction as I cast my flaxon locks back and roar with the kind of self-love and mastubatorialism that would make Gordon Ramsay appear the very picture of Dickensian manners?

Nope.

Still pissed off. Still dissatisfied. Still envious of literally everyone else in the world.

But then that might be a good thing. People do their best work when they’re up against it. Look at the Egyptian slaves who built the Pyramids. They may have been getting continually whipped throughout their miserable, but mercifully short, existences; taking the sort of daily abuse unthinkable by today’s standards (unless you do actually still live in Egypt – topical alert, topical alert!) but look what they produced. My point is that if you sweat and toil, someone will appreciate it thousands of years from now, so it’s all worth it. And stop moaning, you long-dead, long-suffering Egyptian slave irrelevances.

Unfortunately, my erections are nowhere near as spectacular as Egypt’s, so you’ll have to make do with the sort of banal musings that, in 2007, had The Guardian’s Allegra Stratton saying absolutely nothing and elicited the following review from The Independent’s Robert Fisk:

(I have absolutely no idea who Robert Fisk is – it’s just a name I was given. I don’t even think he reviews anything. The point I’m making is that I’m a nobody. Do you see? Are you happy now?! My girlfriend thought you wouldn’t get it if I just left it blank and insisted I added this caveat to make it clear. Well? Is it clear? Probably. Is it funny? No)

The long and the short of it is that I’m back. I’ve been working as an English teacher in Peckham and Greenwich for the last 3 years and now I want to change it all again. This will be about how I manage that. Or wind up a serial killer. It really could go either way.