Some ways I’ve nearly been fired

As a teacher you have to be acutely aware of everything you are doing because you work with young people. Unfortunately, things don’t always go as planned…

#i love you

We had taken a group of students for a skiing trip over the winter break. Everyone was having a great time and we had avoided the perils of injury, drunkenness and getting lost. However, one of the students had developed a bit of a cough and we needed to administer medicine. Due to the wonderful bureaucracy of modern education we needed to ring the parent and get permission to administer some cough medication. We had the number for the parents, this was no problem.

I rang the mum, a lovely person I had worked with for a few years, they were very supportive and coincidentally had the same name as my wife ‘Rachel’. We had a bit of a chat about what her son had been getting up to on the trip, wished each other Merry Christmas and she was happy for us to give the medication. The conversation was over.

At this point my brain went into autopilot and I did what I always do at the end of the conversation with Rachel, just the wrong one. “Love you, bye”. It took me thirty minutes to realise what I’d done; the phone call to apologise was not the most comfortable of my life.

#fluffer

I once came home, many moons ago, and my wife asked me how work had gone that day. I said that the day had gone fine, but that I’d had a tricky sixth form lesson (teaching 17–18 year olds). On questioning I had to admit that I’d made a bit of a linguistic slip-up and had referred to a piece of equipment as a ‘fluffer’ and then consequently giggled at my faux pas. That would have been fine, no great drama. However, the students did not understand what I had found funny. Instead of brushing this off and moving on I went on to try and explain what a ‘fluffer’ was in the pornography business. Needless to say, my wife thought I may have overstepped the mark of ‘educating’ on this occasion.

#Moon in sunlight

I used to have a huge fishbowl of an office with the windows looking out onto the main school field. This was not only a place for sporting activities but was also the thoroughfare for the parents and students to cross from one side of the school to the other. Every Wednesday I had to coach sport in the late afternoon but I was a headmaster so I was always in formal attire in the day. I never had a changing room. I think you can see where this is going.

I would often try and change clothes, crouched down on all fours behind the desk, arriving to sport sweaty and creased. All too often I took the chance to change quickly in the corner hoping nobody would look in the window. Either nobody ever saw or they thought my round behind was a reflection of the sun in the window. Mooning the entire school is a hard one to come back from.

#swearing

Although I have sworn frequently under my breath throughout the years I have only shouted a swear word once. Driving a minibus back from a long trip a car pulled out in front of us and I had to do an emergency stop “SHHHHHIIIIITTT!!” luckily the parents the children told were very supportive.

#Breaking students

I fully sign up to safeguarding practises and acknowledge you should not harm children. I get it! However, sometimes the lines are a little blurred. I once worked in a very prestigious boarding school and coached sport. One year I was coaching a superb cricket team and our top batter was making everyone else look silly, so I thought I’d put him through his paces and give him a few ‘faster balls’ to deal with. Needless to say things didn’t go well. After the third ball was hit easily I upped the pace and the ball rapped him on the knuckles, sending him to hospital with a broken hand. I wanted the world to swallow me up. I fronted up to the parents, apologised and waited for the formal complaint. Luckily nothing happened.

Many years later I found out that the parents had told the headmaster “bloody good, this kind of thing is exactly why I send my son to this school”. I may have missed something, but I’m glad he was happy that I broke his son.

#Naked

Now, ignoring the mooning above, I have never been naked inappropriately in school, I’ll make that very clear. However, there are a couple of stories of parents who have not been so clever.

The first story happened a few years ago as a parent left the school with no notice, only to move to a school around 10 miles down the road. The family were completely happy and would not give a reason for the move. My mind boggled, but I supposed it was something private and left it at that. A few months ago I discovered the reason why they left.

Commonly, parents set up chat groups for their class on social media to share information. “When are they back from the school trip?”, “have you seen Jonny’s shorts?” etc. One late Friday evening the mum in question sent something quite different: a fully naked picture of herself with the caption “I’m waiting for you”. My favourite bit of this story is the fact that several of the mum’s replied with things like “where did you get that vase in the background?” The classic English stiff upper lip at work.

The final story is one of the few bits of humour that came out of the pandemic. During online lessons we had 6 months of online lessons in Thailand. We set up online lessons with the whole class, and then small group sessions throughout the day and the system worked really well. We were all working from home to avoid crowds. One day I got a phone call from a younger member of staff who was a bit flustered. Something had clearly happened and they didn’t know what to do. My stomach sank, what was it? A horrible accident? Had they done something wrong online?

It turns out that, during a small group session, 6 videos of students on screen, one of the mothers emerged in the background. No problem right? Turns out that she had just emerged from the shower completely naked. She clearly hadn’t realised her son was on a video call and was still oblivious! What do you do? I have no idea still whether we did the right thing, you don’t get taught these things on a management course.

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