Should I teach Yr 11 boys love poetry?/Teaching girls to put on make up properly

This is a collaborative post between myself and my fabulous Twitter friend @Xris32.  Thanks for suggesting it @Xris32, when can we do it again?

His bits are in black, mine are in blue.  Be aware, it's a post of epic and gargantuan proportions. 

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a male English teacher in possession of free time at lunchtime, must be in want of male company.

I walked into the staffroom after a gruelling bout of teaching poetry to a class and made my way to the section of the room that had been secretly dedicated to the English staff. They were sat around chatting and eating salads or sipping vegetable soup and conversing about teaching, life and what was on telly last night. I should inform you that the group, at that time, was all women. Often, the conversation did get on to admiring what the other was wearing, but for the most, I was usually able to join in.

I sat amongst the crowd of eight English teachers (what is the collective noun for a group of teachers? A critique. A sarcasm. A kerfuffle.) and proceeded to eat my lunch. Oblivious to the conversation around me, I opened my sandwich bag and removed the sandwich, or, accurately, two full slices of bread with a slice of meat between them. I never cut my sandwiches up and this caused a number of frowns from some delicate ladies, insisting a sandwich must be cut and not left as a whole slice.

Munching away on my food, I could hear bits of the conversation around me.

“What is it with men? Huh. I mean, why do they like boobs and bums and legs?”

Keep eating your sandwich, I thought. There was no way I could escape this minefield of a conversation.

“Come on. It is silly isn’t it? Men are always going on about a woman’s boobs or her legs. Women don’t do, do they?” This was spoken by one of the younger females in the department. The rest of the baying crowd murmured in agreement like a parliamentary backbencher or nodded their head in agreement. They carried on. “What is it? Chris, what do you think?”

I froze. Shocked, stunned and petrified, I had no idea how to get out of this conversation. I was a twenty something that lacked the confidence that some of my age had. I looked down at the remains of my sandwich, thinking how I could escape the answer.

“Come on, Chris. What are you? A boobs man? Do you prefer legs? What about bums?”

Oh, God. I was in meltdown. What could I say in that situation? How could I escape this? The seating arrangements meant that it was quite troublesome to leave and I would have to ask people to move. I saw the fire alarm. Maybe, I could throw my orange and hit it. Probably not, as I am allergic to all sports. Best to say something. My sense of humour had left me and packed up and moved to Cyprus, so I was running out of solutions. If I said bum, they’d think I was a pervert. If I said boobs, it would make them think I was constantly looking at their breast. Legs, nah! If I said eyes, people would be sick and vomit and I’d lose my integrity as I sounded like some romantic poet. If I said ankles, I would sound like some sort of Victorian gentleman, and we all know what they were like. Hair would make me sound like a serial killer, so I went for necks.

“Necks,” I said with confidence, thinking I had narrowly avoided a massive social blunder.

Mouths stopped munching fat-free salads. Lips stopped slurping on weightwatcher’s soups. Every eye looked at me. My interrogator continued: “Necks! You like necks.”

“Yeah,” I replied nervously, “I just find them attractive.”

Every female in the group made a subconscious movement with their hands to their necks. They all looked at me as if they had just uncovered a strangler of English teachers. Strangely the whole conversation just died from that moment on.

From that day on, there seemed to be a lot more scarves in the department and everybody shivered when I said I was teaching ‘Porphyria’s Lover’. Suddenly, for one term, there were no visible necks for me to ogle over, and it was the summer.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a male English teacher in possession of free time at lunchtime, must be in want of male company. For this blog, I want to look at the question of gender in the classroom. Does the teaching of boys differ to girls? Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus, but where are students from? To help me, I have enlisted the help of  my dear Twitter friend Gwen, so that this blog doesn’t become full of sexist and misogynistic comments from me saying that women are better teachers than men – see what I did there!

It’s all about texts

I am male. Not really a bloke’s bloke, but I am male. I don’t do football, but I do do geeky stuff and I am mad about science-fiction. As an English teacher, I have free reign about the texts I can teach and the choices I make. However, I always try to make a balance between boy-friendly texts with girl-friendly texts. Someone at the back pipes up: “Good quality literature supersedes gender”. But, I question, whether it really does?

