My Teachers Never Taught Me Anything

The reason why Mum sent me away to boarding school was because her parents sent her away too. I was quite happy to leave the parental home when I was twelve, especially as Mum and Dad bought me a huge trunk to put all my school uniform, mufti, and a home made walnut cake in, which Mum made for me especially. Mum and Dad thought I was going to get the best education that money could buy. And, even though English boarding schools didn’t cost nearly as much as they do now, the fees were still quite a lot. My poor parents. They could have bought a holiday home with all the money they squandered on my private education. If they had foreseen that my sentence at public school was a complete waste of time and money, they would have erupted like Pompei.

My year was full of naughty girls who were away from home without parental supervision for the first time in their lives, and like me they were making the most of it. They were no longer the repressed, well-brought up little twerps like I was at the family residence. Now, we were all rebelling like there was no tomorrow.

Our weak housemistress was used to looking after well-behaved ladies, not rabid, uncontrollable hooligans like us lot. After we put glue on the bannisters and raided the larder one night, she promptly had a severe nervous breakdown, and our matron had to stand in for her during her lengthy absence. From then on, there was blissful anarchy in our house, and we played pop music all night long. It was a miracle, we managed to dress ourselves in our dreary grey and maroon uniform each bleary morning, before we lurched like a chain gang through the town, to the school’s main building for our daily lessons.

Little did poor Mum and Dad suspect that being educated at my public boarding school was a complete fiasco. Our moronic teachers were completely useless. I have no idea which black hole the school’s governors dragged them out from, but I do know that none of them could teach for toffee. I specialised in languages at school, but my teachers were so hopeless, they might as well have resorted to communicate in sign language from the very start.

Our German teacher was young and very wet. She was such an inadequate drip, she couldn’t teach us a thing, and after half a term, she had turned into a gibbering wreck, and was literally carried out of the classroom on a stretcher. ‘Ich liebe Sie nicht,’ she screamed after we drove her to clinical despair. Naturally, we all looked up what she had just yelled in our German dictionaries, because thanks to her bogus teaching, we didn't have a clue. ‘I don’t love you,’ we translated, which was fine by us, as we certainly didn’t love her one teeny-weeny bit. Although I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who felt a little guilty that we had forced her into a life of involuntary exile from the classroom.

My Latin teacher was made of sterner stuff. Her nickname was Latin Silly, and was such an antique, she was even old when she taught Mum the dodo dead language at school. Poor crone. She might have terrified my mother into parrot learning "The Iliad" off by heart, but by the time she tried to teach my contemporaries and myself, she was senile. However, I realised she was not that senile when she caught me reading a copy of ‘Teach Yourself Latin’ in class. In fact, she was very hurt and wept noisily on my shoulder, not a pleasant sensation as all her dandruff from her wiry grey hair fell onto my shoulders like a pyramid of dusty salt.

But, the worst teacher of all was our racist scripture teacher who had a wooden leg, wore an eyepatch and warned us that anyone who was a pagan should be burned at the stake. My friends and I kept very quiet, and after her excruciating class was finally over, bolted out into the school grounds and hugged a tree. Yes, I loved school, but not the teachers. They were all a load of charlatans, but I never told my parents, in case they sent me to another institution where I wouldn't get away with letting off stink bombs in Maths.

Copyright: Frances lynn, 2006