#oneaday Day 449: Revisiting Teachers

Back in the dim, distant past before streaming video services were a thing, and in a wonderful time before the apparently collective decision that if you're not continually "consuming new content" you're Doing It Wrong, there were several DVD series I had on my shelf that were in almost continual rotation in my DVD player. Spaced, Black Books, Peep Show, Big Train, that sort of thing; a particular brand of British comedy, almost always originally broadcast on Channel 4, and in many cases involving the exact same cast members.

(Aside: a fair few of these have been sullied a little in recent years by their association with Graham "I Hate Trans People… Wait, Why Do You All Hate Me Now" Linehan, but I do try my best not to let that bother me too much, because these series — and the work of the actors therein, most of whom do not subscribe to Linehan's odious bigotry — will always be special to me.)

One of my absolute favourites was Teachers, which was a thoroughly interesting show. I've just re-acquired the DVDs of the complete season, and I watched the first episode last night for the first time in a very long while.

Teachers, if you're unfamiliar, is probably best described as a comedy-drama rather than an out-and-out comedy. It initially focuses on the life of a 27 year old English teacher named Simon, who works at a comprehensive school in Bristol. In later series, several of the original cast members (including Andrew Lincoln, who played Simon) depart to make way for a new ensemble cast, so as a complete run it's more of a snapshot of a moment in a group of people's lives rather than a particularly "personal" story as such. There are a few constants along the way, though.

One of the most interesting things about Teachers is its heavily stylised nature. A trademark of the show is how each episode looks at several days across a typical week, and the introduction to each week is done diegetically through the name of the day appearing on something in the world — on a billboard, on a sheet of paper being photocopies, on a computer display, that sort of thing. This is just the beginning of things, though.

There's an almost hallucinogenic quality to certain sequences in Teachers, which certainly in the initial series is intended to reflect the somewhat turbulent state of mind that our hero, Simon, is in. Simon, you see, is a bit stressed out and starting to have significant doubts over whether he actually wants to be a teacher, and his rather rocky relationship with his peer in the English department, a stern woman named Jenny (played with great enthusiasm by Nina Sia), certainly doesn't make things any easier.

Sometimes these stylised sections are very obvious, such as when Simon returns to school the night after a drunken night out, during which he and his friends broke into the school and let a sheep in, among other things, and starts hallucinating that a full-on forensics team is dusting down his classroom for prints. At others, they are subtle, such as peculiar things happening in the background of scenes — the aforementioned sheep continually shows up throughout the series, for example — or little sound effects, such as when Jenny aggressively touches Simon on the shoulders with her fingertips while admonishing him, and you can hear the sound of sizzling.

One of the best things about the show is the ensemble of Kurt and Brian, played by Navin Chowdhry and Adrian Bower respectively. This pair are, in many ways, the worst of the worst. They're male chauvinist pigs constantly obsessing over people's arses, they always do their best to avoid getting out of having to do anything, they're utterly irresponsible, and they're absolute pranksters.

And yet you can't help but love them. Their behaviour towards women, which might initially seem winceworthy in the somewhat more enlightened world we supposedly live in today, is endearingly, amusingly pathetic in light of the fact that the pair of them seemingly get no action whatsoever for the vast majority of the run (that and the female members of the cast are more than capable of standing up for themselves); their irresponsibility actually comes across as a relatively healthy method of coping with the potentially overwhelming stress of working as a teacher; and their pranks… well, they're always amusing.

Probably the absolute best thing about the show, though, is its use of music, which almost exclusively consists of late '90s/early '00s Britpop and indie rock. In some respects it dates the show enormously — as does the fact that a plot point of the first episode is that teachers are no longer allowed to smoke in the school building in the "smoking room" — but in others it forms an absolutely core part of the show's identity.

