Grey's Journal:
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| ``No
need to worry,''
said one of the religion teachers at my new placement school, `Errol's
Academy For Boys', ``they're just a cross between monkeys and
dogs. Monkeys because of their intelligence and ability to get
into trouble but also dogs because of their reliance on the pack.
Classroom management is quite simple really. All you need to do
is kill
the leader and you shouldn't have any problems.'' This was typical of the encouraging advice teachers gave me about working in a boys school, but which had the opposite effect. ``I have a hard time with the boys because to them I'm just another forty-year-old woman like their mum telling them what to do,'' said another science teacher. ``But you'll be like an older brother to them. Just talk sports and cars and you'll be fine.'' I am not the kind of man who enters a room, discerns who is the alpha dog, then goes for his throat to assert my dominance. Nor have I any interest in cars or sports. My ability to distinguish cars from each other is limited to their color, and I've attended only one sporting event in my life. My father took me to a baseball game at Yankee Stadium when I was fourteen. He did so, not because he had any interest in sports, but because it is a requirement of every American father to take his son to a baseball game -- no matter how much neither of them wants to be there. Baseball, I learned that day, is even more boring in person than on television. There are no slow motion replays, nor announcers explaining what's going on. It's a bunch of guys standing in a field doing nothing. After what felt like a hundreds years, my father decided that this parenting criterion was met, and we left the game. My lack of interest in these bastions of masculinity has contributed to my scarcity of male friends. I've always been more comfortable around females and, as I discovered when teaching in my previous school, they make better students. In the science lab, if something astoundingly stupid or dangerous happens, it's nearly always a boy who's at fault. There is also an element of conflict in everything boys do and say that gets amplified when they are in groups. So, when I learned that my second placement school was an all boys school, I was not pleased. My only hope lay in the knowledge that the school is extremely posh. My first day at Errol's Academy was overwhelming. It is not so much a school as a country estate, situated on seemingly endless acres of greenery with buildings that look like the Natural History Museum. It is the stereotypical image Americans have of English boarding schools. A head of year gave myself and the other PGCE students from King's College a tour of the school. At my previous school, the tiny `St Hedwig's', the tour took all of twenty minutes. But at Errol's Academy, where the science building alone dwarfs St Hedwig's, the tour was a half day affair. We viewed a grand hall where wooden panels displayed the names of the boys accepted into prestigious universities and beside them a list of those accepted into Her Royal Majesty's service in India from the seventeenth century. We passed a library where boys reclined on leather chairs and our guide told us the history of the school and listed its famous alumni. When I asked the age of the school, my guide said: ``Oh, fifteen... fifteen... ahhh...'' and strained to recall the exact date. ``That's okay,'' I said, realizing the school is older than my country. ``Fifteen is all I need to know.'' We continued outside, passed the gymnasium and the stables, to watch boys on the field playing croquet and arguing the finer points of the game. Our guide said, in a hushed tone, ``I don't want you to get the wrong impression that this is a rich boys school.'' ``Of course not.'' My conversations with the boys revealed that many of them spent time living in the former colonies ranging across Africa and South East Asia and some of them were leaving at the end of the month for a six week exchange program with a sister-school in Thailand. Even though the British Empire is no longer, the English still have close ties with these nations. While this is jolly romantic , there is an underside to this worldliness that I discovered from a friend of mine, Esther. The first real Londoner I met, Esther works as a microbiologist getting close and personal with unpleasant diseases. While not likely to have a long and healthy life, as compensation her work provides her with a great conversation starter. At all times she is required to keep on her a card that reads: If the bearer of this card is
ill, do not give her medical attention. Call the number below and
men in biohazard suits will shortly arrive to take her (and you) to an
isolation chamber where doctors will watch through a small window as
the incurable disease you contracted from her while reading this card
ravages your body.When Esther tells me she's feeling sick, I postpone meeting with her. But, when she's well, this purple-haired microbiologist is good company and usually has an interesting story to tell. When she learned that I hoped the poshness of my new school would save me from the boyness of it, she had this to tell me: Esther had once attended a lecture give by a parasitologist working for the Public Health. An upper-class private girls' school called on his services because, after the girls took their examinations in the main hall, one of the teachers tidying up found a tape worm segment crawling across the floor. ``A segment crawling?'' I asked Esther. ``Oh yes, it's all rather interesting. Tapeworms attach their head to the inside of your intestines where they eat your partially digested food. Their body grows longer and longer in segments which eventually break off and crawl out of your body. That's how they reproduce. ``The infested girl probably squirmed around in her chair during the examination feeling something... tickley.'' Here Esther raised her hands and made crawling movements with her fingers, ``As it escaped from inside her.'' I should point out that this conversation took place in Chinatown over a bowl of noodles. ``So what happened?'' I asked. The school knew that one of its girls had a tapeworm so they called the parasitologist to assist with the search. But, when the parasitologist looked, he found that two thirds of the girls carried parasites. After some investigation it turned out that the unusually high infestation rate was a result of their posh lifestyle of living abroad in the former colonies. ``How did no one catch on earlier?'' ``The girls were asymptomatic. Most parasites don't cause too many problems for their hosts -- it's not in their best interest. And in a country like England where the population is over weight, a tape worm is more benefit than burden.'' I still worry about teaching at Errol's Academy, but when I'm having trouble with my upper-class boys, I'll ask about their summer holidays and take solace in the thought of their insides wriggling with something `tickley'. |
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Copyright © 2005 Wellington Grey  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. |
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