IT was 20 years ago today, as the song says. Well, near enough. In October 1982 I could be observed entering Moray House College of Education for the first time.
With considerably more hair than I have now (though not, I believe, looking any the better for it) and the world’s dullest sports jacket, I was about to spend a year on “one of my options”. Teacher training was something to do when I had “no commitments”. If, as an unhelpful friend suggested, the kids “took the piss” out of me all the time, I could try something else.
I broke the rules from the word go by enjoying it. That wasn’t allowed. You were supposed to be bored stupid and only really learn anything on teaching practice. There were some cringeworthy moments, though. Prior to being let loose on pupils, the physicists had to give short lessons to one another.
First up was a dumpy wee guy in a Pringle jumper with nothing underneath it except chest hair. He had a slight “sch” speech impediment and retained the west of Scotland idiom of saying “youse”, or in his case, “yish”. And he had picked a spectacularly difficult experiment on which to base his lesson, one with trolleys and ticker timers. “Yish take yir ticker-tape,” he said in a flat monotone, “and schtick it ti yir trolley . . .”
After a couple of minutes of this it was hard not to look out the window. When it came to the experiment itself, our classmate mixed up a couple of ticker-tapes. Soon he was up schit creek and couldn’t prove what he had set out to demonstrate. He left the stage to the sound of 20 wannabe physicists shuffling on their seats in sympathetic embarrassment.
His place was taken by our tutor whose face bore an expression of tight-lipped sadness. He drew a breath. “I’m afraid we’ve got to be cruel to be kind here . . .”
The textbook reaction would have been to comfort our fellow student with the words: “He’s only a college lecturer. What does he know? Probably widnae last 10 minutes in a classroom.”
But it would not have been true. Refusing to conform to a stereotype, our physics tutor, by his manner, left us in no doubt that he must have been a respected practitioner in front of a class.
It was this man who, after a period in my first teaching practice when some of the kids did take the piss out of me, kept my confidence up. It is partially thanks to him that 20 years on I have almost decided that teaching isn’t merely one of my options. I might just make a career of it.
Gregor Steele can’t remember what his “other options” were.
