Dancing on the Tables

Dancing on the Tables

Published by Bartholomew Peters at Smashwords

Copyright 2019 Bartholomew Peters

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase "your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 - Dancing on the Tables

Chapter 2 - We Went Down to London…

Chapter 3 - Managing Behaviour

Chapter 4 - Sporting Success

Chapter 5 - Meeting with the Parents

Chapter 6 - Memorable Moments

Chapter 7 - All Things Musical

Chapter 8 - Day Tripper

Chapter 9 - Not the Juggler Again

Chapter 10 - A Little Bit of Stock

Chapter 11 - Embarrassing Times

Chapter 12 - Those Wonderful Creatures Called Children

Chapter 13 - Infants!

Chapter 14 - The Interview

Chapter 15 - Being the Head

Chapter 16 - Close Encounters with the Public

Chapter 17 - Keeping Them Safe and Secure

Chapter 18 - Lost Property

Chapter 19 - A Trip to Taiwan

Chapter 20 - The Art of Delegation

Chapter 21 - Testing Times

Chapter 22 - On the Telly

Chapter 23 - The Art Teacher

Chapter 24 - Politicians, Bless 'Em

Chapter 25 - Children on Stage

About the Author

Introduction

I usually gave the staffroom a wide berth. This was the place the teachers, teaching assistants, dinner ladies and caretaker could come to unwind. They could mull over the triumphs and disasters of their day, share their ideas and have a grumble. However, today was different. The Christmas term was all but complete: just some tidying up and an assembly to go before two weeks holiday, and to celebrate having made it this far into the school year it was a tradition for staff to bring in various items for a buffet. That was why I was busy filling my plate with barbecue chicken, fresh green salad, a range of Indian delicacies and a huge slab of French bread smothered in butter in the staffroom, rather than sitting down to a school dinner in the hall with lots of chattering children.

I sat next to Joan, one of the teaching assistants and whilst we munched away, we talked about what we were going to be doing at Christmas. After I had related a story about the previous year’s Christmas dinner shopping trip where I’d managed to exchange my full shopping trolley with somebody else’s half way around the store, she said to me, I shall miss your stories.

I had, at our morning briefing that day, announced that I would be retiring at the end of the summer term and so this was the hot topic of conversation. Joan then continued, You know, you ought to write these stories down. I had thought of doing so before but there were two problems. First of all, running a school with nearly 300 three to eleven year olds and thirty staff was enough to keep me busy most of the time and secondly, I could never remember stories on demand. If someone was talking about memorable lessons then an amusing incident would pop into my mind and I’d feel obliged to share it with everyone, even though some had probably heard it many times before. But, put me on the spot and ask me tell a story about a memorable lesson and my mind would go blank.

Seven months later, I retired. After all the celebrations and final goodbyes, I went with my family on holiday and then returned to begin my new life. I wasn’t sure what I would miss about teaching because I’d loved the job, even the times when it was incredibly stressful. I found that I didn’t miss the education side of it much at all. I certainly didn’t miss the almost daily missives from politicians and civil servants who knew very little about schools and education but who seemed to devote a lot of their time to making my job more difficult. What I did miss was talking to people, more specifically, telling stories to halls full of children, having them hang onto my every word, doing things they didn’t expect and, on several occasions, getting them completely wound up and over the top before sending them back to class for their teachers to calm down. And so I decided I’d do a bit of public speaking.

I put together a historical talk about the changes in primary education in England over the last 160 years, a period which coincided with five generations of my family being teachers. I auditioned for the Women’s Institute and joined a website that listed speakers and soon my diary filled up with bookings. As part of my talk, I included one or two of my little stories as ways to engage the audience, bring a smile and refocus their thoughts. Once I began thinking about a particular topic, such as 'Residential Visits', I found that the stories came flooding back and so I set about creating another talk composed from my recollections and organised into themes.

This book contains all of the tales from that talk plus a whole lot more that I remembered as I was compiling it. They are all completely true with only the names of people and places, including my own, changed to protect those who, by some quirk of fate, may end up reading this and identifying with the people described: not so bad if you are the child who went on to become a doctor of music; not so great if you are the child who didn’t wash for a week on a residential visit. I’m sure the stories will ring true to some of your own experiences of school: they certainly did when I began delivering my new talk. I called it ‘Dancing on the Tables’.

Chapter One: Dancing on the Tables

Pamela was a quiet child. Over her three years in school, she had developed a talent for blending into the background. She didn’t struggle; she didn’t have her hand in a permanent upright position begging to answer every question; she wasn’t badly behaved. She just arrived in the morning, got on with her work and left at the end of the school day. There was, however, one exception to this daily pattern: the PE lesson because Pamela hated PE. I never did find out the reason: was it a fear of going on the apparatus, a dislike of competitive games, a lack of co-ordination? Whatever the problem was, Pamela had developed a strategy to deal with it – she never had her PE kit in school. All the other seven and eight year olds would be lined up at the door, shuffling impatiently as they waited for me to give the order to proceed to the gym, and there would be Pamela, sitting at her desk, resplendent in the clothes she’d come to school in.