 I had the experience of being taught ‘Pride and Prejudice’ as a teenager and I hated the experience. I like the book now, after my years of studying the novel and all its glories at university, but I hated the experience then. At 16, I would read everything and anything, but this book I couldn’t. The teacher was brilliant, but I loathed every second, minute or hour spent on the book.

Now, ‘Jane Eyre', which I read in conjunction with ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’, is a different story. It was a book that really appealed to me. The darkness, the Gothic horror, the harshness of it all had and has me reading and rereading the book to this day. I hated the bonnets, dances and polite conversation of Austen’s world, yet Bronte’s world was far more appealing. Both books written by a woman, but they had varying impact on me.

I once had a friendly disagreement with a colleague about teaching boys about love poetry. If grown men find communicating their emotions difficult, what chance does a teenage boy have with discussing love poetry? A 15 year old me would struggle to talk about love, as I was sat next to a girl in the class, and I also struggled to tell a girl I knew that I fancied her. So, Chris, what is this poet telling us about love?

We have to be intelligent with the texts we pick. By picking boy-friendly texts we risk alienating some of the girls. ‘Jane Eyre’ was great for proving this point as it was both boy and girl friendly. I’ve made mistakes too. I taught ‘Lord of the Flies’ to a predominately female top set and they hated the book. They got it, but they could easily be dismissive as it was just about boys being violent. Look at some of the popular books in departments and you can see that they often have male and female protagonists (‘Skellig’ and ‘Stone Cold’).

Boys will be boys

My initials are CC and at primary school I got the nickname of Class Clown. Like ‘Lord of the Flies’, there is a constant battle for dominance in a classroom. Usually, for boys it is about humour. The person with the Conch is the person who can get the most laughs. As a Year 9, I spent times in Physics lessons laughing my head off. I know, Physics. But, it was how you got liked if your weren’t the best footballer, or clone from the latest boyband. Get a quick, cheap laugh and people like you. People always like the funny one. That’s why in a lesson the lads will look for the innuendo in text or laugh at the silly costume in a video, or laugh at the naked bottoms in the ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ DVD. It is not survival of the strongest. It is survival of the funniest.

Male Pride

Conflicts that occur in the classroom tend to escalate with boys because of, simply, male pride. They cannot bear to lose face. Boys will rarely back down in a conflict situation, if there is an audience. It is the great challenge to authority. They cannot be seen as weak. I remember my own fights and arguments with my own father.

Take the boy away from the audience and they are able to function as a real human being and not an angry-stomping-fighting machine. The best thing in teaching is ‘sleight of hand’. Look at this funny YouTube video of a cat falling over, while you stamp a wasp to death.

Body Language

We tend to assume that girls are advanced in the subtleties of human behaviour and can spot a dirty look from a thousand miles, but boys are astute. A nod or a raised eyebrow can establish a connection that a thousand words can’t begin to achieve. I remember a particularly student, who challenged me constantly when we first met. Finally, he mellowed and then all I had to do was nod my head as he entered the room. He would then nod back, as if this was some sort of accepted greeting. It said that we respected each other. And, he stopped other students from misbehaving. This was all down to a simple greeting of a nod.

In the moment

I tend to be a ‘night before’ kind of person. I can rarely plan ahead. It is ‘all now’ or ‘at the last minute’ with me, and I think a lot of boys are like me. That’s why homework from boys tends to have that look of 'writing on the bus' look about it. Have you done the work for Jones? No. Lean forward Bob and I’ll write it on your back.

Our whole exam system keeps changing depending on whether girls or boys are underperforming. If boys are underperforming, the terminal exams are wheeled out. If girls are underperforming, then coursework is dragged out. Girls understand that things need crafting. Boys know that if they do this think quickly, then they’ll have more time to play football. Oh, and they like the competitiveness of things.

