Teacher of the year

I've been thinking about yesterday's post for a lot of today. I was wondering if I had portrayed what had happened to me too harshly, but on reading it again just now, I don't think so. But I've had a chuckle to myself today remembering when I worked alongside the winner of one of these "teacher's Oscars" award winners a few years ago. Because if I was asking myself if I am shit, then he must have no conscience, because how else would he sleep at night...

Mr W (that's how I think of him; the W stands for something like Winker) hadn't been a teacher for very long when it was announced in the staff meeting one morning that he had been short-listed for a prestigious teaching award - the Headteacher was practically bursting with a mixture of pride and fawning at this time.

Rumours started flying around, as they do amongst a jealous and petty staff, that he had bribed several of his sixth formers to nominate him for this. After all, here was a teacher whose "Rate my teacher" website entry is the only one full of five stars and comments like "what a great guy". But these turned out not to be rumours at all. One of the teachers in my Friday-lunchtime-down-the-pub gang had a son in the sixth form at the time, and confirmed that Mr W's nomination had come as a result of his own suggestion just before he took a bunch of sixth formers on a really exciting field trip with lunch at McDonald's thrown in. Well, we kind of shrugged, how else would a teacher be nominated for an award that only teachers ever really knew about?

Personally I couldn't quite understand how Mr W was supposed to excel at teaching. At times he used my classroom for lessons, and it used to wind me up every time when I returned to my room at the end of one of his lessons to find overturned chairs, sweet wrappers all over the floor, new graffiti on the desks, and so on. At one time I had asked him to track down the culprits who had drawn something rather pornographic on one of my desks, and which had been spotted first by some Year 7s who hadn't quite worked out what it was, thank goodness. Mr W promised to sort it out, but nothing was ever done. A small point, but one which I added to the many others which I started to hear about. There was the case of the lost coursework, the case of the made-up coursework marks, the case of stealing another teacher's work and passing it off as his own... but Mr W was charismatic, and such matters were overlooked or just forgotten...

And being charismatic, Mr W won the trophy and got a promotion within the school. But still the slackness continued. He was given his own office opposite the staffroom. One time I was in the staffroom trying to mark, books balanced on my knee, when in came a dozen Year 11s. I was just about to ask what the hell they were doing when one of them pre-empted my question. It turned out that Mr W had important stuff to do in his new office, like arrange exciting field trips to McDonald's, and so had abandoned the idea of actually teaching his class, dumping them in the staffroom so they were nearby while he used his phone and internet. I did not have the words to express how I felt about this, but he was irreproachable now he had a shiny trophy and promotion.

So I guess the moral to this is that even award-winning shiny-trophy-possessing teachers fall far short of perfection. Or maybe the moral is that awards for teachers are a sham. But either way, it made me feel better about being made to feel a little bit shit yesterday.

...