Something happens to you a couple of years after starting to teach. You lose the ability to blush in situations that would usually warrant such an involuntary reaction.
During teacher training, our tutor posed the question of what our reactions would and should be if (and when) a child farted in the classroom. The horror! We all hoped we didn't have to deal with that too soon. How young and foolish we were. We soon discovered that disruptive fart syndrome is quite mild on the sliding scale of social faux pas committed by the toe-rags on a daily basis.
You soon learn that anticipating sniggers at suggestive words in books is, for example, the best form of defence against blush-causing offences. And I won't even go into the area of pupils wetting themselves or worse. Apart from to state that it does happen, even in secondary schools.
I first noticed my lost art of blushing a while back, when a class were doing role-plays
in the first lesson of the day, whilst I gathered my thoughts at my desk and saved myself some
future marking by avoiding setting any written work. My stasis of inner tranquility / outer chaos
was blown apart by a colleague poking his head round the door and yelling at the children
to sit down and be quiet. Then he noticed me looking like I was doing sweet FA (which I suppose
it must have looked like, in all honesty, even though I was mentally flicking through
holiday brochures) and began to apologise.
Now, a while back I would have blushed in that stumbling English way epitomised by the likes of Hugh Grant. I would have been horrified to have been caught sitting down during a lesson instead of circling the room, aiding and observing, especially as I wasn't even pretending to sift through paperwork. Instead, I gave a dismissive hand-flap and muttered, "They're doing some drama", before settling back to my daydreams.
The same week I managed to interrupt a male colleague in the toilets, in full flow. It was
me who was in the wrong toilets, not my colleague, in case you're wondering, for reasons of
time efficiency and stairs avoidance. Once again, I failed to feel the burning in my cheeks
and reacted in what would probably be called a brazen manner, by assuring him I wasn't
looking, and carrying on with my business.
And so it continues. Not only do the kids no longer make me blush, but neither does anything I do to show myself up in front of my colleagues. The only exception I have is not drinking in front of them, because I'm sure the next day my lost art of blushing would be regained, probably with the added bonus of a P45.
added 24/7/03
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