Parents who never say 'no', an epidemic of sexting – and the pupil who thought Mrs Thatcher was a lesbian poet! RYAN WILSON reveals how being a teacher is half comedy, half tragedy

'You're brave’ is the commonest response when you tell people you are a teacher. 

‘Ooh, I couldn’t do that’ comes a close second, and third ‘Is that what you always wanted to do?’ – a thinly veiled attempt to ascertain what career you might have failed at previously to mean you ended up with this fate-worse-than-death job.

But I had wanted to be a school teacher for as long as I can remember. Now, I was taking my first class. I’d spent all weekend planning how to bring Shakespeare’s Richard III to life and I was in character as the hunch-backed King when I was interrupted by Jade, a girl of 14 who looked about 25 owing to a remarkably thick layer of make-up.

‘Sir, can I talk to you outside?’

‘It’s probably nothing,’ Jade told me in the corridor, ‘but I think Gavin fancies me.’

‘I see,’ I replied carefully. ‘And is he being annoying?’

‘Well, I’m just not really comfortable with how he’s… like… expressing it.’

It turned out that Gavin, whom I’d hitherto included among the good ones, thought it would be devastatingly seductive to trim himself down below, cut the hair up into a fine dust and blow it into Jade’s face.

I called Gavin outside and suggested that perhaps this was not the best way to Jade’s heart.

Meanwhile, I glanced back at the classroom. The pupils were not analysing the quotes I gave them, but setting upon two boys with rolled-up copies of the play.

I leave teaching burned-out and frustrated. Something is clearly wrong. Two in five teachers quit the profession within five years of qualifying; four out of five report high stress levels because of all the bureaucracy, writes Ryan Wilson

‘What are you doing?’ I shouted with more desperation than authority. ‘Killing the princes in the tower,’ came the reply.

My year as a trainee teacher was going to be harder than I anticipated.

While learning to be a secondary school English teacher, it was a requirement to complete a week in a primary school.

Walking home after my final day there, I wondered why every primary school teacher had not been awarded the Victoria Cross.

Then I became aware of the presence of Martha, a Year 6 child who was a young ten. 

Her hair was in pigtails and she was sparky, chatty and articulate. I asked her where she was heading.

‘I’m walking home with you,’ came the response.

I laughed, presuming this was some kind of joke. ‘Where are you really going?’

‘I want to come with you,’ she repeated, with no flicker of a smile.

My child protection training told me this was a classic red flag: a child trying to push the boundaries between teachers and pupils. I told her firmly that she couldn’t go home with me.

Then I heard her say: ‘If you don’t let me come home with you, I’ll tell my teacher you tried to touch me.’

Her nonchalance was most shocking. She had the power in this terrifying situation, and she knew it.

I managed to reply: ‘I’m afraid that is a completely inappropriate thing to say, and I’m going to have to talk to the head teacher.’

Martha shrugged and walked off. My mind swirling with worry, I immediately phoned the head, as serious allegations of this nature could be career-ending.

The head teacher told me this wasn’t the first time Martha had made such comments, and they’d all been proved false. 

I never heard anything more about the incident, but sometimes I wonder what could have happened in Martha’s life to make her say that. This was something I faced again and again as I became a fully fledged teacher.

There were almost always reasons why a kid was behaving poorly. It didn’t excuse them or mean that they shouldn’t have got into trouble, but it did help temper your response.

Take, for example, Patrick in my Year 9 class. He invariably sat with his head on his desk, yawned every few minutes and rarely produced homework. I was worried he wouldn’t be ready for GCSEs so I bit the bullet and called his parents.

Here’s how the conversation went: ‘I’ve noticed Patrick seems to be tired a lot of the time. He struggles to do his homework and sometimes falls asleep in class.’

‘I’ll tell you what the problem is, Mr Wilson. He sits up most of the night playing his Xbox.’

‘Do you think we could try taking the Xbox off him for a period?’

‘Ooooh, I don’t think so. He wouldn’t like that at all.’

I had wanted to be a school teacher for as long as I can remember. Now, I was taking my first class. Ryan Wilson is pictured above in his school uniform

I found the desire of some parents to be best friends with their children a little odd. The whole idea is misguided. Sometimes, too, I noticed a desire in teachers to be mates with students.

In my experience, children hated it when you tried to be pally. They’d rather have a strict teacher than a friend. They liked boundaries, they liked knowing where they stood and, yes, they even secretly liked being told they couldn’t do something when they knew deep down it was in their best interest.

Meanwhile, I struggled with my Year 13s – second year A-level students who went out of their way to make life difficult, turning up late, arguing and taking any chance to undermine me. It was particularly hard because I was only a few years older than them. I did my best to hide any frustration and stay positive, but it wasn’t always easy.

