In junior school our class teacher used to pick his nose while talking to the class, roll whatever he'd dug out round between his thumb and forefinger and then absently flick it!!!!!!! No one wanted to sit near the front in his lessons.

My friend's a teacher in Liverpool - born and bred in Toxteth and now teaching foreign languages. That's French and Italian btw rather than English.

She's got a variety of ways to keep order but her favourite is to go up the disruptive pupil, give him a big hug and kiss and say "There there, who got out of bed the wrong side this morning then, Didums!"

The pupil becomes deathly silent.

Oooh! Isn't that technique banned under some Convention or other?

(And isn't there a risk, nowadays, that she'll be accused of indecent assault just for the hugs?)

************************************************************

Warning! Product may contain Newts!

Love it! We had a history/geography teacher who was notable for the shortness of his trousers (his ankles always showed) and his total laid backness (laidness back?) which was so great that he only ever taught us anything two weeks before the end of term, at which point he'd do a quick checklist of points to note, we'd learn them by heart, he'd set an exam based on those points, we'd all get 98% and we'd all go home happy (if still as ignorant as when we started).



_ _ _ _ _

If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.

Ooh, a "shop-the-teachers" thread! I've got one or two - there's even a chance Simon'll recognise them...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Top of the list is Mr T, who taught German and Russian. He taught me German for five solid years and Russian for three. Admittedly he was the only teacher of Russian we had, but I might at least have had a luckier break with the German. And to think, this was top set we're talking about here - perhaps the powers felt we didn't need Noam Chomsky or summat teaching us, I don't know. I also don't know how he hung on for as long as he did, or how the hell he made Head of Department. Most likely it was an attempt to promote him out of harm's way. It failed.

Mr T's chosen method of teaching was to use 'Radiovision'. 'Radiovision' is, or was, a suite of BBC language courses that came with a set of photographic slides, accompanying audio and printed text. "This is Goettingen town hall. In olden times it was the wombat-wrestling centre of Germany." And so on. I'm not saying this would have been bad now and then, but Mr T actually let it do his teaching for him. Entire years of my academic study were taken up with 'Radiovision'. Mr T knew his grammar and knew it well, but we had a second German teacher to take us through that, the literature, the written exercises, the reading comps, etc. All we did with T was listen to the tapes, stare goggle-eyed at the slides, and do "fill-in-the-missing-word" exercises. Numbing stuff. We actually entered into a knowing, concerted effort to break his will and send him off with a nervous breakdown. All we ever got out of him were some amusing class dismissals. (In A-Level year we started smuggling in dictaphones and recording these outbursts. A fellow sufferer still has some of these on tape.) He retired a year after I left.

In my A-Level year he was made to present one of our three set German texts to us. Lacking a 'Radiovision' tape for it, he made haste to the library, found a commentary on the book, photocopied the entire thing fifteen times, and handed the photocopies to us, and started setting us practice essays. When he was happy that we could regurgitate enough of the commentary from memory, he put us back on the 'Radiovision'. Incredibly, he even introduced a couple of the "fill-in-the-missing-words" exercises into our mock exams. By this time we were overtly dismantling his classroom during German lessons in a bid for human contact.

There was a brief glimpse of hope when I started learning Russian - for a couple of months, I got some actual real grammar teaching out of T. And then, with mounting horror, I watched T open up his cupboards and pull out the first of many Russian 'Radiovisions'...

So that's Mr T. I can still do a mean ("mean" as in cruel, as well as reasonably accurate) impression of him, draw amusing caricatures of him (thanks to years of practice in his lessons), and recall in gritty detail his numerous quirks and foibles. But I think 'Radiovision' pretty well sums him up.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Honorable mentions go to Father H, the assistant chaplain who taught Latin with a sadistic sense of humour; Mr W, the well-loved Chemistry teacher who'd lost a couple of fingers in a rock-climbing incident, but liked to claim he blew them off in the lab, and who was known for exploding his experiments; and Mr H, the supply teacher who taught us Physics for a year, and who, to my unjustified astonishment (the clues were all there...), was outed as a paedophile on a television documentary earlier this year. Yikes.

Finally, Mr S, the headmaster of the prep school I went to (age 10-13). Mr S nominally ran and administrated this prep school, and still taught Physics (for a while, at least). Unfortunately, Mr S had had a stroke a short while previously, and was not at his peak. One memorable afternoon he taught us about micrometers by holding one up and describing it, briefly, seven times. Then he walked out. Bless 'im.



-----------------------------------------------
"Whisky-wa-wa," I breathed - she was dressed as Biffo the Bear.

BJ - Worryingly I had a Mr W as a supply Chemistry teacher for a term. He had lost two fingers and claimed they were blown off in an experiment. - This was in the late 1970s - I know that they were short of Chemistry teachers at the time, maybe they were cloning them.

KT _
The 'W' at Lancing, to whom BigJohn referred, = Andrew Wielochowski (or some similar spelling). Was that the same one? He was particularly likely to cause explosions during the last Chemistry lessons of each term (and especially so during those at the end of the academic year), in the hope that this would "keep" pupils interested in the subject until they returned... On one occasion he requested a bottle of glycerine and a supply of crushed ice: I don't actually know what he was making with those materials, but only one possibility springs to mind...

************************************************************

Warning! Product may contain Newts!

Regards getting back from your children what you give out.

When daughter was about 2 she went through a stroppy patch. One day I sat there while she snapped and moaned, and then just said, 'I love you, Jessica.' Didn't give her much to answer back to.