Not all boys are the same

I don’t like football. I am not like most of the male population. Not all boys are loud, out-spoken and confident. There are so many different types of boy in the class that rarely two are the same. These might be some of the types you might see in the class: the quiet but popular boy; the outspoken intelligent boy; the quiet reflective boy. There are loads of them. Each one has subtle differences to the others. I think it is healthy to not tarnish all boys as the same. And, for some lessons, boys will be totally different things. I know of students being quiet as a mouse in English and then become positively boisterous in a Geography lesson.

Now, this is where it gets complicated: the girly bit.

Teaching girls to put makeup on properly

It is with much regret I have to admit to never having been in the awkward position as Chris’s, rather funny and painful, staffroom anecdote. I am embarking (or should I say, trying to survive) my tenth year as an English teacher and in all that time, we females have outnumbered the fellas. English departments do seem to be rather oestrogen heavy and I don’t think it’s a good thing. The rather interesting issues that occur when teaching an ‘all girls’class spill out into the female adults who teach the subject, a desire to be good, but not always KNOWING that you are.

I have been at my school for about three years now (do excuse the vagueness, I started in January, and, oddly my brain finds it hard to work out precisely how long my tenure has been). I have taught both ‘all boys’ and ‘all girls’ groups at KS4, and for all its old fashioned peculiarities, I enjoyed both groups, and learned a huge amount from the process.

Context is everything, I’m an English teacher don’t you know?  

 Two years ago, as we embarked on the all new and sparkly WJEC GCSE Language and Literature courses, I was handed a very able group of all girls. In fact, on paper they were the second set, and due to the gendered setting, they were a mixture of a top and second set. The paper work and data said that they were less able than the boys. (Their results told a different story, te he he). Now the management, in their wisdom, also decided that a) we would start the GCSE at the new timetable rollover in June and b) we would teach the outgoing GCSE English Spec in Year 10 b) the new GCSE Language and Literature at the tail end of Year 10 and into 11. Yes, dear reader, three GCSE courses in two years, bonkers no? With the benefit of the post GCSE English fiasco, it now seems a wise move.

 

 Potential oestrogen focused pit-falls

Girls can be bitchy

Excuse the potential political incorrectness here, but I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t a concern when I began teaching this group. I’d taught some of them before in a mixed gender group and as a new teacher at their school, bitchy-ness was their default setting. However, it was just that. Boys can wilfully disrupt as a tactic to ‘put you in your place’, girls use verbal mechanisms, bitchy-ness for the same reason. You will do wonders by modelling warmth and parental qualities here, modelling non-bitchy behaviour for them, so that they can find their own way to that more pleasant place. You will still potentially have a bitchy nut to crack and a fail-safe tactic is to be utterly, relentlessly nice; you can even use terms of endearment like ‘sweetie’ and ‘petal’ and you make it that much harder for them to unleash the bitchy-ness in your direction. As an aside, this is also a useful tactic with your colleagues. You know, the ones who are passive aggressive or just plain aggressive and have all the natural charisma of a bulldog chewing a wasp. Being relentlessly nice to them will wear them down in the end.

Surely, you’ll need a perpetually evolving seating plan?    

The bitchy-ness could potentially lead to fall outs in lessons and a perpetually evolving seating plan. How do you get round this? Use your emotional intelligence. Get to notice and know their friendship groups. Take that into account in your seating plans. In my class, I had the core of the popular alpha females of the year group. When they all sat together, pre-seating plan, I couldn’t get them to work. I had to use the ‘divide and conquer’ rule, while at the same time allowing the well-functioning and productive friendship groups to remain together. Girls place a high value on fairness. Be explicit and state your seating plan is about helping them achieve, not anything personal and they will accept it with good grace.

Id, ego and superego

It is very rare they you will come across a truly egotistical or egocentric girl (or woman for that matter, but crikey, when you do, AVOID, AVOID, AVOID!) if they appear so, it is merely a front to hide a rather more altogether fragile ego. As I said in my introduction, I found my girls wanted to be good at the subject. Many of them already were, but few of them actually knew it. Even the most able student I’ve taught in many a year, did not want to acknowledge precisely how good she really was.