Teachers is great because it tells some believably human stories about a distinctly down-to-earth cast of characters and doesn't get hung up on high drama — which is something that subsequent school-based TV shows, like Waterloo Road, could be accused of — and focuses on just being entertaining. Watching Teachers is like being included in this little friendship group of characters; you get to see them at their best and, more frequently, their worst — but that "worst" is never anything particularly serious — and it's always a joy to be among them.

It's definitely a show that is very much "of its time", but after revisiting the first episode earlier, I'm looking forward to watching some more.

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#oneaday Day 312: Memories of Me: the teachers who inspired me

I've talked before about how I think my schooldays, and particularly my time in Sixth Form (which was at the same school) were among the happiest times of my life. Once I'd got over an initial bout of bullying in Year 7, of course, which was resolved by me punching my tormentor firmly in the face just as the headmaster was coming around the corner.

One of the reasons I think back so fondly on my time at school — particularly secondary school, which is what I'm going to focus on today — is because I had a lot of great teachers who inspired me, encouraged me, recognised the things I was good at and generally did a great job of making me feel like I wasn't a completely worthless human being with terrible hair, atrocious dress sense and a complete inability to socialise normally. (Retrospectively, of course, I recognise that the latter aspect — and perhaps some of the others too — stem from my autism, but I didn't know that back then.)

I thought I'd describe a few of them today. I don't know what happened to any of them after I left school, as I didn't stay in touch with any of them — something I kind of regret a bit, now — but I can say, with confidence, that they made a positive impact on my life in some way, and the memories I have of the time I spent learning with them are some of my most treasured.

Let's think through subject by subject.

In the English department, I had a run of excellent teachers over the course of the years of both compulsory and post-compulsory education. There was Ms Derbyshire, who reminded everyone of Victoria Wood with her general demeanour and tone, and who had a delightful sense of humour. There was Mr Bowie, who was probably the "coolest" teacher in school, who knew his stuff and managed to be knowledgeable without being a nerd. He taught me about Jeff Buckley. There was Miss Idziacysyk (I think that's how you spell it — it's been a very long time since I wrote it and Google is no help!), who took no shit but was also a really knowledgeable teacher of both English Language and English Literature. And there was Mr Lack, who was a kind and gentle soul unless you pissed him off.

In Maths, I should give particular praise to Mr Wilbraham, who had a… strange reputation to anyone who had never taken classes with him — a reputation I shan't repeat out of respect for him… and the fact we never really knew if it was true or not — but who turned out to be an excellent, friendly, supportive and good-natured teacher. I disliked Maths intensely, but I put up with it and somehow managed to remain in the top group for it throughout the entire time I was forced to take it, and the lessons with Mr Wilbraham in Year 10 and 11 were probably the closest I had to "favourite Maths lessons".

In Science, I had a lot of great teachers, too. There was Miss Bartlett, who everyone fancied because she had long blonde hair and wore quite short skirts, but who also got us involved in doing practical experiments pretty much from our first lesson in Year 7. There was Mr Allured, who had a booming voice you could hear a mile off, and a personality (and moustache) that made him feel like everyone's dad. And there was Mr Maskell, who looked like Harry Secombe and was a cheerful soul, always keen to show us his "volcano" experiments in the fume cupboard.

Music was a focus of my time at secondary school, and I had a wonderful time studying with, at various times Mrs Choy-Winters, Mr Murrall, Mr Wrigley and Miss Garrick. Each had their own specialisms, but all were incredibly supportive of me, and keen to make use of the fact that my musical skills, particularly on the piano, were significantly ahead of pretty much all of the rest of the school. I ended up doing a lot of accompanying various musical groups during my time at school; school concert nights were some of my favourite times of the year. There's probably a whole post in me just on school concerts, so I'll save any further discussion of that for then. I will just add that I have recurring mild nightmares about disappointing my Music teachers and no-one else from this list.

