Joanne Wells apologised to me halfway through her story. “I don’t like using that word. It’s offensive, I know, but if you want to know why I gave up teaching, being called a ‘fat cunt’ by a fifteen year old boy seems motive enough to me. There was no real reason for him to say that and I just asked myself why I was doing this job. Three months later I was studying for a Masters 200 miles away.”
Joanne had a very happy childhood. She was clever at school, she worked hard, she had one long relationship with a boy from her History class which finished when she went to study Maths at University. She fell in love with Adam having been in his tutorial class in the First Year. By the time she was working in Beechfield Comprehensive School in Lingfield New Town, Adam was working in IT and they had been married for six months.
“I liked Beechfield. It had a real mixture of kids. Some of them went to Oxford or Cambridge, some of them still didn’t know their tables when they left school. Most of the kids were really lovely: affectionate, polite, well behaved and hardworking; some of them were difficult to motivate and a bit rude. Gary Carey was in my middle ability Year 11 class and he was reasonably clever; he certainly wasn’t stupid. He was probably spoilt by his parents. I mean, they were quite pleasant when I saw them afterwards; horrified at what Gary had said to me but I bet they spoilt him rotten. He was an only child. This class were OK but one of the more difficult classes I taught. None of them were very motivated to work hard. No, that’s not right. Correction: about half a dozen kids were not motivated to work hard. It’s very easy when you’re faced with thirty teenagers and you’re losing control to feel that they’re all against you. The reality is normally that most of the kids want you to take control, to get the difficult ones to shut up, so that they can get on with their learning.”
Joanne smiled at me and asked if I needed a glass of water. I declined.
“I have this recurring nightmare,” she said, “where I am teaching a class and someone on my right starts talking to their friend so I tell them off and while I am doing that a kid on my left does the same thing and then a kid at the back starts talking and there’s only ever one kid at a time being difficult, but it’s impossible to get them all quiet. After I started working at Ashborough, those dreams stopped.”
Joanne pressed the buzzer and asked the nurse for a glass of water for herself. She raised an eyebrow at me and again, I declined.
“This class was a bit like that. Five badly behaved boys, two badly behaved girls and twenty three lovely students. Those two girls were impossible and I suppose I had given up expecting them to produce any work but Gary Carey and his mates could actually produce something if they chose to; it’s just that they wouldn’t shut up and listen. I remember the lesson well. I was teaching trigonometry. Quite an important skill for people to acquire.”
Joanne saw my scepticism and smiled at me again as she carried on with the first part of her story.
“Morning Gary,” Joanne said as Gary Carey and his mates turned up five minutes late.
No answer.
“Any reason why you’re late?”
“Bog”
“Oh, you’ve actually done quite well to get here by 11:05 if you’ve come all the way from Ireland.”
A sneering look from Gary Carey. Laughter from the three more intelligent kids in the class.
“Well, you’ve just missed my introduction to trigonometry and… Gary could you stop talking please.”
“I’m only getting my pen out of my bag.”
“And can you do that and keep quiet at the same time?”
“I was just getting my pen out.”
“OK. Now, trigonometry is an important skill to have. If you have a tree in your back garden and…Gary, please stop talking. You were noisy in the last lesson and I gave you a detention but you never turned up. Can you explain why you didn’t turn up?”
“Forgot”
“Well, I wrote it in your diary for you. Please stay behind at the end of the lesson and we’ll discuss it then.”
“It wasn’t fair anyway, I was talking about the work.”
“Brian. Please stop talking.”
“You’re talking to Gary. We’re not learning anything anyway. It’s crap in this class. You should take control.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do.”
Joanne’s nightmare was turning into reality.
“So, if you’ve got a tree in your back garden and you’re scared it might fall on the roof of your house. GARY!! PLEASE STOP TALKING. If you carry on talking, I will have to ask you to go outside.”
Joanne had raised her voice and the class went completely silent. For thirty seconds.
“And you want to find out how tall the tree is…... Right Gary. Please go outside.”
“I was telling Harry about the tree in my back garden. It’s 50 feet tall.”
“GO OUT OF THE CLASS. I’M FED UP WITH YOU AND YOUR ATTITUDE. I’m going to ring your parents at break and tell them that you’re impossible to teach.”
“And I’ll tell them you’re a fat cunt.”
There were gasps from the other students. Joanne felt shock and deep humiliation. How dare he! What gave him the right to speak to her like that? Who did he think he was? She’d show him. She would get him into so much trouble. It was quite good really because now he would be excluded from school for at least a week and maybe permanently excluded and forced to go to another school. She was prepared to make the sacrifice – to be ridiculed in front of thirty fifteen year olds was worth it if the little sod had to face up to the consequences of his actions.
