Teachers nod and nudge each other, knowingly. We can be just as bad for stereotyping parents as it seems to appear the world is about teachers. Or are they? On Twitter someone had posed the question, “Why do people hate teachers so much?” If you read all the comments then you would have concluded that they don’t. There were one or two replies that talked about laziness, long holidays, or a Machiavellian desire to mould children into enemies of the state but 90% of the replies made it clear that teacher hating isn’t a normal experience. It is, however, human nature to make more of the negative comments than the positive. Why do we do this to ourselves?
Anyway, that wasn’t what I was going to write about.
Has anyone else got a flitty brain at the moment?
Again, sidetracked.
Boris. Parents. Right.
There are some parents that make a teacher's work harder, and the Boris type is one of those. Prime Minister is a parental role for the whole country. Boris is one of those parents that wants to be their child's friend. The most important thing for a Boris is that their children like them. This can be a disaster because sometimes, as a parent, you have to ask your children to do things they don't want to.
On my very first day of school I observed one of these parents in action. Its a very clear memory. I had already waved goodbye to my mum and was putting my PE bag on the peg labelled with my name when a beautiful little girl, with dark wavy hair and enormous eyes appeared. I had spent a little time before, reading all the names next to the pegs and had been fascinated with her .. It was different, unusual and rolled around the tongue in a uniquely satisfying way. I will use her name, one day, in a fiction but not here. She was making the most awful racket. Her Mum was still with her. She sobbed and wailed and said that she didn't want to stay at school. Her mum cajoled and placated and told her how lovely she was. Her mum wasn't wrong. She was lovely. Even when she was sobbing, I looked up to her, both literally and figuratively.
"It's alright, Sweetie, you don't have to stay if you don't want to."
The wailing was instantly broken and the sobs became more spaced out. A smile spread over her face and she slipped her hand into her mum's.
Unfortunately for her, Miss Jones had heard all of this and swept into the cloakroom. She saw me, standing open mouthed and said, "Go and sit down Julia, stop dithering, and close your mouth. You'll catch flies standing there like that."
Miss Jones peeled the crying child away from her mother and gave her a warning about not making promises she couldn't keep.
I have no other memories of this girl until I was in senior school. I was in the humanities department, doing some handwriting practise, as the joke about me becoming a doctor was beginning to wear a bit thin. I was mortified at having to be there with a lot of the children who were in detention. This girl was one of them. She was still beautiful and tall and I still loved her name.
"Oh yes," she said, "I can have any boyfriend I want to stay. My mum is like my best friend."
We were 12 and I remember being shocked as shocked as she went on to explain, in graphic detail, to the open mouthed boys, exactly what her and the sleepover boys did.
About a year later there were whispered rumours that she had left the school because she was pregnant and her mum had decided that they would move because of the shame. She was supposed to have told Louise William's mum that her daughter now hated her and had asked her why she had never set any rules. Louise Williams always knew everything and her mum worked at the doctor's surgery so no one questioned the truth of the rumour.
I suspect though, we have now got to the stage where the country are asking Boris why he didn't set tougher boundaries before and so it's only a matter of time before he gives in and gives us what we want again. The Daily Star has decided that he's a clown and most of the other papers have stopped saying nice or sycophantic things.
*I forgot to publish this blog this morning and as it has just been announced that Boris will give a television address at 8pm and Scotland have announced a full national lockdown, like March I feel as though I predicted something, entirely predictable.
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