It Shouldn't Happen to a Teacher

Working with teenage girls is all too frequently a terrifying experience. I find a policy of don't-go-within-three-yards-of-them works quite well most of the time.

As a teacher you have to use praise alot, though it takes a time to get it down to a fine art as when I praised one of my pupils for working so well they called me a suck-up, but that's another story. I have several stampers for giving my pupils messages of praise, one of which is personalised and reads 'Mr **** says Brilliant' with some stars in the middle. I'm quite pleased with it and my pupils love getting it stamped in their books, even great big year eleven boys.

I was going round stamping some books during my year ten lesson and one of the girls asked if she could stamp her own book. That's fine by me but after I turned my back for a second to check another pupil's work I soon regretted it. When I look at the girl again she's only gone and stamped her nipples, as in on her school shirt, not her actual nipples. At least I assume not, I wasn't about to check. To say I was horrified is an understatement on a par with standing at the South Pole and saying it's a bit chilly.

Imagine now - but not too much - how that must have looked, a girl walking around with 'Mr **** says Brilliant' on her tits.

My own, slightly paranoid, view is that it made it look like I was giving her breasts a seal of approval, kind of like a highly perverted version of a Quality Standard for meat. It wasn't like it was late in the day, there were still three lessons to go, plus break and lunchtimes. She didn't even have a jumper to put on over the top. So numerous other teachers would have seen it, and that's before she gets home. That'll give her mum a fright when she does the laundry. I wouldn't imagine stamper ink comes out too well either.

I'm sticking to using my smiley face stamper from now on.

One of the best things about teaching is working with children who say the silliest things. Each term we get a magazine from the council to give our pupils. One of the boys asks me 'why does it only say when they're doing it for girls but not for boys'

'Because you don't have a cervix'

'Oh'

I did a little research about the jab as I was unsure how it actually worked. The idea behind it is to prevent women from contracting a particular STI that can cause the cancer. Interestingly there's an argument that men should have the jab aswell as that would help to stop the spread of the infection, so perhaps the boy wasn't that far from the mark afterall. It might turn out that the past two years he's been in my forms he's only been pretending to be terrifyingly dopey and is actually a master spy with a growth-disorder.

I'd find that hard to believe though. On a not completely unrelated topic when Jade Goody died he said that he wasn't sad about it because she was racist and had been nasty to 'that woman' on Big Brother. I was impressed with his moral fibre on the subject but he ruined it seconds later. He asked me what her name was and when I told him it was Shilpa Shetty he started giggling because apparently her name sounds really funny. I think we have some PSHE work to do there.

I was having an interesting conversation about racism with my year tens. They were calling one of their class 'Polish'. I questioned why they were doing this. One response was that he looked like a Polish boy in year nine, which probably makes it not racist. Another was that he has a 'Jew nose', which I guess is technically anti-Semitic and ill-informed rather than racist but definitely not the sort of thing they should be saying.

One of the girls joined in the conversation by asking if she called Paul black, would it be racist. Paul's very white so I suggested it wouldn't be racist, just a bit thick.