Strange

"Oooh, I love it when you see a teacher out of school, it's like seeing a dog walk on its hind legs," said the sassy one in Mean Girls, when they spotted their teacher in the Mall. Working in the town where you live can leave you feeling like you are permenantly walking on your canine hind legs. It's not feasible to stay locked in the house and it seems that whenever you leave it you see someone and some reactions can be extreme.

I'm quite lucky because I don't have separate school and home personas. I'm not mean and strict at school or a happy drunk, snogging and groping my husband in the corner of a bar, as a maths teacher from my school was. I don't always wear or not wear make up, so seeing me in town in slouchy clothes, pale faced with birds-nest hair isn't too terrifying for my pupils; they've seen it all before. 

When my children were at school (and before I taught) I would often hear other parents complaining about the teachers being drunk in the pub on a Friday night. "I think it's terrible," they would say, "It's just not professional." "How can they show themselves up like that?" I always disagreed, "Why shouldn't they? You are on your 4th glass of wine and you have to go home and look after your children - they don't!" I thought it was a good thing for parents to be reminded that teachers are real people.

Pupils can struggle with the concept of teachers as human beings. Parents should know better. As pupils get older they start to speculate about the outside school lives of their teachers. They wonder about their sexual lives and are not beyond making up a story or two. I used to babysit for my music teacher and his wife, who were a very happy couple but rumours used to run rife in our school that he was gay. One of my friends made up a lurid story about seeing him kissing a man. I know it was a story because he had supposedly seen him on an evening I was babysitting; they had been to a black tie dinner dance and so he wasnt wearing the jeans, leather waistcoat, no shirt and cowboy boots my friend had seen him in. 

Over the course of a teacher's career they could encounter thousands of pupils and it is impossible to remember them all. I knew a teacher who, after a particularly messy divorce, was picked up by a gorgeous young man in a bar. It was only as they were about to leave to go to his place for 'coffee' that they discovered he had been in her first year 5 class. They both sobered quickly and vowed never to mention it again.

Pupils are shocked when they see you in the wrong place. How you handle it can be a minefield. I usually smile and say nothing, unless I'm in the swimming pool, where  I pretend not to have seen them, so they can pretend they haven't seen a half dressed teacher. The youngest children struggle the most. Most think that teachers sleep in the classroom. Once, I heard a child exclaim to his mother, "Look, there's Mrs Music Teacher! What's she doing outside the hall?"

Children's reactions to you can be hilarious. One child got into the supermarket trolly and burried himself with the shopping, rather than have to face me. 

Yesterday I was in a shop in town when I saw a little girl. She looked at me shyly and I smiled and moved to the other side of the shelf. 

"You'll never guess who I just saw."

"Who did you see darling?"

"Mrs All Trades."

"Oh, who's Mrs All Trades?"

"She works at my school."

"Right. What does she do?"

"I'm not really sure......she sings a lot....and sometimes she plays the, oh, what's it called? You know, she plays the thing while we run around."

"Strange."

"Yes, strange."