Member-only story
MEMOIR
How We Do Things Here
A tale of school dinners, shame and public telling off
This is Thelma. It is 9:50 on Monday morning, and she is standing in my classroom doorway with thirty children watching. The dinner register was due in the office at 9:45. I am in the second week of my teaching career. She has more than twenty years’ experience of registers, dinner registers, parent phone calls and message slips. Thelma is important here. She knows her stuff, and she wants me to know that she knows it. The missing register is important. It cannot be missed.
This is how we do things here.
So she has come down to make sure I understand.
In front of the children.
I laugh uncomfortably, which only riles her. “This isn’t funny. I don’t know what you think is so funny, young man.” And there, in two sentences, is the beginning of my teaching career in primary education, working mainly with middle-aged and older women:
1) I am a man. Something has clearly gone wrong with the recruitment process. This is NOT how we do things here.
2) I am young. Ditto, and very much ditto.
But, most importantly, we do not fail to send the dinner register back to the office by 9:45am.
