THE FINGER OF TRUTH

I’m ambling across the playground with a full cup of coffee teetering dangerously close to spilling on a small child’s head – potentially no bad thing, of course, depending upon the child in question and the relative severity of the scalds – when I hear the shrill tones of a girl screaming my name from within a hoard of pupils behind me: ‘SIR! SIR!’ Her screeching has the desired effect: I pause immediately, snaffle up the top centimetre of my coffee in order to avoid a potential act of Health and Safety criminal negligence and prepare myself to be dragged from a blissful and joyfully distant daydream into the world of decidedly variable personal hygiene, cartoon-esque casual violence, far-too-obviously-stuffed bras and endless throngs of E-number fuelled lunatics that constitute the modern secondary school playground.

What could it be, I wonder? Perhaps a fight requiring the use of my budding authority and manly teacher skills to defuse? Perhaps a pre-lesson homework excuse? Perhaps a young year 9, sufficiently inspired by my opening lesson on adverbs, is desperately seeking my perennial wisdom to enlighten the darkened path of English grammar? Admittedly I always thought that last one was going to be something of a long shot; in actual fact, in turned out to have been about as likely as the Pope donning a burkha to mass because it made him look ‘both religiously tolerant and sneaky’.

And so it was that I turned to greet my needy charge, careful to effuse the ‘relaxed yet authoritative’ aura that I was so keen to develop.

It is Shelly, a year 8 girl. I do not know her very well. ‘Sir,’ she says, ‘look…’.
She puts her right hand into her blazer pocket. I am intrigued. I look. She fumbles around momentarily. I am slightly more intrigued. She seems to have produced nothing but her own hand… I am confused. Oh, hang on; it has definitely changed position… I’m getting this now… Yes, Shelly’s middle finger is quite definitely raised. And straight. And pointed in my general direction. Worse, she has fixed me with a deranged look and is baring her teeth – which, incidentally, would put the Wife of Bath to shame – and emitting some kind of screechy tribal war cry. At this point, as if to add a touch of endearing femininity to proceedings, she sticks her formidable tongue out at me. I quickly decide that its blueness – she has an ‘ice-pop’ in her non-swearing hand – is something further to her advantage. It’s the pièce -de-résistance. It’s like the end of the Hakka with an unexpected Technicolor twist.

I have been on my first stint of in-school teacher training for a sum total of 2 days. My principal achievement so far has been to be publicly humiliated by a 12 year-old girl with a fluorescent tongue. I would love to say that I consoled myself with the old axiom ‘the only way is up’. The problem was that I knew very well that it wasn’t - Yaz´s perennial optimism was sadly incapable of rousing me from reality. Indeed, I had spent enough time doing youth work and assorted jobs with ‘youth at risk’ to be well aware that things were all too capable of going sideways, or, should I not improve dramatically, straight bloody down at an alarming rate…