When teaching something totally knew to them, like Spoken Language, or something they are intimidated by such as poetry, an ego massage is required. Remind them what they are already good at. Tell them that they are capable as often as you can ,and, eventually, the ego will listen. Girls are more prone to worrying about getting it wrong; fear of failure can be crippling. Let them fail, safely, comfortably and kindly in your classroom, so that they know how to avoid it in the exam. Park your ego firmly at the door-  work on theirs.

They can see through bells and whistles.

My colleague and I taught ‘Romeo and Juliet’ at the same time. The resources I was initially given were based around the RSC drama approach to the text. The boys loved it, lapped it up, but the girls found it hateful. They felt exposed and vulnerable and they were not, by and large, ‘look at me’ drama types. What did they like? Old school didactic chalk and talk. It certainly surprised me and I felt a bit, well, fraudulent resorting to such old school methods. I think, I have a suspicion, that they feel the security of needing to know they are being taught by an expert, and this rather old school method enabled them to see that  once they worked out I wasn’t a fraud, they in turn felt more confident, they became a bit more brave in their own decisions.

Girls can see beyond the end of their nose

From the outset, girls can recognise that they are working towards a future goal. Boys struggle with this very concept, they very much live in the present, they are already pre-programmed to ‘carpe diem’. Why do you need to be aware of this difference? Well, if they already have this intrinsic, internal self-motivation towards a future end goal, beating them with a stick will do you no favours. You MUST recognise their emotional state during times of pressure, you MUST empathise with the pressure they are under and alter your lessons accordingly.

Towards the end of Year 11, they became more and more emotionally and mentally drained by the whole process. My solution? Give them a choice of revision tasks, and a choice of methods to use and get them to work in groups for moral support. Allow them to decide for themselves how best to revise and what to revise. Many, chose to do so at home, often asking for more resources to take with them. Trust them to do the right thing and more often than not, they will.

A final thought

So men are from Mars, women from Venus, boys from Pluto and girls are from Mercury, Saturn and Jupiter. We think that gender in the classroom is a complex aspect of teaching and sometimes gender needs to play a part in an IEP. Oh, look they have got this and that, and also they are a girl.

I have to say, after having taught all boys and all girls groups, I loved the experience of doing both. I found with the boys, and my group were very laddish, that some days it was like watching a sequence from ‘Gorillas in the Mist’. They tweaked each others’ hair gel and at one point, one lad gave another who was the ‘alpha male’ a shoulder massage; my flabber was well and truly gasted I can tell you. The girls were by and large a more co-operative bunch and by that I mean with each other, letting go of, or ignoring their differences for the common good and goals of the class. They are also worry warts and want more reassurance, a mix of giving it, and ‘cruel to be kind’ denying it is needed in order to build up confidence and decision making.

Huge thanks to @Xris32 for suggesting we do this and helping me get my blogging mojo back. He's blog is a treasure trove of good advice and easily nick-able ideas, a must read. http://learningfrommymistakesenglish.blogspot.co.uk/

Another digression: It's all about the psychology, innit?

It's going to be a busy blogging weekend as I am currently collaborating on a blog post about teaching and gender with the lovely @Xris32 as well as having an urge to write this one. 

What has spurred me to ramble on this morning? 

An interesting Friday with my Year 10 (I call them 'bonkers', I mean that in an affectionate, rather than a derogatory way) made me think about the psychological trickery involved in teaching.  

This group are hard work, and would you believe it, I volunteered to be their teacher, madness! Well possibly. I'd taught many of this group in Year 9 and my god they were exhausting, but through shear stubbornness and determination I won them over in the end. For that kind of group, full of fragile egos and emotional problems, familiarity with their teacher is a benefit, so, dear reader I volunteered to take them on at GCSE. Do they issue medals of bravery for teaching? Shouldn't they?

Anyway, Friday Period 1 tends to be our best lesson. They are quiet and calm and seem to turn into this lovely studious group of pupils; I wish I could say the same for all of our lessons. On Tuesday last lesson, which is the last lesson of the day, I'm not sure who is watching the clock more sometimes, them or me. 