I managed to wangle things at GCSE so I could do Theatre Studies alongside Music instead of having to do an Art or Technology class I really didn't want to do. There was only one drama teacher at our school, known as Miss Unsworth — although the headteacher Mr Cragg occasionally taught drama lower down the school — and she was quite the character. She was definitely a "theatre person", and she taught us a lot both through our lessons and in the productions of The Wizard of Oz and Twelfth Night I took part in during my time at school.

In Modern Languages, we had the good fortune to have a native German speaker known as Herr Haubert. We used to take the piss a bit because of his somewhat stern attitude, his rather severe moustache and the fact he perpetually smelled of spearmint — for some reason, our teenage selves became convinced that this was because he was always chewing mint flavoured condoms, not actual mints or gum, which would have made more sense — but I can't deny that he was a good teacher. Immersing us in the target language right from the first lesson, I can still remember a decent amount of German that I learned in those classes. Not enough to be confident or fluent, but definitely enough to get by in an absolute emergency.

In the Humanities, or "Hums", we had several great teachers. There was Mr Watts, who was our formidable head of Sixth Form, an excellent history teacher and someone who didn't believe anyone under the age of 15 had any right to exist in his line of sight; Mr Mason, an ageing hippie who taught Geography and could bring an entire class to silence by lowering the volume of his voice rather than raising it; and Mrs Lloyd, who helped make my A-Level Sociology studies entertaining and fascinating.

I had a look back at my school's website, knowing full well that I was there a very long time ago at this point and thus was unlikely to see any familiar names, and I was proven correct. I suspect many of the people I've just mentioned have retired or perhaps even passed on by this point, which is somewhat humbling to think about. Wherever they are and whatever they're doing, though, I hope they know that they had an impact on me, and that I still think about them very fondly. It's true that your school days play a crucial role in defining who you are — and the teachers who guide you through those school days are an incredibly important part of that.

So thanks to all of the teachers of my youth, both the ones I've mentioned and the ones I've inevitably forgotten. My life may not have gone exactly as planned in numerous ways, but I always felt I had a solid foundation to build from, and it was all thanks to them.

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#oneaday Day 946: Things I Actually Miss About School

For the most part, I don't miss my own school days. I spent a lot of them being bullied by douchebags who hopefully haven't amounted to anything by now, one of whom I rather memorably punched in the face just as the headmaster was coming around the corner. (He sided with me after the fact, noting that my outburst of aggression was quite understandable, given bully in question's history. I got away with nothing more than a "five minute report", a piece of paper I had to get signed by teachers every five minutes during break and lunchtime.)

But there were good times too. So I thought I'd share a few.

The Rough Book

Our school library used to sell exercise books for a few pence, just in case you lost yours and wanted to replace it without having to tell your teacher that you'd lost your book. The librarian (Mrs Miller, no! We will not let you go!) asked no questions, though, other than "what colour would you like?"

And so it was that my friend Ed and I brought in the concept of the "Rough Book" — an exercise book ostensibly for quick scribblings, sketching and note-taking but which usually ended up completely covered in graffiti, drawings of cocks and an elaborate middle two pages flamboyantly depicting the name of whichever girl I had made the mistake of telling my friends I fancied that week.

A key part of the Rough Book's appeal was keeping it secret, and for the most part we managed to do so without it being confiscated or even spotted. It was immensely satisfying but also a bit sad to reach the end of one — while it was possible to look back on all the silly drawings we had done over the course of a few weeks, the book's "magic" was lost, and it usually found its way into the bin eventually — largely because we didn't want our parents and/or teachers seeing all the pictures of cocks and swear words we'd scrawled all over every available inch.

Music Concerts

Our school used to do two big concerts a year — one in the summer, one around Christmas time. The weekly rehearsals for the various groups tended to revolve around practicing pieces for these big events, which always enjoyed a strong turnout from parents and friends of the school. Going to music groups was one of my main forms of socialising at school — since I lived seven miles away, it wasn't always easy to just pop over to a friend's house for pizza and video games, and music groups gave me a chance to make some new friends and see some of my existing friends in a new context. They were fun.