She somehow got through the lesson and it was OK, the tree by the school gym wasn’t in danger of falling onto the roof. At the end of the lesson, Joanne found Robert Smith, the Head of Year and explained what had happened. It wasn’t a conversation that she was looking forward to because she didn’t like him. This was mainly because Robert Smith had previously had a tempestuous affair with Mary Brown who also taught Maths. However, Mary had been dismissed because she was incompetent and Joanne had got her job. Robert Smith had never been very pleasant towards Joanne but he was good at his job and she knew he would support her. She thought he would support her.
“I’d phone the parents if I were you,” Robert Smith said.
“You want me to do that! But he called me….”
“Oh he’s done a lot worse than that in the past. No, phone his parents.” Robert Smith walked off muttering “they’re very supportive.”
A bit like you, you pathetic little man.
“Thanks Robert” said Joanne, mustering all the sarcasm that she could, hoping he couldn’t read her thoughts.
“That’s shocking,” I said. “So he didn’t get punished at all.”
“Well, I contacted his parents and they gave him a good telling off in front of me and he was a bit better behaved after that but it really upset me. I had spent a long time training to be a teacher and I thought I was good; I wanted to help them, I wanted them to like me and respect me, I really did but it obviously wasn’t going to be easy to get through to every student I taught. So I gave up teaching.”
“What, straight away?”
“Yes. No. Well, sort of. I went home that night and told Adam and he said that he had been headhunted by a company in Ashborough and it was a really good job. I told him to take the job. He asked me what I would do and I said I didn’t care. So he took me at my word and took the job. Of course, a week later I got scared and wondered what I would do. Starting a family was out of the question……”
“…Obviously….”
“….so I took some careers advice and got myself on a Masters Course in IT at Ashborough University. A great course, great bunch of people on the course, one of the best years of my life. And then I got a great job in London. Well, no, not a great job, it wasn’t well paid, it was an hour’s commute every day, but it was really interesting. Challenging. I also lost four stones in weight.”
“Wow”
“It was hard but worth it. I’m so proud of that. So maybe Gary Carey did me a favour after all.”
“So what made you leave your job?”
“Just one ten minute conversation one night in Twickenham after a Home International. I didn’t go but Adam liked his rugby and he went with two of his friends. I went shopping with the girls! A bit obvious – boys go to rugby, girls go shopping but it was perfectly pleasant. We all met in a pub afterwards. One of Adam’s friends actually knew of somewhere where you could make yourself heard in Twickenham after a rugby match. I hadn’t realised such a place existed but we were all sitting round chatting. The problem was, no, it wasn’t a problem, the good thing was that all the others were teachers. Jan and Derek were my friends and James and Alison were Adam’s friends. It doesn’t really matter who they were, but the conversation really got me thinking.”
“Did you hear about that teacher in America who had brain cancer and wrote a letter to the New York Times”
“Oh yes, he wanted to know whether or not he had made a difference.”
“Made a difference?”
“Yes. Had being a teacher made a difference to his students’ lives? He wanted ex-students to get in touch with him.”
“I’ve not heard this. What happened?”
“Loads of his ex-students got in touch”
“And…?”
“It was heart-warming”
“Sentimental American bullshit more likely”
“James! You can be a real pig at times”
“Go on then. Inspire me!”
“Well it started by this bloke reminding us how hard teaching is.”
“Too right!”
“You do all that marking and you do your bit in the classroom and you wonder if it’s all been worthwhile.”
“Sounds interesting. Go on.” Joanne made a contribution to the discussion at last. She’d not read this story.
“Well, James can call me sentimental but lots of students got in touch and said how great he’d been.”
“Yes! I remember. One of his students said how intelligent he was and how he sort of just created an environment where you wanted to learn.”
“And there were loads of people who wrote back to say how much their teachers, not just this teacher, had inspired them and guided them to be what they are today.”
“No one forgets a good teacher,” Joanne contributed.
“What?”
“It was a promotional film to encourage people to become teachers.”
“I never saw it.”
“It was on the telly. A couple of years ago. All sorts of famous people just gave the names of their favourite teachers.”
“Who was on it?”
“David Puttnam. Skin”
“Who?”
“Skin. From Skunk Anansie”
“Who?”
Joanne felt that she was an expert on music, if not teaching.
“How come you know so much about this advert?” Adam asked his wife.
“Because it made a big impact on me. I thought it was really clever and it summed up how I felt about why I wanted to become a teacher. The thought that what you do has such a big impact on other people’s lives.”
“What about your job now? Doesn’t that make a difference?”
“Huh! You’re joking. Nobody would care if I went in to work or not.”
Jan, Derek, James and Alison fell silent while Adam quizzed Joanne on her feelings.
“I thought you enjoyed your job.”
“I do.”
“And yet you don’t make a difference.”
“None whatsoever.”
“And it’s important to you that you do make a difference?”
“Of course.”
