This week has prompted me to reflect in depth on this wonderful vocation which some have been prone to call teaching. I have at times referred to it fondly as “alligator wrestling” and to lessons, particularly the last lesson Friday graveyard shift, as “feeding time at the zoo.”  This week a change has occurred: the alligators have multiplied unimaginably, joining forces with thrashing anacondas and uncaged lions, tigers and bears. The feeding time has moved out of the zoo into the classrooms and corridors and yards. Shoals of ravenous piranhas have devoured the flesh of helpless staff, while murderous vultures have circled over the school, on the hunt for vulnerable victims.

You might think that this is an exaggeration. Well it is Wednesday today. By the end of school on Monday I had been called a “fucking cunt”  by a feral untamed, unboundaried wild beast, who though it highly amusing to come into my lesson – not the one he should have been in – refuse to move, before upending several tables and using his water bottle as a much longer penis than his own, as he squirted his fellow students in mock urination. When I shut him out of the classroom to protect the other students he tried to get in my fire door, using the force that you would expect from a demonic beast. Unable to enter, he returned to the locked main door with a long shelf, intent on smashing the main door open. Help finally arrived at the moment when I was about to tell the students to come away from the door area and get under the tables, and away from impending glass implosion. Crisis averted. Vocation salvaged.

Tuesday would surely get better. Wouldn’t it? Well by half nine I had been told by a fourteen year boy to shut up for being a snitch. Muttering “snitch” under his breath he did his work: a few scribbles on a scrumpled piece of paper. That is all his scrumpled braincell could manage, until later in the day when he summoned up some divine inspiration and drew two circles with two dots in and wrote the word “tits.” It was clearly a selfie of him and his equally feral mammary friends.

You will be pleased to know, however that every dark cloud has a beautiful, shining silver lining.

As I did a demonstration on how to neatly fold a piece of paper in two, a thirteen year old boy had an eureka moment and hailed my skill and genius: “Eh sir, you’re a black belt in paper folding.”

So the good news is, dear readers: I may well be a fucking cunt, an evil snitch and have severe tidiness OCD but I have gained recognition as a paper folding genius. My life is now complete and I am fully assured of, and satisfied by, my life vocation in the teaching profession.

©cre8ivation