Last in the series, The Weird and Wonderful World of Teaching
At the party after the school concert, I knocked back the wine big style, so utterly overjoyed was I to have it over and done with – not just the concert itself, but even better, an entire year of teaching. It was one of the happiest nights of my life.
Gilles’ parents came over to thank me for my efforts. I breezily told them that their son was the nearest thing I had experienced to childly perfection They burst out laughing. “Not at home he’s not!” they exclaimed, in a cry of near unison. I didn’t know whether to be relieved (that he was normal), or disappointed (that the perfect child didn’t exist.)
And then, suddenly, it was over. Parents whisked their children off to bed. Chairs were stacked, the lights switched off and I walked out of the building into the night – a free woman.
But walking home, dramatically mellowed by wine, I realised there were things that I would miss. Kiddie sweets for starters. I LOVED them (naturally, I had to sample them first; make sure they were alright). I bought all the rubbishy, gaudy ones, crammed full of sugar and yummy chemicals – mainly because I liked them myself. The big sour turquoise spiders were my particular favourites and went down a treat with the kids too – they probably weren’t allowed them at home.
I handed out sweets to the kids in the quantities I ate them myself. When a small boy had won a game, I allowed him to delve into a packet of gummy bears. “How many can I take?” he asked. “Eight”, I said. I’d scoffed a handful before the class had come tumbling in. ‘EIGHT?” he exclaimed, unable to believe his luck. I wasn’t sick when I got home, but he probably was.
Of course, I’d miss the kiddies themselves. The beauty of them. I used to think they were like the dawn – all clear, fresh and dewy. Adults seemed so horribly haggard by comparison. And I would miss their nonsense Their thought-processes. Their upsets. Their excitements. Their chatter. I realised that a child’s world is every bit as complex as the adult one.
What else would I miss? Alexei’s huge, grave eyes. Patrice’s brace-infested grin. The Pink Little Girl who hugged my knees and the way she looked at me, eyes and mouth forming a huge O whenever her mother’s new boyfriend came to pick her up. José’s[J1] black face sticking round the door, eyes positively sparkling with mischief. Or the way he would hide under my desk, convinced I hadn’t noticed, while his classmates trembled with ill-contained glee as I walked around, saying, “Where is José? Where CAN he be?”
One thing I would not miss was the blackboard. All my classes, except one, were held in the most ancient schools where the blackboard and chalk still reigned supreme and cleaning a blackboard meant breathing in entire cumulus clouds of chalk dust to such an extent that when I blew my nose, I could rather sensationally produce rainbow-coloured mucus. It became a bit of a party trick.
One classroom had a daytime occupant who was a prime candidate for Winner of the Howard Hughes’ Award for Obsessively Compulsive Disordered Person of the Year. Woe betide you if he found his chalk rearranged in (shock, horror) the WRONG COLOUR ORDER, or is blackboard did not look as pristine as the day on which it was born. I actually had to photograph his chalk arrangement and draw a map of his classroom to ensure that every desk, chair and dust particle was put back in its millimetre-perfect position.
And as for the blackboard! An entire lifetime could have been wasted trying to achieve the result he wanted. I settled for 15 minutes. There was a duster, which sufficed in normal classrooms. But this was an ABNORMAL classroom and so there was also a dry rag, a wet sponge and one of those things with a blade that you use to wipe a window once you’ve squirted Ajax at it. It was quite the performance and I never mastered it totally. Dried-in drips were my speciality and as sure as anything, the following week the concierge would be lurking to tell me that Mr OCD had complained – surely not – about the state of his blackboard and that if things didn’t improve, he would report me to the headmaster in the hope that I would never be allowed to darken the door of his classroom or leave drips on his blackboard ever again.
It was very, very tempting, but I bore this additional cross in the same manner in which I bore teaching generally – with a rather heroic display of teeth-gritted martyrdom.