We have finished reading Of Mice and Men and I had issued them with a series of 'Thunks' about the whole text based on the fabulous range of ideas presented in @Xris32's blog and something that I think I swiped from @kennypieper (All teachers are thieves, FACT). 

We did one as a whole class: 'To what extent is George's killing of Lennie an act of kindness?'  and 'How will George's life be different now he no longer has Lennie to look after?'  Neither question is hardly ground breaking in terms of a 'Thunk' but it was a lead into the more abstract ones like 'Who would you want to sit next to in class, George or Lennie? Why?' (@dockers_hoops) and 'If Lennie is a horse or a bear, which animal are the other characters like and why?'  (@Xris32)

I started by recapping the George 'Thunk' and slipped into a small anecdote about my dad.  I told them how I had watched him die slowly and horribly from liver cancer, that he had died in my arms and how helpless I felt. I had watched him suffer terribly; it was the most painful thing to watch.  I could do nothing about it. Implying my only alternative was to do what George did for Lennie. Although George's situation is fictional and fictionalised, the moral dilemma he is tortured with is very real. It happens to very real people. 

I told them how much I understood George's actions and above anything else, it made him brave. It took courage to do what he did.   Now, it's not often that they listen in ABSOLUTE SILENCE to anything an adult says, least of all me. They did then.  One even muttered, when I told them dad died in my arms, 'Oh Christ'.  I didn't speak for long and got back to the 'Thunks' fairly quickly. 

The change in the atmosphere in the lesson was palpable. The listened in a surprise silence, which I think turned from shock into respect. A seismic shift for this group, to coin Steinbeck, 'a moment had turned into so much more than a moment.' Ethereally, it came and it went like a cloud in the sky and on the lesson went. 

I told them they needed to be brave and show courage in lessons, to make decisions for themselves in order to succeed. It was my Henry V 'Once more into the breach' call to arms (Look, I shoe-horned Shakespeare in there, don't you see?).

They were given their new 'Thunks' to choose from, and they worked in pairs to do so. They were told an IT room was booked so they had to decide WHAT they were going to do, and HOW they were going to do it this lesson.  They beavered away, calmly and quietly as if they were the top set of the year group. Spooky.

What on earth did I do?

This is what got me thinking. What did my dramatic but personal anecdote do? There's even a thought of, 'Should I have said it?'.  

To these kids I am an authority figure, that for all sorts of complex and understandable reasons, they are hard wired to rebel against. My authority is challenged; I have to work hard to maintain it in each lesson. Most importantly though, it really isn't personal.  Essentially, I am a 'thing' rather than a person. Think about it. It is so much easier to throw a really hard punch at a stuffed, inanimate punch bag than it is a real person isn't it? 

I revealed something incredibly personal to them, a traumatic event in my life, they listened intently.  What did this change? I altered from a 'thing' to a person.  This could be a risky strategy, this could expose me as weak, I don't think it did.  They saw the person behind the title 'teacher' and that horrible things happen to all sorts of people. When they view me as both teacher and person, I am less of a 'thing' and more (cliche klaxon) real. 



NB Apologies for the missing accent on 'cliche' - can't work out how to add it on Blogger.
If I have credited the wrong person for an idea I've stolen, do not hesitate to correct me. 

The Bard V Dangerous minds

So, after a minor digression, I'm back to the Bard.  This is thanks to @hgaldinoshea who has shared a previous blog entry with colleagues and @Xris32 who somehow has managed to do a blog entry every week since term began. As you can see from the date of entry....I haven't! 

Why 'The Bard V Dangerous Minds'? 

Well, a few years ago whilst teaching in an inner city school in Coventry, I was given a Year 11 set 5 class, very much like the situation I am in now.  The group had virtually no GCSE English coursework to speak of, and a range of social, emotional, cultural and EAL issues that would make your toes curl in on themselves.  

