Mistakes, mishaps and mayhem

If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you’ll know I work with other teachers helping improve classroom practice amongst other things. Occasionally a few of these teachers will look at me like I know all the answers, and the simple truth is I do not, and never have. It’s pretty easy to sit at the back of a classroom and see what is going right or wrong.

Of course, having over thirty years experience helps a lot, but I’ve made a load of mistakes or been in embarrassing situations in that time, so buckle up, here are some of my more memorable ones – or ones made by colleagues¹.

1. On the second day of my career, I was summoned to the front gates alongside the head of year. A father was at the gate and he was fuming. He started ranting at the head of year, saying how it was ridiculous his son was being allowed to mix with such big students and how they were all bullying him. At this point he pointed at me and said something along the lines of ‘see, kids like him are picking on my lad’. I was his son’s form tutor.
2. At the start of my second year, a kid was sat in my class, and he was holding court about what a great summer he had had², and I said “Ah, Johnny, still full of shit I see.” Oops.
3. My classroom was on the top floor (second storey) and had a great view of the playing fields. One lesson, period 5, less than half my class turned up. Turns out there was a football game on, and most of the class were playing in it. Everyone sat by the windows, and I was far too inexperienced to insist on my seating plan, so they spent my introduction to the lesson staring out the window at the game. Eventually, I said, ‘Look, if you’re not interested in this lesson, just go and watch the game’. Hmm, football or maths in a boys school? I’m pretty sure you can guess how that worked out³.
4. My board rubber went missing one lesson, and I was looking for it, trying not to get flustered. Eventually, a kid⁴ held up my rubber and said ‘looking for this?’. I was so grateful I took the rubber from him. I didn’t notice he was holding it by the felt bit and in his other hand was a tube of superglue.
5. I used to live on the school site, and I woke one Monday morning because one of my colleagues was in my room⁵. He was a friend and had crashed at our house a few times. He was livid because he’d been asked to cover me and I wasn’t in school. I wasn’t ill, I was exhausted and slept through my alarm. About three minutes later I was in my room. I avoided my boss all day, until I bumped into him as I was leaving. He said ‘Traffic shit this morning, huh?’.
6. Alongside a flatmate, I coached a rugby team in the first couple of years of my career. Now, I’m a deeply shit rugby player, so I’m not really sure how I got roped into this, but it was good fun. We used to have fixtures on a Saturday so would meet the team at 9 a.m. One morning, a kid knocked on our door at 7:30 a.m. He grinned at me when I opened the door, bleary-eyed and hungover, and said ‘Sir can you open the sports hall so I can shoot some hoops before the game?’. My response was direct and deeply professional. ‘Fuck off’⁶.
7. As someone who was vaguely involved with the PE department, me and my flatmate got invited on the PE department’s Christmas do at the end of our first term. I was twenty-three⁷, my mate twenty-four, and we thought a night out with a bunch of forty year old blokes would probably be really boring, but we agreed to go anyway. We drank half a bottle of port before we left. Big mistake. Next day I had the second worst hangover of my life⁸.
8. I was at a photocopier and a deputy head came into the room. She took one look at me and said ‘I’m more important than you’ and literally barged me away from the machine. I really should have given her a mouthful.
9. A kid spent a good portion of my lesson doodling a UFO style design on the front of his book and generally disrupting the lesson in other ways. He asked if he could go to the toilet, and I agreed as he was being such a pain I just wanted a couple of minutes without him. At break, one of the toilets was discovered to have been trashed with a UFO design. The exact same one he’d spent the lesson doodling on his book. At least he’d perfected it right?
10. In the days before smartphones ruined schools, students used to be a lot more creative in ways to disrupt lessons. A kid got a load of blu-tack, a few drawing pins and some paper from the front of my room. He would cut the paper into a rough small circle, stick the pin through the blu-tack and put it all in the paper to create an impromptu dart. First I knew of this is when he threw it and it hit me in the side. His defence? ‘I was aiming for my mate and you got in the way.’

I’ve got loads more of this sort of story, so I’ll come back to this in a later blog.

Until next time.

FOOTNOTES

1. Yeah, yeah. They’re all me. ↩︎
2. Yep, she definitely didn’t go to this school and we hadn’t met her. ↩︎
3. As it turns out, this worked in my favour. The kids all went to watch. Their head of year was outraged and returned them to class giving me a very public dressing down. The kids were shocked I’d got into trouble and not them and so I inadvertently won them over. Still, don’t do this. ↩︎
4. An absolute pain in the arse, so I really should’ve known better. ↩︎
5. No, not that way. ↩︎
6. I’m still not sure how I got away with that one. ↩︎
7. Oh my sweet summer child. ↩︎
8. The worst is my wine-merchant mates wedding (shoutout Bruce and Saran). The last thing I remember there is having my own bottle of wine at about 7 pm when we’d already been drinking all day. ↩︎