We were learning about Gothic literature and instead of asking them to produce an analysis of Frankenstein or Dracula, one week I asked them to write their own Gothic short story to show what they had learnt.

Marking their work, I was pleasantly surprised to see they had absorbed the basics of the genre. Then I came to Sarah’s story. 

Sarah had taken against me from the start. Her Gothic story was about a girl called Zara who didn’t do much work in her English lessons.

It didn’t incorporate many traditional elements, but if the point of a Gothic story is to make the reader’s blood run cold, Sarah succeeded.

I spoke to the head of sixth-form about it and Sarah was removed from my class. I was sad. Teaching is about building relationships, even when students are difficult. Shortly afterwards she left school due to complications at home. I couldn’t help feeling I had failed her.

Meanwhile, I was still trying to teach Richard III to Year 9. Maybe showing the class the film adaptation starring Sir Ian McKellen might help?

But I forgot there was a (mercifully not overly graphic) sex scene. In desperation, I threw myself between the projector and the screen at the crucial moment to block their view. The scene was projected on to my face. Naturally, the students thought this was the funniest thing that had ever happened.

As a new teacher, I was assigned a personal mentor. His name was Robert Clements and the kids called him ‘Sergeant Clements’.

He did have a military air. His teaching style was unique. I watched him address his students.

‘YOU KNOW WHAT REPORTS ARE?’ he bellowed at a timid lad. ‘REPORTS ARE A THERMOMETER. THEY ALLOW US TO TAKE THE TEMPERATURE OF HOW YOU’RE DOING. SO LET’S SUCK THE THERMOMETER TOGETHER. LOOK AT YOUR CHEMISTRY RESULT… YOU’VE BEEN VISITED BY CAPTAIN COCK-UP!’

Watching Robert was extraordinary. He marched around, castigating and praising in equal measure.

But he cared deeply about his students and they loved his lessons. For all his bluster, he was a brilliant teacher. When he retired, there was a sense that we’d lost one of the last of the old guard.

In my experience, the number of eccentric teachers has dropped drastically. Schools have changed. They are now more slick and corporate, with appraisals, observations and management drop-ins.

Teachers are expected to create plans for every lesson, drawing on student data and dividing the learning into phases that stretch the most able while supporting those who struggle most.

League tables, funding cuts, forensic inspections and exam pressures mean that this has become inevitable. But change comes at a cost: able, experienced teachers who’ve spent years honing their craft are told they haven’t made enough use of data or their lesson plans aren’t sufficiently detailed.

Eccentric teachers are often brilliant. They are the inspirers who make learning effective as well as memorable and fun, the ones we all remember from our own school days.

Any system that is too inflexible to accommodate them deprives itself of some of the best.

No matter how gifted the teacher, there’s one thing guaranteed to ruin any lesson: a ringing mobile phone.

Mobiles were confiscated on sight in both schools I worked at, in East Anglia and Inner London. This could prompt grumbles from parents, who said they needed to be able to contact their kids in case of an emergency.

But they didn’t seem to consider the problems caused by allowing children to access everything online at an age when they weren’t necessarily able to process what’s right and wrong, real or fake, normal or extreme.

Indeed, the cases of online bullying I witnessed were truly shocking.

I saw pupils form Facebook groups to post insults and unflattering photos of a particular person. I’ve seen WhatsApp groups set up to be nasty about another child; and sometimes the victim was FaceTimed by a group who carry out remote bullying.

Sexting was also a massive problem. A young, insecure girl or boy was approached by a predatory child and showered with praise about their appearance. Maybe they were even asked out on a date. They were so flattered that, perhaps against their better judgment, they allowed themselves to be persuaded to send a naked picture to the other child.

Within an hour, most kids in the school had seen it, and the child was filled with shame and didn’t want to come to school. They couldn’t even tell their parents what was wrong.

It was a scenario I saw more times than I can remember.

The school year has a natural rhythm and, for a teacher, writing reports is a regular drum beat.

Every child gets a full report once a year, and progress-checks twice a year. If you have seven classes averaging 28 pupils, that’s nearly 200 full reports. They are spread across the year, so teachers aren’t writing them all at once, but by the time you’ve finished you’re back to the start again.

When I wrote my first set of reports, the instructions came as a bit of a surprise. There was space to enter a grade, and marks for effort, but the comments section threw me. You had to write a few sentences about ‘positive personal achievement’ as well as a positively phrased ‘target’ where the student could improve.

I fully understood the principle behind positivity. If students felt they were doing well, it often became a self-fulfilling prophecy. But in most schools you cannot say anything that might be perceived as negative, even if it might be helpful to signal problems to parents. The only thing kids learn from this is that, no matter what they do, their reports will be positive.