The class were mostly boys with only one other female present in the room...another pupil.  The boys were full of testosterone, anxiety, and fairly disaffected, much like the class Michelle Pfeiffer has in 'Dangerous Minds', although I am no Michelle Pfeiffer; I am not, and never have been, trained by the Marines, I'm not a petite size 8 or stunningly beautiful. Nor do I own a nicely fitted leather jacket. I very much felt I was up the proverbial creek without a paddle.  

To begin at the beginning

I began, rightly or wrongly, with their Shakespeare text as it is the 'big one' in many senses and I had chosen 'Romeo and Juliet'. Partly because I had taught it for many years and partly because I felt at least secure in my knowledge of the text. Additionally, I'd hoped they would be able to grasp the whole 'gang rivalry' thing as some of them, in all likelyhood, were actually in one.  

Now, I can't say we began terribly well, I can't recollect precisely how I began with them. It could have been so disastrous that my brain has blanked it out, but what I can remember is a moment where things started to work...or feel less like Armageddon. 

We were looking at Act 1 Scene 1, so I am presented with the dilemmas: 
'How do I win them over?' 
'How do I make it relevant to them?' 
'How do they get the humour when initially it seems so unfunny to them?'.  

Easy, I take a leaf out of Mrs. O'Driscoll's (see post on Shakespeare Insults) tried and tested teaching book and concentrate on the rudeness. 

SAMPSON 

    True; and therefore women, being the weaker vessels, 
    are ever thrust to the wall: therefore I will push 
    Montague's men from the wall, and thrust his maids 
    to the wall. 

So, ask them to underline the word 'thrust'....can you see where I am going here? Point out that a sword is something that you have to thrust...but what else? What is suggestive about this? Here, be prepared for some surprising and funny answers...and a possible side-track into PHSE territory. 

Double-entendre time

Here, you do need to tell them, or give clues as to what a 'maidenhead' is all about...and let the penny drop. You could introduce the idea of double-entendre here, and then move onto the Shakespeare's text. It is important to ask them WHY Shakespeare is getting these characters to be so suggestive and refer to sex so much in the opening? What is the purpose? What are they trying to prove? How will the audience react? What type of play do the audience think they are currently watching? 

SAMPSON 

    'Tis all one, I will show myself a tyrant: when I 
    have fought with the men, I will be cruel with the 
    maids, and cut off their heads. 

Desperate times call for props and thinking on the hoof

Now, here we move onto a moment of improvised use of props and without it, I could have been flogging this particular dead fish for hours.

GREGORY 

    'Tis well thou art not fish; if thou hadst, thou 
    hadst been poor John. Draw thy tool! here comes 
    two of the house of the Montagues. 

The reference to 'fish' is to do with virility and the, erm, erectness of the member. Whereas 'poor John' refers to a dead or flaccid fish.  Here, dear reader, is my 'Dangerous Minds' moment of on the hoof thinking.

'What is a live fish like'? I ask the class. 

I can't remember the exact responses but they did grasp the idea of the animal's liveliness and strength, of it being full of life and hard to control (I could go one here, but think it moot not to).  

While we were discussing this I held in my hand my whiteboard pen.  My whiteboard pen was held aloft and very vertical, erect if you will. (I'm blushing a bit as I write this) and I do point this out to them. 

'What is a dead fish like?' I ask the class.

They are a bit baffled still, I think I am losing my grasp of the lesson, Armageddon looms large before me. 

'Look at my pen,' I tell them as I slowly move the whiteboard pen from the vertical, erect position, to loose and dangling in my hands. 

I repeat the question, 'What is a dead fish like?'
'Floppy miss!' a pupil cries. 
For the hell of it, I introduce the word 'flaccid' to them and ask some more questions:
'What is Gregory teasing Sampson about if he calls his 'parts' a dead fish?'
'Why are the men teasing each other about their masculinity?'
'What kind of atmosphere does this create in the theatre?'
'Have you seen men behave like this before?' 

If my memory serves me well, the point was deftly grasped even if the language used was less polite and formal than would normally be desired in a lesson. 

