If a teacher falls in the forest and there is no one there...
Mr. Jenkins closed the door behind him, walked up to the chalkboard in the staffroom and wrote the figures 10, 5, 6, 12, 21 and 0 in his column. He dropped the chalk back into the tray and flopped onto the sofa next to Mr. Davis."Ten no-shows, not bad," said Mr. Davis. "Not bad figures all round, it seems. There is a really big Thank You to Sincere Thank You disparity there. Twelve "I pay your wages" merchants too. Are you going for the title?"
"What," said Jenkins, "am I going after Jones? It just isn't possible. The man has being a miserable cunt down to an artform. Amazing, the difference you see when he isn't in school mode. Anyway, he rubs them up the wrong way on purpose. Not a chance of beating him."
From the other side of the room the headmaster shouted, "Jenkins! I had to endure that fucking idiot child Rowley's dad for half an hour tonight. What did you say to him?" The headmaster scowled across the room.
"I merely suggested that he try and enforce a bit of study in the home. Gently like."
Another scowl. "So he was cluttering up my office for half an hour because you gently suggested that he make sure the fuckwit does his homework? Let me remind you, and everyone else in the room better listen-up good and proper, your role in this school is to keep the parents as far away from my office as is humanly fucking possible. I pay your wages. That means you have to acquiesce to my every whim and desire, no matter how ill-thought out and self-serving it might be."
Jenkins, held up his hand in best Oprah style, "hang on. The government pays my wages, you just pass them on. My job is to acquiesce to the every whim and desire of the Department of Education, no matter how ill-thought out and self-serving it might be."
The headmaster scratched his nose whilst holding Jenkins in his thousand yard, board-duster throwing temper-tantrum stare. "The damocles sword of unemployment is hanging over your balding pate and swinging lower with every word out from mouth. The only thing protecting you is that that hulking idiot Jones is still stuck in the doorway. Where is the miserable bastard, anyway?"
Davis interjected, "last I saw of him he was heading outside with one of the parents."
The headmaster fixed his most suspicious stare on Davis, "what kind of heading outside?"
"In the sense of chat for two, ambulance for one."
"Oh, fuck!" said the headmaster as he shot out of the room. "Not again. Not-a-fucking-gain!"
posted by Between daisies @ 11:49 am
5 Comments:
пкуфе вшфдщпуюю
sorry, in english: great dialogue. this is pretty much how i imagined teachers to be as a child. now i know that many of them do.
Cheers! When iwas about 16 dialogues were a real mission for me. I spent about a year writing dialogues under a different name, though I have never felt too comfortable writing them. prose was always my favourite.
I wish a few more teachers were like this. It would make my job a lot easier to bear... Kids have this image of teachers being indestructible and all-knowing, whereas on their own time they are often quite odd and sometimes less worldly than the kids they teach.
Sigh - it all seems to come down to who the hell pays the wages, doesn't it?
Suggest you sit down and have a nice hot cocoa with the headmaster, that dad in the last post, and someone from the DoE. You might want to bring a knife too.
Professional distance is the only way forward at school. Physical distance can help, too. So emotional distance and a long weapon like a spear or a lance would be ideal for this situation...
If a tree in the forest falls on a baby and theres no one around to see it, is it still funny?
Post a Comment
<< Home