My response was to write reports like an estate agent selling a dodgy property. Harry was not ‘disruptive’, he was ‘spirited’. Connor had, ‘on one or two occasions, shown that he is capable of focusing on his work for brief periods. In order to improve further, it would be great to see him being less distracted by his peers’.

The truth, as I’m sure sensible parents would agree, is that sometimes kids need their egos massaged and sometimes they need a kick up the backside.

It’s part of the art of teaching to know when each is appropriate.

Six weeks of blue skies in the summer holidays had only one cloud: GCSE results day.

When I was handed an envelope containing the results, I was infinitely more nervous than I ever was about my own results. I was convinced my class had all failed: I’d accidentally taught the wrong book or messed up the mountain of paperwork.

However, they did better than I’d hoped. For all the mistakes I’d made, all the crises of confidence and misfired lessons, we had got there in the end. After congratulating the kids, I headed home – convinced that nothing came near to teaching for job satisfaction.

As head of department, there was a tacit understanding that you’d take the trickier classes – often the lower sets where behaviour can be erratic and pupils are often disengaged. You would fail more than you would succeed. But when you did succeed, the sense of achievement was unparalleled.

There was a pupil called Azad I taught while working in a London secondary school. He was sparky, but struggled with comprehension and found writing difficult.

I tried to teach the work of the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy – in particular, a love poem.

‘Who’s the bloke she’s writing them to?’ Azad shouted out. I calmly asked why he was so sure that she was writing to a bloke. ‘As it happens, Carol Ann Duffy is in a relationship with a woman,’ I added.

Azad’s mouth could scarcely have opened wider.

A year later he came bounding up to me in the corridor. ‘Sir, sir,’ he said. ‘That fat lesbian you taught us about died.’

I tried to piece together what on earth was going on inside his head. After a few seconds I realised he may have meant Margaret Thatcher, who’d died the previous day.

‘Yeah, the gay poet,’ Azad said.

Taking a deep breath, I explained that the poet was Carol Ann Duffy, not Margaret Thatcher, who had been our first female Prime Minister but was neither a lesbian nor a poet. I could see the cogs going around. ‘Ah, I get it now,’ Azad said, a smile breaking across his face. ‘So Margaret Thatcher was dating Carol Ann Duffy who died?’

I had no idea how Thatcher and Duffy became entwined in his head, but it was another reminder to never feel pleased with yourself in teaching.

Becoming assistant head meant assuming responsibility for some of the school’s strategic priorities, including ‘achievement’ – quite a big thing to take charge of, I thought.

But I was told the school had signed up for a support network which involved meetings in a grand hall in the centre of London.

Usually teachers meet in a dingy classroom after hours with instant coffee and digestives. Here, there was fancy lighting, professional projection, proper pastries and a top-notch lunch. The meetings had an evangelical zeal with the charismatic leader exhorting us to do everything to make our schools’ results better.

But then something happened which, to me, got to the nub of everything that I believe is wrong with our education system.

One speaker started to describe qualifications that schools could teach pupils very quickly, even in the last few weeks of the academic year, that counted towards a school’s overall statistics.

Another described how she had found the exam board that gave the highest number of top grades. Yet another told of a loophole which meant you could enter pupils for a particular GCSE exam, not teach them anything about it and it would benefit the school’s stats regardless. I felt that a lot of the advice crossed the line from moral duty into gaming the system and massaging the numbers. Entering children for exams you haven’t taught for is immoral, regardless of whether it takes your school up the league table.

Such meetings exist because teachers are under crippling pressure from Ofsted to produce ever-better results. With pressure mounting on all fronts, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back and I wrote a resignation letter.

I leave teaching burned-out and frustrated. Something is clearly wrong. Two in five teachers quit the profession within five years of qualifying; four out of five report high stress levels because of all the bureaucracy.

I wonder what schools would be like if teachers were freed from all data obsession. Just think of the extra time they could spend on planning exciting, dynamic lessons. Tracking students’ progress is important, but as the old adage has it, you don’t fatten a pig by weighing it more often.

That said, it’s important to distinguish all this noise from the absolute pleasure of being in the classroom. At its root, the process of passing on knowledge and skills to the next generation is the best job you will find.

Working with young people, in all their unpredictability and forthrightness and hilarity, may sometimes be frustrating, but it’s incredible fun.

© Ryan Wilson, 2021

Let That Be A Lesson, by Ryan Wilson, is published by Chatto & Windus on August 19 at £14.99. To pre-order a copy for £13.34 go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3308 9193 before August 15. Free UK delivery on orders over £20.