Pamela, I would wearily enquire, knowing full well what the answer would be, Why aren’t you changed?

I’ve forgot my kit, would come the familiar reply. For the first few weeks of the new school year, I countered this by asking her to go to the teacher in charge of PE who kept a supply of spare shorts, t-shirts and plimsolls in a box in her classroom but Pamela, a resourceful child, had a way of dealing with this too. As the class and I set off to the gym for the PE lesson in one direction, she would start her long and tortuous journey to collect the spare kit in the other. Once we had turned the corner, she’d reduce her speed to somewhere between a dawdle and standing still. Then, on eventually reaching the classroom where the kit was stored, she would wait at the door until someone spied her through the window, take ages to find some kit that would fit her and then return to the classroom at a pace equivalent to the one she’d employed on the outward journey. The whole performance was a masterpiece in precision timing, her eventually entry into the gym inevitably coinciding with me issuing instructions to the class to get down off the apparatus because the lesson was over.

At about week five, I snapped. An alternative approach was needed and in the heat of my frustration, I came up with the first thing that popped into my head.

Pamela, I said, I see you have forgotten your kit. Pamela nodded, giving me a pitiful look that indicated how sorry she was that this situation had inexplicably arisen again.

I’ll tell you what I'll do, I continued, If you remember to bring your kit next week, I will dance on the tables. It was a bizarre offer to make but immediately I realised it was a stroke of genius for whilst Pamela sat there quite unmoved by the prospect of me making an utter fool of myself, the rest of class appeared decidedly keen, and so I left it at that and waited for peer pressure to take its course. I have no way of knowing what went on over the next few days in the playground, in the dinner queue or on the way home from school. I’m ignorant of the inducements that were made to Pamela, the encouragement given, the possible blackmail. What mattered was the result and this I discover the following week when the children once again got changed for PE. There standing in line, her face beaming with pride, was Pamela, resplendent in pristine shorts and t-shirt. All eyes turned to me. I congratulated her for finally bringing in her kit and then, remembering the adage I was taught when training to be a teacher: never make a threat or a promise you’re not prepared to keep, I mounted the children’s desks and began my performance.

I’m not sure that I’d have scored many points for technique or artistic interpretation, but it was a dance that captivated my audience, created an uproar in the classroom and ended with a burst of spontaneous applause. Having danced, we set off for PE where, I have to say, Pamela carried out a range of physical activities with an assurance that belied her total inexperience. Maybe that’s why she didn’t want to do PE: it was all too easy; she was a natural.

News of my dancing quickly spread around the school. Ten minutes after I dismissed the class for lunchtime, I was sitting down in the dinner hall when the headteacher came to join me. I hear you’ve been dancing on the tables, he said as if this was an everyday occurrence. I hastened to explain what had happened and whilst not advocating adopting table dancing as school policy, he realised that I had taken an unusual approach to solve a recurring problem. I was quite the hero in the staffroom and I began giving advice about how other teachers could solve some of their recurrent problems. After six years of teaching, I had finally arrived, a voice to be listened to, an educationalist of note. And so it was that the following week my class, once again got changed for PE. As I scanned the line of children, I noticed that someone was missing. Where was Pamela? And then I spotted her, in her seat, in the clothes she’d come to school in. Before I could say a word she spoke:

I’ve forgot my kit.

Chapter Two: We Went Down to London…

There was a knock at the door. We were keen to discover who could possibly be making a nighttime call on our colleague Dave, whose room we had gathered in at the end of an exhausting day. It was a woman in her late 50s, dressed in a white fluffy dressing gown and pink slippers. Oh, I’m sorry, she said, casting her eyes over the four of us, I’ve got the wrong room. As Dave closed the door, we immediately burst out laughing, teasing him about having a secret tryst with this mysterious lady. Then came a second knock and there she was again. I was right, she declared, now clearly annoyed. You are making rather a lot of noise and we have a party of schoolchildren trying to get to sleep along the corridor. Please keep your voices down. We nodded obediently, chastened by our reprimand. We were all too aware of the children down the corridor: we were meant to be in charge of them!

As a primary school teacher for twenty years and a headteacher for another eighteen, I always had a driving passion for education to be as enjoyable and memorable as possible, providing children with a wealth of experiences and opportunities. Residential visits fit that bill perfectly. Maybe it was my own experiences of a week in Derbyshire as a ten year old that inspired me to pester fellow staff to get involved and then later, as a head, persuade nervous governors to let me organise visits when the schools had never run them before. The result was an involvement in over thirty trips during my career: hiking over hills in Derbyshire; careering about on quad bikes in Wales; cramming forty children onto packed underground trains in London.

Things didn’t always run smoothly. In the early days, staff would sleep in the same large dormitories as the children, not an ideal arrangement, especially if the child in the bunk bed above you decided to be sick in the night as one boy did in a youth hostel in Derbyshire. Rather than mess his bedding, he sensibly leaned over the side of the bunk and liberally sprayed everything below. Now he