Brilliance in the classroom may elude some of us, but stay in the job long enough and we can all become an object of beauty and fascination when opening the door into our pedagogical parlours.
I, for instance, have reached the very top. You should spend a day with me. Extreme door-opening doesn’t get any better. Watch me approach a closed door with the odds highly stacked against me. Surely my latest arrangement of precariously balanced piles is going to erupt and go spewing onto the floor? Yet I always succeed, sometimes even finding a spare fist with which to punch the air afterwards.
Visitors swoon when they see me in action at such times. I always decline their offer to lighten my load or to take the door for me. “Just watch this,” I say to them. This is my moment.
This supreme mastery, however, did not just happen overnight. In line with fellow doyens of the doorway out there, I had to graft hard to reach the top and to enjoy all the glamour that goes with it. Someone once said that the greatest teachers “open doors”. I like to think that they meant it literally.
There are no shortcuts. Newcomers need to work their way up through the official levels. Cutting corners is the gateway to humiliating spillages, to waves of unkind laughter rippling down the length of the corridor.
Level 1: “Entry” level, if you like. The target here is simply to negotiate a door with just a single carrier-bag of books, leaving one hand free for the door. In fact, I found it helpful at the start to practise - after school hours - just opening the door with no bags at all, just to build up confidence.
Level 2: When ready, teachers should try with a second bag. Tip: put a whole wrist through one bag handle so that one hand is still free to do the necessary.
Level 3: Teachers will eventually want to move on from carrier-bags to investing in their own big plastic crate. This is a big step up for the door-opener, though most experienced teachers are at this level. Given the crate’s greater capacity, we tend to pile everything into there, causing the crate to weigh about the same as a well-nourished Year 9.
As with a Year 9, it requires two hands to carry, one at each end. This obviously presents us with a potential crisis. Both hands are in use and the crate is between midriff and door.
So, to achieve Level 3, the teacher needs to practise swinging the crate to the side of the body at such times, so that it can then be held between a hand and a firm thigh. The switch has to be done really quickly, before the crate has time to realise that, for a moment, there is nothing holding it up. If all goes well the teacher now has the required free hand.
Level 4: Same as 3 but now with your tea or coffee in hand, too - safely lidded, obviously. With the above strategy no longer liberating a hand, the standard option now is to crouch down and try opening the door with an elbow. Others prefer to swivel gracefully around and use an up and down motion with their backside. (Don’t worry, health and safety person. No one ever gets hurt in any of this.)
Level 5: This is the same as Level 4 but with the crate now so overloaded that the teacher has to open the door with a bag under each armpit, another clasped between the knees, and a roll of sellotape between the teeth.
Those of us who have come through this final threshold really have nowhere else to go. We have no more doors to open. We have truly “arrived”.
Stephen Petty is head of humanities at Lord Williams’s School in Thame, Oxfordshire
