Teachers are being worn out by classes who hum in unison or start orchestrated coughing and other schoolboy pranks, says the union NASUWT.
Humming? Coughing? They should be so lucky. We drove our French teacher mad. Of course we did not mean to, not so he’d spend months off work and return from some psychiatrist’s couch a thug with the manner of a kindly uncle, but we did.
All teachers are supposed to have ways of dealing with mischievous classes. I remember a physics teacher who could lift me off the ground by the ear lobes. Mine, not his.
Others just had authority. You played your joke and then did as you were told.
Whenever Fat Malc, the French teacher, turned to write on the board we’d swap places, so when he turned back, no one was where they were supposed to be.
Ha ha.
What we did not know was that he thought he was confused, not us messing him about.
If he handed out a four-page essay as a punishment then the challenge was to get an eight pager and so on. We had a league table going and someone gave a commentary, as if on Grandstand.
The more he could not control us the more we were uncontrollable and I vividly remember a game of rugby going during the lesson using a textbook as a ball.
All the time Fat Malc sat at his desk reading aloud to himself in French about a kid called Anatole.
God, it was funny.
Then he went off.
Then he came back.
We were warned by the head to behave.
We behaved.
Fat Malc patrolled the class. He asked a question.
A boy called Christopher answered.
Malc went over to him and ruffled his hair.
“That’s very good, Christopher,� he said, soft as a nursery school teacher to a three-year-old. “Very good indeed. I am very pleased.�
All the while he was lifting his hand high in the air to bring it whacking down on the side of Christopher’s head with a force we had never seen before.
Christopher was on the floor and barely conscious enough to hear Fat Malc point out with an unearthly calmness: “But you should have put your hand up first.�
We carried on with the lesson with, to all intents and purposes, a body lying on the floor.
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