Between a teacher and a class there’s an unspoken contract. Photo / 123rf
Increasingly I think of Mr Smith. We did him harm. But at the time it was a pleasure.
Mr Smith taught physics and was a respected amateur astronomer.
He was of average height and unexceptional appearance. He had a slight oddity of speech, almost an impediment, but I’m not sure that it was this that did for him. In the end I think we picked on Mr Smith because we picked on Mr Smith. It could happen to any teacher.
Between a teacher and a class there’s an unspoken contract.
It develops through familiarity, and if the class reneges on it any teacher is powerless. It is 30 against one.
And it can happen easily. Over the course of 15 years or so of secondary teaching I taught thousands of kids in hundreds of classes, and the ones that come to me most vividly now are the few I lost connection with, where the contract was broken. Those kids, those classes, ate at my psyche, deprived me of sleep. Which I suspect is how it was for Mr Smith with us.
It began in the fourth form, year 10 as it is now, the year of puberty for many boys, the year when they peep over the wall of squeaking boyhood and see the possibilities of being men. The year of incipient muscle, body hair and testosterone. Testosterone is chemical violence.
There was a particular moment. Something was thrown when Mr Smith was writing on the blackboard. I doubt it was aimed at him. More likely it was a single artillery shell in some skirmish between adolescents. But it went astray and struck the wall beside him and everybody noticed.
At that point he had choices. He could have shrugged, said “missed” and carried on writing – a high-risk strategy but a good one if it paid off.
He could have turned to face the class and just looked around in silence, not aggressively but in a way that said, implicitly, what needed to be said.
Or he could have spun on his heel and demanded to know who was responsible. Again a high-risk strategy, but one popular with old-style martinets.
The point, however, is that he had to do something. And he didn’t. He pretended he hadn’t seen or heard the missile that we’d all seen and heard. In that pretence we sensed weakness.
We were a nice bunch, by and large, academically able and inclined to obedience. But we were not immune to the appeal of misrule.
Thereafter Mr Smith’s classes were more and more chaotic. Missiles became standard.
If he was out of the room or attending to a piece of apparatus or talking to one boy privately about his work, they flew. Rubbers, pencil stubs, plastic protractors, stolen chalk and increasingly food.
Once or twice he made a stand, issued a plea or a threat. But it was too late. We listened in silence, acted meek, even as the more daring held half an orange under the desk waiting for the next moment of inattention. He’d lost control. We’d got it.
Never once did I think of his misery. Never once did I think of him as a fallible middle-aged man who was trying his best. Though I was responsible for little of his persecution I relished it, the turning of tables, the pack hunt.
For a ray box experiment to work the window blinds had to be down and the lights off. Before he turned them off Mr Smith issued a warning. We nodded. He turned off the lights.
An instant artillery barrage. Stuff whizzed, pinged and thudded. Mr Smith groped for the light switch, found it. Most of us were sitting faultless at our desks, bent over our ray boxes, but a pie was slithering down the wall beside the blackboard. And on the floor lay Bob Moore and Mike Morris, as still as stone but locked in combat. Mike, who had the sort of looks that melted mothers, had Bob in a head lock.
“Sorry sir,” said Bob, “we were looking for my pencil.”
Everybody laughed and Mr Smith could find no response. Thereafter we harried him without mercy. The end of the year could not have come fast enough for him.
What damage we did to his psyche I can only guess at. I believe he took early retirement. And by now he’ll be long since dead. It would have been nice, but pointless, to say sorry.