What is it with teachers? Do they learn, at teacher college, how to deliver a telling-off? Or is it just experience?
They’re so good at it. I’ve been interviewing teachers this week about schools and lockdown.
And I made the mistake of asking one about when schools would “reopen” and they would go back to work.
A killer pause. Then I was gently but firmly corrected. Schools haven’t closed. To say otherwise is an insult. Have you not done your homework?
I tell you. In that instant I was transported back to Grimes Dyke Primary School, east Leeds, where I had to confess to Mrs Nancy Coverdale, the loveliest of all my teachers, that I hadn’t forgotten my swimming kit but hidden it in the cloakroom because I hated swimming. Still do.
Those tellings-off were always justified. Like the one I got this week.
This gentleman who I was clumsily interviewing was absolutely right. Schools have been open all the way through. Even teachers who are self-isolating have been grafting.
It’s disingenuous to say the argument – whipped up by elements of the media spoiling for a row, and Boris Johnson and the Treasury looking for scapegoats – is about going back to work.
Believe me, teachers desperately want schools back to normal but not when the risks are this high.
They’re not sunning it or strolling round the garden centre. They’re working.
My mum taught all her working life so I know about the hours, the terrible pressure, the impossible targets, the sheer workload.
Anyone who thinks that job is finishing at 3pm, two weeks off at Easter and six in the summer is deluded.
It’s often heartbreaking work. And it’s not just about lessons and marking.
It’s making sure the kids are getting enough to eat. That they’re clothed properly. That they’re safe.
It is a hell of a job. And very quietly they’ve been getting on with it.
But now we’re told they won’t go back to normal because the unions are digging their heels in. That’s just not true. They want to make sure we’re not rushing it. That no one, y’know, dies.
Rightly, we won’t stand for anyone criticising the NHS frontline staff but teachers have been forgotten in all this.
Forgotten. How can this happen?
I can still remember all of mine. Mr Flanagan – who taught me Shakespeare and how to duck out of the way of a well-aimed textbook. The mysterious genius of Mrs Christine McLoughlin.
Mr David Woodhead, the technology teacher, who taught me the only sharp thing I should be allowed to handle is a pencil and only then under strict supervision. Mrs Catherine Lister: “Not everything has to rhyme, Keir.”
And my mum, Mrs Susan Mudie, who – mercifully – never taught me. Not at school anyway.
Think about them while you’re out clapping, will you? Not my ones, your ones. And the ones that are in the firing line at the moment. Then when this dies down, do something nice for them.
I don’t know what teachers like these days. Chalk? An apple? Or better yet – and I have my mum in mind – I’ve never seen one say no to half a cider.
