DANCING ON THE TABLES

I usually gave the staffroom a wide berth. This was the place the teachers, teaching assistants, dinner ladies and caretaker could come to unwind. They could mull over the triumphs and disasters of their day, share their ideas and have a grumble. However, today was different. The Christmas term was all but complete: just some tidying up and an assembly to go before two weeks holiday, and to celebrate having made it this far into the school year it was a tradition for staff to bring in various items for a buffet. That was why I was busy filling my plate with barbecue chicken, fresh green salad, a range of Indian delicacies and a huge slab of French bread smothered in butter in the staffroom, rather than sitting down to a school dinner in the hall with lots of chattering children.
I sat next to Joan, one of the teaching assistants and whilst we munched away, we talked about what we were going to be doing at Christmas. After I had related a story about the previous year’s Christmas dinner shopping trip where I’d managed to exchange my full shopping trolley with somebody else’s half way around the store, she said to me, “I shall miss your stories.”
I had, at our morning briefing that day, announced that I would be retiring at the end of the summer term and so this was the hot topic of conversation. Joan then continued, “You know, you ought to write these stories down.” I had thought of doing so before but there were two problems. First of all, running a school with nearly 300 three to eleven year olds and thirty staff was enough to keep me busy most of the time and secondly, I could never remember stories on demand. If someone was talking about memorable lessons then an amusing incident would pop into my mind and I’d feel obliged to share it with everyone, even though some had probably heard it many times before. But, put me on the spot and ask me tell a story about a memorable lesson and my mind would go blank.
Seven months later, I retired. After all the celebrations and final goodbyes, I went with my family on holiday and then returned to begin my new life. I wasn’t sure what I would miss about teaching because I’d loved the job, even the times when it was incredibly stressful. I found that I didn’t miss the education side of it much at all. I certainly didn’t miss the almost daily missives from politicians and civil servants who knew very little about schools and education but who seemed to devote a lot of their time to making my job more difficult. What I did miss was talking to people, more specifically, telling stories to halls full of children, having them hang onto my every word, doing things they didn’t expect and, on several occasions, getting them completely wound up and over the top before sending them back to class for their teachers to calm down. And so I decided I’d do a bit of public speaking.
I put together a historical talk about the changes in primary education in England over the last 160 years, a period which coincided with five generations of my family being teachers. I auditioned for the Women’s Institute and joined a website that listed speakers and soon my diary filled up with bookings. As part of my talk, I included one or two of my little stories as ways to engage the audience, bring a smile and refocus their thoughts. Once I began thinking about a particular topic, such as 'Residential Visits', I found that the stories came flooding back and so I set about creating another talk composed from my recollections and organised into themes.
This book contains all of the tales from that talk plus a whole lot more that I remembered as I was compiling it. They are all completely true with only the names of people and places, including my own, changed to protect those who, by some quirk of fate, may end up reading this and identifying with the people described: not so bad if you are the child who went on to become a doctor of music; not so great if you are the child who didn’t wash for a week on a residential visit. I’m sure the stories will ring true to some of your own experiences of school: they certainly did when I began delivering my new talk. I called it ‘Dancing on the Tables’.