Lesbians

Year 10 VET (private study), T2

Pretty laidback class. About half of my twelve students are doing some study, the rest are, well, bludging. My job is basically to babysit. Shweeeet! It’s a free-dress day too. Most of the kids are wearing jeans, sneakers and sports tops. Exchanging one uniform for another really.

You should have seen the kids in my last class: years sevens, and some of them were dressed up to the nines. One little girl, Sinead, was wearing a sophisticated little gold party top with plunging neckline (plunging into very little!) and spaghetti straps. One of her friends said she was trying to impress her boyfriend. That’ll do it, I thought to myself – but said to her it wasn’t very appropriate for school. Ah well, they’re year sevens – what do you expect?

Anyway, back to this class, check it out - a couple of girls have spent most of the period in each other’s arms. They’re either lesbians or very comfortable with each other. One of the boys, Aaron, asks them if he can ‘watch’. One of them, Blair, says “Join us”. Aaron enthusiastically runs over, but he’s only pretending; he knows she doesn’t really mean it.

God, look at them: now the other, Renee, is leaning her head on Blair’s breasts, which are covered by a flimsy white low-cut top. Oh baby…I know this seems like weird behaviour for a classroom, but believe me, really it’s not. The kids don’t even expect me to say something to them about it, and I don’t. I mean, it’s only ‘private study’.

Another girl, Kristin, is starting to play around with some hard lollies she’s brought to class. They’re those little round sour-balls covered in coconut. She’s throwing them around, trying to get them in the bin, which is behind me. She knows it’s annoying me but she doesn’t care, and frankly, neither do I. She takes great delight in calling them her “hairy balls”.

Breakfast Cereal Boxes

Year 8 PE, Room 11

They’ve got theory, or something like that, so I’ve put them in a classroom. The work left by the teacher is an activity where the kids are to design their own breakfast cereal box. Weird, huh? The kids don’t seem to mind, and get to dreaming up various ideas and drawing them. One kid’s got a cereal made of worms, another one insists on a design that incorporates a picture of a certain teacher.

A couple of girls come in late and I just give them the work and leave them alone. A student later tells me they’re actually not supposed to be in this class and should be sent away. I tell him I don’t care, just as long as they’re occupied somewhere then it shouldn’t matter. When the girls realise I know they’re not supposed to be there and I don’t care, the joke they’re playing seems to lose it’s appeal, and they decide to leave. One of the girls tells me, “You’re a strange man.” I take it as a compliment.

"Go Back To Your Caravan Park!"

Year 10 Politics, Room 31

They’ve got bookwork on Federation. I send a student off to the library to get the class set and I start writing the teacher’s questions and page references on the blackboard.

It’s gonna be a difficult one, I can tell. I’m in this pokey little portable out in the middle of nowhere – not very conducive for study - and I’ve already had to yell at a couple of students for bringing food into class. The two students, both girls, happily share a chocolate bar, despite my threats. I tell them they’ve got detentions, but they obviously don’t give a shit.

So anyway, the books come and I start distributing them around. When I get to the chocolate-eaters one of them, Annie, objects to the way I toss the book at her, like I’m supposed to hand it to her on a pillow. We have some words and I move on. Little bitch, she has no intention of looking at the book anyway. The girls at this table all glare at me and I can tell it’ll be uphill getting any work out of them.

The class settles down for a while as I continue writing questions on the board and do the roll. I have to yell at the other chocolate-eater, Ashleigh, for throwing her wrapper on the floor. Geez these kids are such slobs! I’ve got maybe half the class working. Three boys come in late and sit down silently in front of me, as though coming in late is expected of them. They offer no explanations when I ask for one. I leave it. I just don’t have the willpower to lock horns with them.

I guess I should say at this point that the year tens at this school really are a hand-full. They were horrible as year nines, horrible as year eights, and yes, horrible as year sevens too. But they seem much worse now, because they’re older and more hardened and far less friendly. They’re like a bunch of rabid dogs.

I decide to give the chocolate-eating girls another try. In the course of telling an increasingly aggressive Annie that I’m only doing my job she calls me a name. She keeps yelling at me, calling me all kinds of nasty things. I tell her to leave the room, but she refuses to go. She keeps yelling at me, so I eventually crack it and yell back at her “Why don’t you go back to your caravan park?” There’s a moment of stunned silence, followed by a “What did you say?” from Annie. I tell her she heard what I said.

Then it gets worse. She goes right off the deep end: I’m a “fuckin’ this, fuckin that”, etc.

After a further war of words I leave the room to get the teacher in the portable next door, who I know is a senior teacher and who’ll be able to sort her out. I bring him in and, seeing who it is, Annie storms out.

I tell the kids left that the show’s over and try to settle them back down. It’s hard going, and I find I’ve now got just about everybody against me. One of Annie’s friends, Rebecca, starts in on me now, being as cheeky and rude as she can possibly be. I figure she wants to join Annie, so I decide not to send her out as well. This just means that I’m stuck with her for the rest of the class, and she tries to be as vindictive as possible towards me, to get back at me for what I did to her friend, I suppose. It’s like she’s Annie’s lieutenant or something and she’s taking over her role. We exchange some more words and eventually things settle down.

I sit and simmer and try to calm down, as though this hasn’t affected me. But it has: my hands are trembling. When the bell goes I don’t even look up to see what Rebecca’s doing. If I did and she said something nasty on the way out I think I’d kill her. I get up and look at the blackboard. It’s only half-filled with the questions I wrote up. I didn’t get to finish writing them all.

I can’t describe just how much a shitty class like this takes it out of you as a teacher. I feel drained, pissed off and ashamed that I let my anger get the better of me. So much of this job’s about control – control of the students and self-control. The way I feel at the moment I don’t want to come back to this school. I don’t know if I could face these little year ten shits again.

It eventually passes and I do come back; but I always live in dread of getting that class again.

The Fab List

Yr 9 English, C6

All-boy class. The boys are supposed to do some textbook work on the Henry Lawson story The Loaded Dog. I bring the books but they insist they want to do their magazine assignment instead. I give in, knowing they’ll probably bludge. It's a pity, coz I love that Lawson story. They’re a rough bunch, but I get on reasonably well with them – as long as I’m not making them do too much work.

One boy, Jarrod, shows me his magazine. It’s a bike magazine. I open the cover and see an ad for shoes featuring little pictures of shoes barely covering the nipples of some girl who’s picture he got off the internet. I tell him, “Very subliminal.” The rest of the boys are pretty much bludging.

After I've re-read the story to myself there’s not much else to do but listen to the boys’ lurid conversations, so I do a list. This is one I’ve been thinking about for a little while. The idea is to think of all the most important pop music artists since The Beatles – and starting with The Beatles. It’s a list not just of the most important artists of the various pop eras, but rather, a list of the groups and artists who made their times ‘fab’, as exemplified by The Fabs themselves. All according to my own tastes, of course.

Fab artists through time:

1964 – 65: The Beatles

1966: Bob Dylan/The Byrds

1967 – 68: The Beatles/The Kinks/The Rolling Stones

1969: The Velvet Underground/The Band

1970 – 71: Led Zeppelin

1972 – 73: David Bowie

1974: Paul McCartney (Wings)/Elton John

1975 – 76: Abba

1977: Sex Pistols

1978: The Bee Gees

1979 – 80: The Clash

1981: AC-DC/Thin Lizzy

1982 – 83: Culture Club/Human League

1984 – 85: The Smiths

1986: Guns n Roses

1987: Go Betweens/U2

1988 – 90: REM

1991 – 93: Nirvana

1994: Pearl Jam

1995: Blur

1996: Oasis

1997 – 98: The Spice Girls

1999: The Verve

2000: Travis

2001 – 2002: Coldplay

…So, what do you think of that? And, yes, I do mean it about The Spice Girls! They truly made their era Fab. What artists have been fab this year?

Lurid Holiday Stories

Yr 7 English, A1

It’s the first class of the first day of fourth term. No work has been left for the little darlings, so I write up my own made up on-the-spot lesson on the board:

1. 15 mins talk about what you did on the holidays.
2. Write about what you did on the holidays, the highlights, the lowlights, etc.

Predictable, I know, but always a reliable post-holiday starter. Most of the kids are noisy, but most get down to the work soon enough. I go around the room encouraging kids to write. I get the usual “I didn’t do anything” responses. They’re either just being lazy or lack imagination. One girl up the front has no such problems – she’s powering away writing about her camping trip.

One little girl, decked out in eye shadow and shiny lip gloss, enthusiastically tells me she got her navel pierced. Her dad apparently wasn’t happy because she didn’t tell him, and so was grounded for the rest of the holiday. She and her friend then tell me about their car trip to a shopping mall and how they almost made a car full of guys nearly crash on the way. I start to wonder what they could have been doing to cause that, when one of their friends gives me a graphic demonstration of them simulating oral sex with her thumb and fingers. It’s amazing really: these are twelve year old girls already testing their sexual powers over men and enjoying it immensely.

Another girl, Casey, wants me to read what she’s written. It’s a lurid and badly spelled account of various trips to the cinema with friends and a hopefully imaginary account of a dalliance with her ‘boyfriend’ in someone’s bedroom. She comes up and asks me what I thought of it. I tell her it’s a “nice fantasy”. She says she particularly liked the bedroom bit. I’ll bet.

Lists

Yr 12, Physics, A2

Very quiet class. Only eight students and they're doing a SAC, which entails writing up an "extended investigation". I've got them for the first of double period. This is sweet: no little recalcitrants running around being noisy and giving cheek. I spend the time writing up some top 10 lists. I know it stamps me as incredibly 'old school' and just a touch nerdy, but I don't care.

Top 10 Twentieth Century Novels
Lord Of The Rings, JRR Tolkien
The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Ulysses, James Joyce
To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
1984, George Orwell
My Brother Jack, George Johnstone
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Watership Downs, Richard Adams

Top 10 Nineteenth Century Novels
Persuasion, Jane Austen
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoievsky
Huck Finn, Mark Twain
Tess of the Durbervilles, Thomas Hardy
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson
The Time Machine, H.G. Wells

Top 10 Sixties Albums
Arthur, The Kinks
The White Album, The Beatles
Blonde On Blonde, Bob Dylan
The Band, The Band
Beggar's Banquet, The Rolling Stones
The Velvet Underground and Nico, The Velvet Underground and Nico
Creedence Clearwater Revival, Creedence Clearwater Revival
Younger Than Yesterday, The Byrds
Gilded Palace of Sin, The Flying Burrito Brothers
Dusty In Memphis, Dusty Springfield
Electric Ladyland, Jimi Hendrix

Top 10 Seventies Albums
Muswell Hillbillies, The Kinks
Blood On The Tracks, Bob Dylan
Physical Graffiti, Led Zeppelin
Number One Record, Big Star
Tapestry, Carol King
Tea For The Tillerman, Cat Stevens
Cosmo's Factory, Creedence Clearwater Revival
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Elton John
Never Mind The Bollocks, The Sex Pistols
Sticky Fingers, The Rolling Stones

The Gap

Year 11 English, C5

I write the things they have to do on the board: Journal, Vocab, Write out speech, Video review. It should keep them busy. It doesn't! Well, the good kids are working, but the rest aren't. Strange, considering it's getting towards the end of their term - they should have heaps of work. Oh well.
The room has a curtained partition to the next room and it doesn't close properly. Spitballs are being thrown in and out of the gap. It's becoming a war. I move my offenders to the front, but the spitballs keep coming through. Will the teacher in the next class please control her students! Fat chance: it's Tatiana, a weird old European biddy with woolly blonde hair who's just riding out the job till retirement.
I can't believe these boys: they're so feral! I don't know if it's just a natural outcome of their being hormonal year eleven boys, or that they've had a few bongs this morning, or maybe both. The stupid foghorn noises they make, the obscene comments and gestures. They're talking about Saturday night parties, and they think they're still there. One boy's now saying to a girl, "I don't care, I'll kill both your babies," by way of insult. I would never dare talk like that when I was a teenager. There's something about their incredibly uninhibited freedom of expression; I'm kind of envious. Life's a party to them.