Thursday, Cover Lesson - Science
I hustled along the corridor to do a last-minute cover in a Year Eleven science class. When I caught sight of the students milling around outside the classroom I realised that this was my own bottom-set English class.
A very small Year Seven child almost ran into me and I said, ‘Move aside, Small Person!’ in a loud teacherly voice and Ronnie MacFarlane, who was standing at the classroom door, grinned and commented, ‘That’s teacher authority at work.’ Ronnie was a tall, gangly kid, good at endurance sports and hopeless at English. He was, however, very good at buttering up his teacher. I wondered what he was like at science. I opened the door and let them in, not bothering with my usual ‘Boy/Girl’ instruction as this class was all boys. Bottom sets usually are. I put down my travel mug of coffee and studied the lesson plan on the desk while the boys argued and grappled with each other over who sat where. This was a cover lesson and I didn’t know the seating plan, so they’d sit next to their friends and attempt to do no work. I glanced across at Karl Tough, who was sitting next to Jason Tully, who was himself sporting a shiny and swollen black eye. ‘What happened to you?’ I asked.
‘Karl smacked me.’
‘I did,’ Karl said.
‘It was my own fault,’ Jason said. ‘I was giving him grief.’ Then, apropos of nothing he whispered the word ‘Potato’ in a slightly nasal tone.
‘He was,’ Karl confirmed, flicking Jason a glare, adding, ‘And he still is.’
‘Give out these books, will you?’
While Jason gave out the text-books I gave each student a sheet of lined paper and explained what they had to do. Of course, they didn’t intend to do it. This was a cover lesson. Their usual teacher was on leave pending ‘competency’ issues, which in our current North Korean working environment meant he wasn’t using the latest teaching system with a glad smile and a song in his heart. More than that, he’d been caught. I’m not a science teacher, so they knew I knew even less about their subject than they did, if that was humanly possible. Nevertheless, I figured that as they knew me and as we got along fairly well, they’d either get on with it quietly or make some effort to hide their lack of effort. I didn’t even ask Karl Tough to move to a different desk.
Which was a mistake.
Within minutes Jason Tully was muttering the word Potato in a metallic voice at random and at increasing volume levels. After I’d asked him four times to stop Karl punched him hard on the shoulder, ‘Shurrup!’ he shouted.
I looked up and said to Jason, ‘Go to the Year Eleven office.’
‘What. Now?’
‘Yes. Now.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re irritating everyone, and Karl is liable to get excluded if he gives vent to that irritation and chins you.’
Jason stood up and began packing his bag, very slowly and without moving his lips he uttered the word Potato in a loud metallic voice. Karl punched him on the arm again, ‘You’re an idiot!’ he hissed.
They’re actually best friends.
While I ushered Jason out of the classroom, Horace, our resident Portugese refugee took it upon himself to clamber up onto a desk and begin dancing, thrusting his hips back and forward while being cheered on by his classmates. Closing the door, I went over and gently brought Horace down from the desk and got the class back to work. After five or ten minutes they’d settled and began to work reasonably quietly. Then, from somewhere outside in the corridor drifted the unmistakable sound of a fake metallic-voice:
‘Potato.’
Karl jumped up, ran out into the corridor and began punching Jason. The whole class cracked up in shrieks and jeers and laughter.
‘Authority’ indeed. That was a bubble just waiting to be burst because, outside of my own classroom, and while standing-in for another teacher, I had no more authority than the feeblest non-qualified cover-supervisor. I wondered too how you could possibly be ‘Competent’ with a class like that.
As I tidied up at the end of the lesson I thought back to when I’d been at school: our French teacher Mrs. Rumel couldn’t control us either. One of the kids in my French class was called Arthur but we called him Gog, short for Goggles, because he wore thick, jam-jar spectacles and Arthur was prone to shouting out ‘Aww Gog!!’ apropos of nothing. After a couple of lessons with Mrs. Rumel we realised that she couldn’t control us and then we were all at it, the room filled with the increasingly dramatic refrain ‘Awwww Gogggg!!’ which was as funny to us as it was stupid-sounding to anyone else. After a week or two of this chaos, we’d reached the point where we were stopping off at the greengrocers to buy a dozen crab-apples at a penny each, purely to pelt at each other in Mrs. Rumel’s class. Sighing, knowing I was going to have to fill in a report of the fracas between Karl and Jason for the Cuddle Club, I closed the door on the science room thinking, what goes around…
Previous chapter here: