Apparently my year tens have come across my younger brother working in the school. I do have a brother but he isn't younger than me and seeing as he has a successful career as a joiner I find it hard to imagine him doing a bit of moonlighting as a teacher.
Seeing as I'm something like the third youngest teacher in the school anyway I was slightly shocked by the comment. My younger brother, what were they trying to say? This follows on from Wednesday afternoon when one of my year nines said that I had some grey hairs. Mayeb the stress of teaching is beginning to tell on my youthful appearrance. In any case it was a bit rich as she needs to sort her roots out - though I came to the conclusion that I should keep this thoguht to myself as making a fourteen year old cry would be a little on the harsh side.
Anyway, my 'younger brother' is an art student-teacher who they think looks like me (he doesn't) and the reason for them thinking of him as being a younger version of me is because he uses words like 'yo', 'dudes' and 'sup'. I would imagine if I did that my pupils would tear me to shreds. So he's the hip young one, wheras I'm the geeky older one. Which is a state of affairs that's fine by me.
It's important to develop a good relationship with the pupils, for the most part I think I do quite well. There's times when I get things horribly wrong and there's some pupils out there who I don't think would piss on me if I were on fire but I get on well with the majority of the kids. I'm always careful though because it's a dangerous game trying to be 'down with the kids'. I think if you tried to hard to get along with them the pupils would smell a rat and it could backfire spectacularly. I think most pupils like their teachers to be a bit on the geeky side, that's more like the natural order of things.
2008-05-10 @ 17:12