My Life As A Teacher & Why You Should Never Become One

As I entered the drama studio the smell of teenage foot slapped me round the face like a cold wet sock containing a snooker ball. My brain immediately went into panic mode. I felt a shortness of breath and my stomach started making immediate preparations to reject a hastily consumed breakfast.

When you teach a drama lesson you always ask kids to take their shoes off to minimise the risk of injury when they’re performing. The unfortunate and deeply unpleasant side effect of this is that every school drama studio has been marinated in the smell of teenage foot from the moment it was built. There are few things on this planet that smell worse than a secondary school drama studio and those that do require some kind of gas mask and are typically found within some kind of exclusion zone.

Nothing prepares you for the stale, acrid, stench of 30 teenagers’ sweaty feet. It’s so potent that there are times where you feel it could be used as an instrument of torture to extract confessions from hardened terrorists. One whiff of ‘Eau De Year 9 Pied’ and even Carlos the Jackal would be doubled up in agony begging for mercy, denouncing his colleagues and every single person he’s ever met regardless of their guilt.

Some days are more bearable than others. It’s bad enough on a dry, cold day but on a hot, humid July afternoon when the kids have come straight from PE it feels like a bad day at the Stilton factory.

Drama teachers are a rare breed; they’re like PE teachers except drama teachers have the capacity for critical thinking. There’s a reason PE teachers always get picked last in the school quiz.

I entered the studio and looked around at the chaos that was unfolding in the room. There were groups of 14-year-old boys talking, standing, shouting and running around. Wrappers, biscuit crumbs and half-drunk cans of Cherry Coke littered the floor. Theatre posters were hanging from the wall at bizarre angles. A few had already been torn down. The entire class was treating the start of the lesson as an extension of their break time and it had clearly been the status quo for some time.

I marched to the front of the class, shoulders back, with the words: ‘Right Year 9 I want a circle.’

They carried on talking as if they were waiting at the cheese counter at Tesco and their number hadn’t come up. It was at that point that I realised that the dynamite lesson on Romeo and Juliet and iambic pentameter I had planned might not go as smoothly as anticipated.

I cleared my throat.

‘Right! Year 9, break time is over and I want a circle so we can start our lesson,’ I implored.

Still nothing. If anything, the chatter got even louder.

‘Year 9 I have asked for a circle,’ I bellowed.

At this point, one scruffy looking boy turned round with a can of coke in one hand and a pencil in the other, glanced at me contemptuously and said, ’You're a drama teacher, Sir: imagine one,’ with a calm flourish of his hands drawing an imaginary circle as he delivered the punchline.

The class erupted with laughter, leaving me standing there, lonelier than a stand-up comedian who has just had their set torpedoed by a brutal heckle. The class weren’t laughing with me, they were laughing at me and there is no worse place for a comedian or teacher to be in. The lesson was over and everyone knew it. I looked down in embarrassment and realised that my flies were undone.

Welcome to teaching.

This is the prologue from my debut book: Classroom Confidential.