There was something special about concert night, though — a strange, almost romantic atmosphere in the air. Inevitably, being a horny teenager, I'd interpret this atmosphere as "God, I'd really like to get off with someone" and spend as much of the evening as possible attempting to flirt with the girls from the clarinet section. (Ahh, Nikki. How hot you were.) Being a zitty, socially-incompetent loser with crap hair, I inevitably failed to drum up the confidence to do anything to take advantage of the romance in the air, but all of the girls were good enough to humour me and not just tell me to fuck off, which was nice.

Learning Shit

You know, I actually enjoyed the whole "learning" part of school. (This is probably why I was bullied so much.) I loved the fact that on any given day, we got to learn German, saw a plank of wood in half, spectacularly fail to compose a "reggae" piece and listen to our maths teacher make up an anecdote about the time he went windsurfing and knew he was exactly 200 metres from the shoreline. Exactly how much of that stuff has been retained over the years is perhaps questionable (my use of German nowadays can probably be filed under "racism", or "Englishman Abroad" at the very least) but I enjoyed learning it at the time.

Except maths. I hated maths with a passion. Maths homework used to make me genuinely angry. In retrospect, this was silly, because a lot of things in the real world involve maths to various degrees. Granted, I have little use for quadratic equations in my daily life (and thus can't remember what they are) but things like basic algebra and arithmetic occasionally come in handy.

The Canteen

I typically used to take a packed lunch to school, so eating in the canteen was a rare treat. They served chips and pizza and other awesome things, most of which Jamie Oliver has probably banned by now. In the upper school dining hall (which was later converted into part of the new sixth form centre that my year was the first to pass through) you could get chips and frickin' cheese.

The Teachers

Yeah, I actually miss the people who taught me. It would probably be horrifying to see how much they've aged by now, since the mental image I have of all of them is how they were between the years of 1992 and 1999, but there were some truly fine folks at the chalkface of my school. There were scary teachers, friendly teachers, knowledgeable teachers, weird teachers and, yes, hot teachers — but I can't remember any that I particularly disliked as such. (Except for the guy who taught me four-part harmony for A-Level music, but he was a peripatetic music teacher and thus didn't count.) I wonder how many of them are still there. I also occasionally wonder how many of the students I worked with during my thankfully short teaching career will remember me in years to come?

That's enough waxing nostalgic for tonight, I think. Time to sleep.

#oneaday Day 736: To Sir and Miss, with If Not Love then At Least Fondness or Enduring Memories

Following a conversation with Andie, I thought I would challenge myself to name as many teachers from my own schooldays as I possibly could, along with the contribution they made to making me the person I am today, for better or worse. Mostly the better, I think, which doubtless they'll be delighted to know if they do happen to be reading this, as unlikely as that might be.

If you are one of my old teachers and you are reading this and I forget to mention you, I apologise in advance.

Anyway. Let's consider these in roughly chronological order.

At primary school, our early years were accompanied by Mrs Place. I have to admit I don't remember a great deal about her, but I think given my tender age at the time, that can probably be excused.

Class 2 in primary school was taken by Mrs Robson, whom I also can't remember a great deal about. I do remember her not being there one day though, and me being tricked into saying "shit" to Mrs Powell the cover teacher by Natalie Forster, the bitch.

Class 3 was taken by Mr Edwards, who had a bit of a mullet and a moustache. He liked to play the guitar at every opportunity, meaning that "Circle Time" (the point of which I'm still not sure of even having been a primary school teacher myself) more resembled a campfire singalong than anything more meaningful. It was fun though.

Class 4 was taken by Mrs Barrett, a formidable lady by all accounts who had some very old-school values. The rest of the school was terrified of her, because she had a withering look that could cause geese to fall dead out of the sky if she so desired it. Once you got into class 4, however, it became apparent that she wasn't so scary after all, and even had something of a sense of humour. Her insistence on strict discipline meant that she ran a tight ship, and her class achieved well. Crossing her made you feel like, as cliche as it sounds, you had let yourself down.

