Teaching

Teachers on Strike

by Enormous on April 24, 2008

Audrey and I passed a small group of teachers with placards outside the Brigg Junior School this morning. They are striking for a better pay deal.

They had a very catchy chant: ‘What do we want?’ ‘More money!’ ‘When do we want it?’ ‘NOW!’ If you ask me, that is a very reasonable demand and one that anybody can sympathise with. I know I can.

One of the teachers had a very pronounced astigmatism – I have mentioned her before – and she seemed to be yelling directly at me, as if I could do something to help her in her financial plight. I am fairly certain, however, that she was in fact looking somewhere else entirely, but it did make me feel rather self-conscious and uncomfortable as we hurried by.

I have heard that the children in her class are always badly behaved and often make fun of her unfortunate ocular disability. This comes as no surprise of course, because it is a well known fact that cross-eyed teachers find it hard to control their pupils.

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Studio Monkey Enquiry

by Enormous on September 24, 2007

I have just received a phone call from a young man who used to be one of my students when I was teaching at WNC.

I taught a two year BTEC course in Sound Engineering, but over the six years that I was doing it, I am sorry to say that out of the hundreds of students I had, only a handful ever demonstrated any aptitude for the subject. Most attended because they suffered under the mistaken belief that by associating themselves with a recording studio, they would instantly become rock stars or chart-topping singers. One of these was Gareth (not his real name), a bad heavy metal guitarist from Chesterfield. It was he who decided to ring me at 8:30 this morning.

‘I hear you’ve got a studio assistant job available,’ he said, ‘Any chance I could – ‘

‘I’ll stop you there, Gareth,’ I quickly jumped in, ‘There isn’t any such post open at the moment. Sorry.’

Even if there were, I definitely would not employ him. Gareth never had – and in my opinion, never will have – the necessary skills required for working in professional recording studios.

During lessons, he used to position himself close to the control room near-field monitors and speak into them, trying to communicate with the musicians in the studio. He evidently used to think that because he could hear their voices coming from the NS10m speakers positioned on the mixing desk, the people he was trying to record had somehow defied science and had had themselves shrunk to the size of tiny little men and were now in fact living in the small Yamaha speakers, busily setting up their miniature drum kit and guitar amplifiers. He was always doing that. I am laughing as I type this now – as loudly as I used to then, all that time ago.

Once, when he could not get a signal from a microphone, he pointed at one of the speakers and said to me in exasperation: ‘Sir, no sound keeps coming out.’

‘What an interesting idea, Gareth,’ I told him. ‘Fanciful and abstract it may be, but very intriguing nonetheless.’

For my sins, I could not help but constantly tease and embarrass him in front of his peers. I used to quite upset the poor boy. I have a gift for offending people, as I have said before. This is probably why I do not have many friends. But Gareth and students like him were always a great source of amusement to me.

He once snapped at me in genuine frustration: ‘I don’t come here to have the piss taken out of me you know.’

‘Really?’ I asked him. ‘Where do you go for that?’

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