Fortunately, @Xris32 has written about the use of props in a lesson far more deftly than me; however, your props may have to be what is nearby, what you can literally put your hands on, and sometimes, you just have to improvise.  There's nothing quite like the thrill of flying by the seat of your pants, and not having an unfortunate accident.  If you have ever been skiing (don't I sound well to do? However, I've only ever been on a school trip), it is very much like the first time you ski down a mountain without falling over. 

The 'focus on the rude bits' tac-tics worked and Armageddon was halted. The class got their coursework done, by hook or by crook, and when they left, we parted on good terms.  All thanks to my humble whiteboard pen that was not used as a whiteboard pen. 

A digression: Butterscotch Angel Delight for the Soul

A short word about the title. In my childhood, my poorly food was Bovril, yes, Bovril, even now, the very thought of it makes my stomach churn.  However, our, 'Well done, you are all better again' reward food was Butterscotch Angel Delight.  Thus, I present you the binary opposites of good and bad in food form. For example: Gove = Bovril, Teachers = Butterscotch Angel Delight. 

There have been many blog posts recently giving much sound advice to new PGCE and NQT teachers. This is not that kind of post, well not really.

This is a a fuller version of an anecdote I tweeted to @kevbartle (much like a superhero, he has two identities on Twitter, the professional one is @CanonsOPP, the other is his more Puckish twitter identity) encouraged me to share the anecdote, which means he can share the blame too.

I was teaching my rather lovely, lively and a bit bonkers (you'd really have to meet them) Year 8 A Midsummer Night's Dream. We had indeed begun the process with the Shakespeare Insults work and, reader, they did not disappoint.

During one lesson we were watching the DVD of it, the one with Kevin Kline as Bottom and a pre-Batman Christian Bale as Demetrius.  It's not great, frankly; Calista Flockhart seriously grates as Helena, but it does the job well enough.  Watching the DVD takes a bit of pausing and Q&A as the plot is a little twisty and turny.

We had got as far as Act 2 Scene 2, where the lovers are in the woods and thanks to Puck's interference, great confusion ensues between the lovers.  There began a trickle of giggles around the classroom. I was confused, because it wasn't a line of dialogue that Shakespeare had really intended to provoke such a reaction.

"Miss," a girl near the front of the of the class says, "why does she [Helena] say 'Do not sperm me?' "

DVD is paused. I more or less have my composure.

On the board I write, 'Do not sperm me.' and, what Shakespeare actually wrote, 'Do not spurn me.' and, doing what all good teachers do, I clarify the misunderstanding, mostly straight faced, but barely.

As I am doing so one lad pipes up, "Oh no," he uttered in a resigned kind of way,  "it's turning into a PHSE lesson."

My composure crumples.

These off-piste 'Oh crap, I think I'm going to hit a tree' moments happen more often than you think.  Remember them after the lesson with the class that are like 'monkeys on steroids' (phrase swiped from @MissJLud); through the fog of exhaustion; when yet another decision by Govanasuarus-Rex makes you explode into a mushroom cloud of indignation; when a lesson you spent ages planning goes pear shaped in spectacular fashion; when you are writing your 42nd report and you are losing the will to live; when it's two weeks before Christmas and you look AND feel like the zombies in Shaun of the Dead, remember them. 

Teaching is hard work, you will want to do physical harm the people that comment on your 'short' working day and 'long' holidays. It is also full of the 'tales of the unexpected' that the likes of Jack Whitehall and the writers of Waterloo Road could not even dream up. Even by the end of your first half term, you will have anecdotes coming out of your ears, nose and other orifices, often they're too good to keep to yourself, so don't.

The more you teach, the more of these little scoops of Butterscotch Angel Delight you will get. A scoop of Butterscotch Angel Delight makes you remember why you do it and you'll be able to get up in the morning and it will give you the gumption to, 'Try again. Fail Again. Fail Better' (Samuel Beckett via @Learningspy's brilliant blog).

Thanks as ever to @Xris32 for proof-reading and editing duties: Do read his fabulous blog:
http://learningfrommymistakesenglish.blogspot.co.uk/