There was no class called Uranus

You keep trying to upload an author image that is clearly not an image of the author. We will continue to flag and remove such drawings, but how about you please just stop breaking the rules, okay?

I got this message on a book club website.  It serves me right.  Why hide my face?  Just because every other website allows me to.  What’s my problem?  You’d think a teacher, even a substitute, would know about rules, what’s appropriate and what’s not.

In a job last week, one of the ten-year-olds asked me if I swore at home.  He hadn’t heard me swear, and couldn’t understand why.  I said yes.   

“I knew it!  You’ve got a swearer’s face.” 

Maybe I have a bad-mouth mug.  Maybe that’s why I don’t put it on the net.  

The internet is one of our newest democracies.  The book club volunteer felt that she could rap a stranger on the knuckles.  ‘Kindly refrain from choosing an illustration of the sun as an author image,’ or ‘Cut it out, dumb fuck.’  Or something in between.  In the end, she leant towards dumb fuck.  The ten-year-olds would like her.  Depending on her face.  I can’t find an image of it.

When I get a personal question in class, I often wonder what other teachers might do.  I sometimes think about the episode in Friends when Phoebe is pursued by children wanting ‘the lady who tells the truth.’  Then I do what is convenient.

The last time I swore in a classroom, at least one with other people in it, was during my second spell of teaching practice as a student in Australia, a long time ago.  The lesson was on Keats’ poetry. I lost my place in the little lecture which I was reading to the boys.  I said “Shit!”  The word is not in Keats.  I don’t know why the class teacher, who was observing me at the time, let it pass.  Things were more relaxed in those days, I suppose.  In the same school, the PE teacher told me a joke about aural sex, then described his recent holiday in Thailand, where a mother had sold him her fourteen-year-old daughter for a few hours and dollars.  They were saving up for a dowry.    

At school, PE teachers are no longer so trusting.  You need to watch what you say.  A misplaced phrase can get you the sack, or make people laugh.  Belle Nolan sent an email to the BBC describing the recent fires in Australia: ‘I live in Warrandyte in Victoria State with my fiance, Ryan - one of the worst affected areas.’

An ordinary name can also turn around and smack you in the face.  There is probably more than one South Park Primary School in London, but a few years back we nearly lost one of them.  Some parents agitated to change the name of the South Park where I was working.  The TV show with the same name was very popular at the time.

The agitation failed, but the goal remains – to avoid ridicule.  At the school where the ten-year-olds queried my abusive face, each class bears the name of a planet.  A senior management meeting would have taken place to choose the names.  Despite their distance out in space, Pluto and Neptune appeared warmer and more homely than 6S and 5C.   You have to be careful, though.  Remember, we are dealing with a world where the mere mention of ‘underpants’ will get a laugh.  There are more than a dozen classes in the school.  In order to cover them all, the senior team had to resort to names like Star, Galaxy and Supernova.  But they still left one planet out.