I don’t know why anyone would want to be a teacher, particularly a teacher of teenagers where I went to school. I guess there would be some satisfaction in seeing some of the students pass exams and the long holidays would be another nice perk but I don’t know if that would be enough to offset the random abuse and constant mind games teenagers armed with raging hormones play. The job must be made more difficult by the fact that kids know they are untouchable these days, a far cry from the dictatorial days only a couple of decades ago when teachers would routinely belt students (usually not with a belt). The school I went to was poor in monetary terms. It was also poor in official standard terms. Don’t get me wrong there were some great teachers there but some kids were simply lunatics and uncontrollable. Here are some of my memories of secondary school.

For some still unknown reason one of our lessons in the timetable was ‘unmanned’. From memory it was a music lesson sometime in the late afternoon and for whatever reason we never had a teacher. Whether the teacher was off teaching someone else or instead blatantly just didn’t give a treble cleffing fuck we were left unattended for up to an hour. At the start of the lesson the class would split into two random factions who would arm themselves with arsenals of stationery before upturning a couple of desks to create a rudimentary trench. And then, somewhat predictably, it was WAR! Elastic bands were the weapon of choice for the infantrymen (and women) on the frontline while heavy artillery would be unloading boxes of pens as rapidly as they could. Snipers armed with erasers were always watching out for anyone foolish enough to try and go over the top. Rockets, well rulers, were regularly dispatched from both sides until supplies were exhausted or until some daft twat threw a nuclear bomb (stapler) at the other side which would genuinely hurt someone. The victim was usually the one kid in the class who didn’t take part and would be sitting there patiently waiting for the teacher that never came like a civilian waiting to be liberated from the war zone. By this point a teacher from an adjacent classroom (or the UN as we call them) would have heard the noise and come into the classroom to negotiate a ceasefire (or bollock us, as was more usual). Unsurprisingly when we all left school not one of us could play an instrument but we could hit the shit out of a target ten metres away with an elastic band.

I really enjoyed art class. I always loved to draw and paint and had some really good teachers. The problem was that for a few years at secondary school we couldn’t afford proper desks. I know this sounds bizarre so let me explain. The desks were large pieces of wood balanced on two frames and they weren’t attached, as is traditional in desk design I believe, to each other. Which meant (and I’m not making this up) that you would have two pupils to a desk and when you were about to take your pencil off the paper you had to tell the person at the other end of the desk. Otherwise you would relieve the pressure and then be greeted at tremendous speed and force by your end of the desk, more often than not in the face area. It was like trying to draw on a seesaw. I don’t know if this was the school’s attempt to foster teamwork in art and design but I think its more likely that they just couldn’t afford proper desks. Eventually we got some more traditional desks (we must have won a grant or something) and chin injuries were dramatically reduced and our art flourished.

Early on at secondary school, I remember that we had lockers in the classroom with us as the desks themselves didn’t have any storage area. Which in a normal situation wouldn’t even be worth mentioning. But whenever a teacher and a pupil would have a disagreement in our classroom the pupil’s way of winning the argument was to push over one of the lockers. Hilariously enough the lockers were not conjoined together and in fact were just the right distance from each other to cause a domino effect, knocking over several of the lockers (I think the record was 4). The teacher couldn’t really do anything once the lockers had been set in motion unless he/she wanted to be crushed to death under a locker filled to the brim with unused textbooks. It was actually quite impressive to watch.

I also remember having a woodwork lesson at school. I think we were making a tent peg or something. At some point the teacher was talking to us all about tent peg making techniques. One of my classmates decided it was also a good time to talk to some of the other pupils. He was quickly dissuaded from this idea by a wooden board duster which flew past his ear by about 5nm. The teacher followed this up with the direct statement “Next time it wont miss.” You see the teacher was a big fan of archery and firing things at targets was one of his hobbies so everyone believed him. This time, the teacher won.

Some teachers are incapable of keeping control of a class. Especially if you are a softly-spoken Irish teacher trying to teach a room full of bored teenagers about religion. This was actually the class next door to us this time. Our teacher wasn’t there at the time (and no-one really fucked with him to be honest) so the kids next door were running riot. We could hear all this quite well as the room was only separated by a slider rather than a wall. Eventually our teacher turned up and heard the commotion next door so pulled back the slider. The pupils were still messing about but oddly there was no sight of the teacher. Our teacher roared (actually roared like a lion) and the pupils quickly stopped messing and everything went quiet. Well, almost everything. You could just make out a sort of low-level whimpering noise accompanied by some fevered scratching which seemed to be coming from the corner of the room. You see, in all the merriment the teacher had got carried away and had somehow managed to lock herself in the storage cupboard. The pupil who used this as an explanation, and who genuinely said it as if he 100% believed it, was never seen after that day.

I used to enjoy maths in school (not math, maths) but even the most dedicated maths teacher will admit it’s not the most exciting and experimental subject at school. So it is little surprise that the Humming Game™ was devised for this lesson. It would start while the teacher was talking us through erotic equations or Panathaikos Theorem or something and it would always begin at a really low level, maybe one or two kids at the back of the class just, well, humming. After a few minutes a few others from the same part of the room would join in. The thing with humming is that it can be difficult to ascertain who is humming and who is Chief Hummer when half of the class is doing it. Like a trooper, the teacher would carry on for a little while longer before kicking off. But kicking off on who? The hummers would just be sitting there looking like they were paying the same level of attention as the non-hummers. The game would usually end when the head of the year would come into the class with the hummers all stopping in tandem. If humming was a crime it would be impossible to trace really.

Seriously who would be a teacher. 10/10 to them for effort.