Hugh Reilly - Why the Hulk and Bigfoot are on the city school roll

Published on Tuesday 26 August 2008 19:42

AS A young, naïve teacher, I used to take personal abuse from malcontented pupils, er, personally. I'd explode with anger and, while I stopped short of ripping my shirt from my back, I did do a passable impression of the Incredible Teaching Hulk.

Don't get me wrong – in odd moments, I still give a disruptive kid the hairdryer treatment but, for the most part, I've learned to let go. When an excitable young man starts venting his spleen, I become Buddha on a banana leaf floating down the river.

It wasn't an easy journey to attain my state of classroom Nirvana. In the beginning, there were negative, nagging doubts that I should react adversely when an ill-disciplined youngster verbally humiliated me, but reporting such incidents to management did not bring me peace of mind. Indeed, the opposite was true – my feelings of anxiety were heightened by management planting seeds of insecurity in my head – that somehow I was responsible for the kid behaving in a manner that suggested he suffered from a hitherto uncategorised syndrome.

I found it stressful that management read a referral form detailing the horrors of verbal abuse and immediately looked for a loophole to absolve the child of any responsibility. There is an argument that penning a referral form stating that one has been called a "baldy bastard" can be a cathartic experience but there is an emotional low when one realises that the written account of being abased by an adolescent excites the management as much as an expired all-day bus ticket.

Teachers cannot change the behaviour of pupils, only the way they react to that behaviour. If more pedagogues took this on board, there would be no need for Teacher Support Scotland, a charity that has set up a stress helpline. Naturally, there was an outbreak of mass apoplexy among the anti-teaching brigade when the scheme was launched last week. As someone who worked in the private sector before becoming a teacher, I am only too aware that most jobs have their stressful moments (being the personal masseuse of a page-three model probably being the obvious exception). However, in my opinion, in terms of stressful occupations, teaching is up there with the worst. Don't take my word for it – ask any shell-shocked mature student who has entered the profession in recent years. I've yet to encounter a mature newly qualified teacher who hasn't complained about the high levels of stress.

Some friends, however, seem to think that the stress of teaching in a city school is an urban myth, the Bigfoot of education. Frank, a director of a quantity surveying company, thinks teachers have it easy. He told me this on his return from a hospitality day out at the Scottish Open golf tournament where, after free entry, he drank buckshee champagne and scoffed canaps by the trayload. Alan, a director in a freight business, revels in making snide comments about the cushy life of teachers but fails to see the irony of making such comments after a corporate day of horse-racing at Chester. There is heavy irony that those who write letters to newspapers decrying the efforts of teachers are the same cowards who cross the road to avoid eye contact with a group of hoodies. They are the same self-righteous, spineless individuals who drive two miles to Tesco to buy a bottle of wine rather than face the intimidating prospect of walking through a throng of young neds and nedettes loitering outside the off-licence just around the corner.

It is an unfortunate fact that teachers have daily contact with the kids who throw stones at firefighters, vandalise cars, and proudly and loudly use foul language on public transport. I'm getting stressed writing this – time to leap on my banana leaf methinks.