Something awful happened to me earlier this week. I was approaching the school entrance, weighed down by
bags of books and associated teaching crap, squinting through the early morning gloom at the drab doors
and hearing the water torture of dripping blocked gutters, and for a moment I felt like this had been my
life forever. I tried really hard to remember what it was like before I became a teacher, and the life before -
of racing swivel chairs around a luxuriously carpeted office and sauntering around shops during my lunch
breaks - seemed so remote that I couldn’t even be sure it really happened. In the job I had immediately before
my teacher training course, a couple of us used to frequent the local gym in our lunch breaks. I say “lunch
breaks” rather than “lunch hours” because a trip to the gym would seep into the afternoon’s work, and by the
time we got changed and sloped back to the office the kids from the local school would be swarming around
the town centre on their way home.
“Huh!” I’d think to myself. “Easy life, eh!” There we were returning to work for an afternoon stint, while school was out for the local yobs and yobettes, who now had a good few hours to terrorise the local pensioners and hang around the shops until the shutters were pulled down for the day. This feeling that the teachers had a short day was confirmed when I’d signed up for my PGCE, and had to arrange a number of visits to schools in my vicinity to carry out some observations. I couldn’t leave my desk before 5 or half past, while it seemed that all the teachers I wanted to meet up with were out of the door straight after the kids. “Oh no,” one pompous-sounding headteacher told me, “I don’t want my staff hanging around until 5.30. They all have lives too you know and they work too hard during the day to put in extra hours. You’ll have to arrange to come in earlier.” I still think that particular head is a pompous ass, especially after I’d spent a few days in his school, but now any indignation I once felt has turned to envy. Why can’t I work in a school where the head encourages you to bugger off home as soon as the kids have legged it?
I’ve resisted turning into a fully-grown teacher for so long. I hate the way the job starts to define who
you are. Tell anyone you’re a teacher and they immediately assume you’re interested in kids, the education
system, their kids, philosophies of teaching, current Daily Wail stories of a generation out of control, TV
programmes featuring unteachable kids or kids from posh schools being taught by faded rock stars, standards of
literacy and their other teacher friends. Well, sometimes I am interested in these things, but I am normal
too, you know. It’s bad enough that I seem to get teacher-related junk through my letter box at least twice a
week: dated-looking union magazines, ballot papers to elect union members to positions of highly inflated
self-importance, loan companies and insurance companies racing to offer me preferential rates because I’m that
boring old fart with leather patches on my jacket elbows - dependable, reliable, sensible. I’m fed up with my
job intruding on the rest of my life. It’s starting to swallow me up and I’m starting to forget what it was
like to be a mere wage slave who had every excuse to go out and have hobbies and pastimes and a social life
that defined who I was, rather being than the upstanding member of society who is supposed to give more than a
tuppeny f*ck about their job. I teach, therefore I’m a teacher. But I wish it didn’t have to be so.
added 16/10/05
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