On to secondary school, and my form tutor was Miss Quirk. She was Scottish, had short black hair and said "poem" as "poyem". She taught Maths, but I don't think I ever had a lesson with her.

Elsewhere in the Maths department was Mr Wilbraham, who may or may not have had a drinking problem. He was certainly rumoured to have a drinking problem, but I can't say we ever saw any direct evidence of that. He was another of the Mrs Barrett breed — regarded with fear and misunderstanding from afar, but actually turned out to be very pleasant to work with once you were in his class. He didn't help me enjoy Maths, however.

The English department was my second favourite department. At various points, I was taught by Ms (not Miss) Derbyshire, who was a bit like Victoria Wood when she was being funny; Mr Bowie, who was the obligatory male teacher whom all the girls fancied, was very cool and convinced me to explore the music of Jeff Buckley; Miss Idziacszyk (I think I've even spelled that correctly), who was a good, knowledgeable teacher, particularly at A-level. On one memorable occasion, Mr Bowie came with us to a local recording of Songs of Praise which our steadfastly secular school had, for some reason, been invited to. On that occasion I had my shortest ever relationship with a girl — we went out for a week, during which time I saw her once, kissed her once before she decided she wanted to go back to the way things were before.

The Music department was my favourite department. Initially staffed by Mr Murrall and Mrs Choy-Winters, later by Mr Murrall and Miss Garrick (whom my erstwhile best friend Craig fancied the pants off) and even later by Mr Murrall, Miss Garrick and Mr Wrigley. All of the teachers in the department were laid-back, fun and a pleasure to be with both in lessons and outside. By far the highlights of my time at secondary school were the school concerts, during which staff and student were able to interact in a way that just wasn't possible in the normal classroom.

Up in the Upper School were the Geography and History departments. Here, two particular teachers stood out — Mr Mason (pictured above) on the Geography side, and Mr Watts on the History. Mr Mason had long hair and a porn star moustache, and always spoke in a calm, quiet voice. Instead of shouting when he got angry, he went quieter. It was terrifying.

Mr Watts, meanwhilem was the exact opposite. He could shout your face off, and frequently did. Despite his deservedly formidable reputation, he was an excellent teacher. Okay, I can't remember a lot of what we covered in History, but I certainly remember the lessons I had with him — and the occasions he looked out of the window, saw a year 7 kid and just tutted and shook his head.

Mrs Lloyd taught Integrated Humanities and Sociology. She knew a lot about her subject and was also one of those teachers whom it was very easy to talk to. Perhaps it was the nature of the subject itself, which often dealt with issues that affected us directly, or perhaps it was just her nature. Either way, I remember her very fondly.

Then there's the senior staff. I have fond memories of Mr Cragg the erstwhile head teacher for understanding fully why I turned around and lamped Murray Crofts in the face after the little cunt had been harassing me all day. And Mrs Knight, who was a motherly figure to much of the school in many ways — right down to inflicting embarrassing discipline on those who stepped out of line. (One of the worst punishments, particularly for younger kids, was to be forced to have lunch with her, or to to be on "Five minute report" to her.)

There are doubtless plenty of others I've missed — Miss Cuthbert, who was one of heads of Sixth Form, and regularly tried unsuccessfully to get us all being a bit more religious; Miss Stafford the art teacher, whom I didn't spend a lot of time with (as is probably apparent from the pictures which accompany these posts); Mrs Graham the formidable and terrifying Home Ec teacher.

I know one thing, though — as difficult as schooldays were at times, I'll remember the adults who got me through it for the rest of my life, even more so than those whom I considered close friends at the time, but have since drifted far away to pastures unknown.

I now know first-hand how hard your jobs were, Sirs and Misses. I respect you even more than I did back then. Those of you who have the courage to remain in education with the kids of today, I salute you.