Staff Only: Terrible teens spark outbreak of school phobia
Wednesday September 17 2008
Pity my colleague Kurt Moobs, renowned as a man of taste and leisure from one end of the staff room to the other.
Gone for now are the days of sailing in the Med, stopping off at Monte Carlo for dinner in only the finest restaurants.
His tan fading, his Alfa Romeo Spider parked in the rain beside mere Fords and Toyotas in the school car park, today and every working day the miserable Mr Moobs is trapped indoors from 9 till 4 with a gang of ungrateful and rebellious spotty adolescents.
His face is drawn from sleepless nights and every time I see him he has bitten yet further down his nails.
Avoiding my gaze, he treats my attempts to converse with desultory monosyllabic grunts.
After three months of tasting the sensuous joys of life around Europe and in North America, not to mention places like West Cork and Donegal which are always worth a visit, even in the rain, Kurt Moobs is finding the readjustment to the banal and punishing life of a teacher, very difficult indeed.
Kurt, you see, is suffering from a condition known as 'School Phobia'.
School Phobia means that Kurt spends all weekend anxious and dreading the approach of Monday morning.
During the long summer holidays, those heady days of barbecues, cheap Ryanair flights to sheds in exotic locations, hanging around his mother's kitchen feasting on her homemade bread and jam, Kurt, like the rest of us, never gave a thought to his other life (like the rest of us), the one in which sadistic and satanic teenagers torment him.
Then when he got back it hit him like Hurricane Ike hitting a Bray candyfloss.
Unbeknownst to him, our principal, who does most of his work in the summer while the rest of us are doing our best denying that we were ever teachers in the first place, has entered Kurt's office and thrown his stuff (textbooks, dusters, confiscated replica machine pistols etc) into a black sack and dumped it in a broom cupboard.
Kurt's not the only victim of the great recluse's version of repossession.
Facing a shortage of classrooms for new computers, learning support classes and a mooted sin-bin, the black-cloaked denizen of the shadows has commandeered several private spaces.
I confess, that as one of the less aggressive members of staff and possessing no private office, I did at some stage remind our glorious leader that if he needed additional space, 'don't forget those offices belong to the school and not to teachers. You know me -- I always put the pupils first' or something along those lines.
After giving me a look that said: 'I don't know who you are, but you might have something there', he slithered back into his office.
I thought nothing of it until Moobs rang me to whinge about how the principal had gone 'power crazy'.
Yet all you read in the papers is how stressful school is for the kids. I'm glad to have addressed it from the teachers' point of view today.
- E Grade