About 18 months later, during the summer following my ex wife leaving, I had the kids to stay and was fairly grouchy, being at my wits end. So when I got short with her, Jessica just smiled, and said :

'I love you, Daddy.'

I wasn't very grouchy after that.

Best moment at school was the time we had someone come in to talk about sex and stuff like that. She hadn't realised that 'Year 13' was not the same as 'aged 13'. Brilliantly, she decided to give a completely unprepared talk. You can see what's going to happen, can't you?

So could we...

Anyway, she steps up and the first thing she says is 'So, lads.'

Sixty 17 year-old blokes realise that this could be even funnier than expected. 3 teachers hold their heads in their hands and wait for the inevitable.

Like a antelope going down to the waterhole in a wildlife documentary, she is oblivious to her fate. 'I want you to imagine that you've been out one night and had a few drinks too many, and woken up the next morning next to a girl, and you think you may have had sex with her without using contraception. What do you do?'

Pause. Nobody answers. The teachers think we may be behaving. Fat chance. And then, from the back, in a loud voice.

"For f***'s sake don't tell her your name!"



PSD

==========

This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

Priceless, though not at all 'me'.

BigJohn _
Re teachers at Lancing: Do you remember Philip Dale, the head of the Biology department? He's read & enjoyed TEA & LIAGB.

************************************************************

Warning! Product may contain Newts!

Dave R: love it! Hoist & petard come to mind... : )



_ _ _ _ _

If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.

Not so much disconcerted as moved. From then on we have (nearly) always understood each other.

Montessori - does that make you a strange teacher? I seem to have heard good things about M, where can I find out more?

He goes to bed (allegedly).

Parenting classes - there exists something called ParentLink which runs classes for the over-self-indulgent middle classes, and I knew two people who went to them, one was on the verge of a nervous breakdown so her parenting skills were under some stress, but the other really was a complete twit, and these classes seemed to encourage her to trust her intuitions and not use any common sense. She allowed, in fact encouraged, her 10 year old daughter to advertise her services for odd jobs round the neighbourhood. The daughter made handmade notices, with her name, address and telephone number on them and slipped them through 200 local doors. I was absolutely horrified, and thinking that the daughter must have done this without her mother's knowledge or consent was straight on the phone to the mother. She was quite blase about it and said how good it was that the child was showing initiative, I suggested she thought for one moment about the issue of safety, child abuse and the like. She then told me about these wonderful parenting classes she was attending and how they were to encourage thier children to take the initiative, explore freedom and other such tosh. What a complete idiot. I said if something like it happened again, I'd be calling the social work department, she sobered somewhat at that, and no further incident occurred.

Montessori is fun, my daughter went to a Montessori nursery school and had a great time. Bit of a bump back down to earth when she began formal education in a class of 33 at primary school.

BJ and Simon - My Mr W was called either Wilkins or Wilkinson - he may have been moonlighting under an assumed name. He was a really nice chap - the first thing he did was walk round the class and shake hands with everyone; the ones that flinched when they realised that he had fingers missing he had a chat with after class and explained that it didn't bother him, so it shouldn't bother them.

MissPrint: Yep Montessori is fun - we taught it up to 9 actually - there are schools who do it older but few in the UK atm (one in Yorkshire though DaveR). I wasn't really talking about poncy parenting classes, think I just meant it might be worth giving a few basic tips at school about how to look after kids and how to help them grow up confidently and securely. Something might sink in.

DaveR: Joke - the alternative was to coo and that's hell on the street cred (which I lost some millennia ago now I come to think of it - oh well!) If it's done properly Montessori teaches children how to think for themselves - it's modelled on how they learn, and it's individual teaching so they progress at their own pace rather than everyone learning exactly the same thing at the same time. Not suitable for all children maybe (some may need a stronger more conventional structure but most Montessorians would shoot me for even thinking that!) but brilliant for those it does suit. They have fun - they enjoy what they do - they learn to think.

There are two main training courses in the UK, one more purist than the other, hence most schools are either St Nicholas- ( the freer one) or AMI-based. Both are good. There are books - Maria Montessori's are a bit dense (early 20thc translationds from the Italian) but enlightening - a good one is 'The Secret of Childhood'; 'Montessori Today: A Comprehensive Approach to Education from Birth to Adulthood' by Paula Polk Lillard should give you the ground work.

Sorry to bore everyone else! I'll go now...



Post Edited (07-24-03 09:39)

_ _ _ _ _

If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.

Simon - yes, I remember Mr Dale, he was one of my house tutors. For some reason they used to call him 'Potato', which I assume was surreal boarders humour. Good to know that he's still there - I wonder if perhaps we'll see him on the fforums at some point?



-----------------------------------------------
"Whisky-wa-wa," I breathed - she was dressed as Biffo the Bear.

Is it time for me to mention that my part-time job is making sure a bunch of 5 - 16 year olds do the worksheets assigned to them?

Other teachers -
Mrs S. - and Indian woman was tricked into saying "I can't believe you don't shut up!" like Apu on The Simpsons.

Mr Wolf (It's not funny without the name) who responded angrily to questions about the time.

Dr. R - A man in his fifties who was reputed to have split a desk down the middle and bent the metal supports.

Mr. C - A man who was affected so much by his first year of teaching that he told my class about the time he used to make wheelie bins, then went back to school to learn how to become a Geography teacher.



---
Those who forget the pasta are doomed to reheat it.

We had a great Geography teacher known as "Hong Kong". He used to practice Karate (I think) on the playing fields, using two enormous swords. Very few pupils played up in his class.

Karate with swords? Isn't that a very distinct advantage over the guy with only his fists?



---
Those who forget the pasta are doomed to reheat it.