After last week's post about my old Chemistry teacher, Mr. Dowling, Brian commented...
I took the bare minimum of sciences in high school and college out of pure laziness. The only teacher I remember from those classes was Mrs. Fischer, for reasons that had nothing to do with class content.
All of which brings us to the thorny issue of fancying your teacher... something which I have more songs about that any other issue in school...
Now I may be misremembering here, but the only teacher I can recall who made me come over all Prince...
...was Miss Crosby from the Art Department. The "Miss" was important, I'm sure.
There were three art teachers I remember from school. Miss Roche wore dungarees and also taught what would now be called CDT. The big thing I remember from her lessons was making a letter opener out of blue Perspex... an object which would have high demand as a shank in any prison in the country. I still have that letter opener today, though it gets far less use than it did in the 80s and 90s. I don't even shank people with it any more.
And then there was Miss Crosby, the archetypal "fit" teacher. That word seems rather archaic now - do people still say "fit"? It was the 80s and we were teenage lads. Everyone fancied Miss Crosby. I think it's fair to say that she was a big factor in my choosing to continue doing Art at A Level, even though I only got a C in GCSE.
I didn't do very well at A Level Art (I got an E). Partly because the Art department expected you to spend all your time doing Art when I was far more focussed on my primary subjects (English Language & Literature). Don't take A Level Art as a third option. Nobody will thank you for it. And that's where I saw another side of Miss Crosby too - she could be lovely to those kids who spent every lunchtime in the Art room working on their projects... but those of us with less commitment, she tended to shun.
Oh, my broken Art!
Also, we tended to see far less of Miss Crosby once we started A Levels (it was almost like she'd laid a honey trap and now we were caught in it - and the numbers for A Level art were good! - then her work was done). Instead, most of our lessons seemed to be with the third member of the Art Department, Mrs. Birkenshaw, an older lady who dressed liked Crystal Carrington in Dynasty (shoulder pads were big at the time, and no bigger than on Mrs. Birkenshaw). You could always tell she was coming from a mile off because her appearance was heralded by a choking cloud of Calvin Klein's Obsession... though she was no Isabella Rossellini.
We used to stand in the corridor as she passed, humming the theme tune to Dynasty as loud as we could get away with... I don't think she ever twigged. Or maybe she did, and liked the attention.
There's a lesson to be had here about the futility of fancying your teacher... but I doubt any of you need to be taught it. And just imagine what it's like to be on the other side of that equation...
More on that next week.
At the school I went to for A Levels it wasn't a teacher but a teachers' wife. The two of them used to host a barbeque in their back garden after the final exam for everyone finishing school. At ours one of my mates got drunk, shared his feelings with her and then threw up in her flower bed, scuppering any remote chance that he might have had of winning her heart.
ReplyDeleteI dunno, if she was stupid enough to marry a teacher, she probably had a pretty low bar.
DeleteLovely post Rol, love the sound of your blue perspex letter opener, very cool - and great to read of some actual love for Art classes at school (whatever the reason behind it!). At my prim and stuffy all girls' grammar school Art was never a subject taken seriously and very much looked down upon. Which was pretty crap for me and my ambitions of designing record covers!
ReplyDeleteAlso being all girls, we only had a small handful of male teachers, none of whom were crush material. Bicycle clips, tweed jackets with elbow patches and comb-overs spring to mind.