Twenty two years later, as she was telling me this story, Joanne looked at me with tears pouring down her face.
“So why don’t you go back to teaching.” Adam asked.
“I’m going to. Thank you.”
Joanne had a very happy childhood. She was clever at school, she worked hard, she had one long relationship with a boy from her History class which finished when she went to study Maths at University. She fell in love with Adam having been in his tutorial class in the First Year. By the time she was working in Beechfield Comprehensive School in Lingfield New Town, Adam was working in IT and they had been married for six months.
“I liked Beechfield. It had a real mixture of kids. Some of them went to Oxford or Cambridge, some of them still didn’t know their tables when they left school. Most of the kids were really lovely: affectionate, polite, well behaved and hardworking; some of them were difficult to motivate and a bit rude. Gary Carey was in my middle ability Year 11 class and he was reasonably clever; he certainly wasn’t stupid. He was probably spoilt by his parents. I mean, they were quite pleasant when I saw them afterwards; horrified at what Gary had said to me but I bet they spoilt him rotten. He was an only child. This class were OK but one of the more difficult classes I taught. None of them were very motivated to work hard. No, that’s not right. Correction: about half a dozen kids were not motivated to work hard. It’s very easy when you’re faced with thirty teenagers and you’re losing control to feel that they’re all against you. The reality is normally that most of the kids want you to take control, to get the difficult ones to shut up, so that they can get on with their learning.”
Joanne smiled at me and asked if I needed a glass of water. I declined.
“I have this recurring nightmare,” she said, “where I am teaching a class and someone on my right starts talking to their friend so I tell them off and while I am doing that a kid on my left does the same thing and then a kid at the back starts talking and there’s only ever one kid at a time being difficult, but it’s impossible to get them all quiet. After I started working at Ashborough, those dreams stopped.”
Joanne pressed the buzzer and asked the nurse for a glass of water for herself. She raised an eyebrow at me and again, I declined.
“This class was a bit like that. Five badly behaved boys, two badly behaved girls and twenty three lovely students. Those two girls were impossible and I suppose I had given up expecting them to produce any work but Gary Carey and his mates could actually produce something if they chose to; it’s just that they wouldn’t shut up and listen. I remember the lesson well. I was teaching trigonometry. Quite an important skill for people to acquire.”
Joanne saw my scepticism and smiled at me again as she carried on with the first part of her story.
“Morning Gary,” Joanne said as Gary Carey and his mates turned up five minutes late.
No answer.
“Any reason why you’re late?”
“Bog”
“Oh, you’ve actually done quite well to get here by 11:05 if you’ve come all the way from Ireland.”
A sneering look from Gary Carey. Laughter from the three more intelligent kids in the class.
“Well, you’ve just missed my introduction to trigonometry and… Gary could you stop talking please.”
“I’m only getting my pen out of my bag.”
“And can you do that and keep quiet at the same time?”
“I was just getting my pen out.”
“OK. Now, trigonometry is an important skill to have. If you have a tree in your back garden and…Gary, please stop talking. You were noisy in the last lesson and I gave you a detention but you never turned up. Can you explain why you didn’t turn up?”
“Forgot”
“Well, I wrote it in your diary for you. Please stay behind at the end of the lesson and we’ll discuss it then.”
“It wasn’t fair anyway, I was talking about the work.”
“Brian. Please stop talking.”
“You’re talking to Gary. We’re not learning anything anyway. It’s crap in this class. You should take control.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do.”
Joanne’s nightmare was turning into reality.
“So, if you’ve got a tree in your back garden and you’re scared it might fall on the roof of your house. GARY!! PLEASE STOP TALKING. If you carry on talking, I will have to ask you to go outside.”
Joanne had raised her voice and the class went completely silent. For thirty seconds.
“And you want to find out how tall the tree is…... Right Gary. Please go outside.”
“I was telling Harry about the tree in my back garden. It’s 50 feet tall.”
“GO OUT OF THE CLASS. I’M FED UP WITH YOU AND YOUR ATTITUDE. I’m going to ring your parents at break and tell them that you’re impossible to teach.”
“And I’ll tell them you’re a fat cunt.”
There were gasps from the other students. Joanne felt shock and deep humiliation. How dare he! What gave him the right to speak to her like that? Who did he think he was? She’d show him. She would get him into so much trouble. It was quite good really because now he would be excluded from school for at least a week and maybe permanently excluded and forced to go to another school. She was prepared to make the sacrifice – to be ridiculed in front of thirty fifteen year olds was worth it if the little sod had to face up to the consequences of his actions.
She somehow got through the lesson and it was OK, the tree by the school gym wasn’t in danger of falling onto the roof. At the end of the lesson, Joanne found Robert Smith, the Head of Year and explained what had happened. It wasn’t a conversation that she was looking forward to because she didn’t like him. This was mainly because Robert Smith had previously had a tempestuous affair with Mary Brown who also taught Maths. However, Mary had been dismissed because she was incompetent and Joanne had got her job. Robert Smith had never been very pleasant towards Joanne but he was good at his job and she knew he would support her. She thought he would support her.
“I’d phone the parents if I were you,” Robert Smith said.
“You want me to do that! But he called me….”
“Oh he’s done a lot worse than that in the past. No, phone his parents.” Robert Smith walked off muttering “they’re very supportive.”
A bit like you, you pathetic little man.
“Thanks Robert” said Joanne, mustering all the sarcasm that she could, hoping he couldn’t read her thoughts.
“That’s shocking,” I said. “So he didn’t get punished at all.”
“Well, I contacted his parents and they gave him a good telling off in front of me and he was a bit better behaved after that but it really upset me. I had spent a long time training to be a teacher and I thought I was good; I wanted to help them, I wanted them to like me and respect me, I really did but it obviously wasn’t going to be easy to get through to every student I taught. So I gave up teaching.”
“What, straight away?”
“Yes. No. Well, sort of. I went home that night and told Adam and he said that he had been headhunted by a company in Ashborough and it was a really good job. I told him to take the job. He asked me what I would do and I said I didn’t care. So he took me at my word and took the job. Of course, a week later I got scared and wondered what I would do. Starting a family was out of the question……”
“…Obviously….”
“….so I took some careers advice and got myself on a Masters Course in IT at Ashborough University. A great course, great bunch of people on the course, one of the best years of my life. And then I got a great job in London. Well, no, not a great job, it wasn’t well paid, it was an hour’s commute every day, but it was really interesting. Challenging. I also lost four stones in weight.”
“Wow”
“It was hard but worth it. I’m so proud of that. So maybe Gary Carey did me a favour after all.”
“So what made you leave your job?”
“Just one ten minute conversation one night in Twickenham after a Home International. I didn’t go but Adam liked his rugby and he went with two of his friends. I went shopping with the girls! A bit obvious – boys go to rugby, girls go shopping but it was perfectly pleasant. We all met in a pub afterwards. One of Adam’s friends actually knew of somewhere where you could make yourself heard in Twickenham after a rugby match. I hadn’t realised such a place existed but we were all sitting round chatting. The problem was, no, it wasn’t a problem, the good thing was that all the others were teachers. Jan and Derek were my friends and James and Alison were Adam’s friends. It doesn’t really matter who they were, but the conversation really got me thinking.”
“Did you hear about that teacher in America who had brain cancer and wrote a letter to the New York Times”
“Oh yes, he wanted to know whether or not he had made a difference.”
“Made a difference?”
“Yes. Had being a teacher made a difference to his students’ lives? He wanted ex-students to get in touch with him.”
“I’ve not heard this. What happened?”
“Loads of his ex-students got in touch”
“And…?”
“It was heart-warming”
“Sentimental American bullshit more likely”
“James! You can be a real pig at times”
“Go on then. Inspire me!”
“Well it started by this bloke reminding us how hard teaching is.”
“Too right!”
“You do all that marking and you do your bit in the classroom and you wonder if it’s all been worthwhile.”
“Sounds interesting. Go on.” Joanne made a contribution to the discussion at last. She’d not read this story.
“Well, James can call me sentimental but lots of students got in touch and said how great he’d been.”
“Yes! I remember. One of his students said how intelligent he was and how he sort of just created an environment where you wanted to learn.”
“And there were loads of people who wrote back to say how much their teachers, not just this teacher, had inspired them and guided them to be what they are today.”
“No one forgets a good teacher,” Joanne contributed.
“What?”
“It was a promotional film to encourage people to become teachers.”
“I never saw it.”
“It was on the telly. A couple of years ago. All sorts of famous people just gave the names of their favourite teachers.”
“Who was on it?”
“David Puttnam. Skin”
“Who?”
“Skin. From Skunk Anansie”
“Who?”
Joanne felt that she was an expert on music, if not teaching.
“How come you know so much about this advert?” Adam asked his wife.
“Because it made a big impact on me. I thought it was really clever and it summed up how I felt about why I wanted to become a teacher. The thought that what you do has such a big impact on other people’s lives.”
“What about your job now? Doesn’t that make a difference?”
“Huh! You’re joking. Nobody would care if I went in to work or not.”
Jan, Derek, James and Alison fell silent while Adam quizzed Joanne on her feelings.
“I thought you enjoyed your job.”
“I do.”
“And yet you don’t make a difference.”
“None whatsoever.”
“And it’s important to you that you do make a difference?”
“Of course.”
Twenty two years later, as she was telling me this story, Joanne looked at me with tears pouring down her face.
“So why don’t you go back to teaching.” Adam asked.
“I’m going to. Thank you.”
