‘Spend the day in your socks’: When teachers were tyrants

“Take off your trainers. Spend the rest of the day in your socks.”

So says Barry, the school principal played by PJ Gallagher in the hit sitcom The Young Offenders, as he orders all the students in his secondary school to remove their shoes.

Barry is acting out of spite because one student annoyed him and, depending on your point of view, he’s either overzealous or a petty tyrant.

Either way, he’s a familiar character, albeit a relatively mild one. Petty tyrants abound in all walks of life, but school is one of the few common experiences we all share: almost everyone has a story about a kind and caring teacher who went out of their way, as well as a bully or simply mean and petty character who made their life hell.

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These were times when there were few consequences for tyrannical teachers, and no real complaints procedure to speak of; today, schools are very different places.

These days there are fitness-to-teach hearings and student representatives on boards of management, while new parent and student charters are due soon with transparent complaint procedures.

With the annual teacher union conferences kicking off this week, we asked our readers to share their memories of teachers, and we’ve included a selection of stories here.

Memories

In my own case, my sixth class teacher, George Leahy at St Brigid’s BNS, easily stands out as the best I ever had.

After years of being told I had a mental block and to “just try” to do my maths homework – I may as well have been asked to just try to speak Japanese – and after years of tears and frustration, he was the first to really acknowledge that, actually, I wasn’t very strong at maths.

He persuaded me to go to a remedial class and helped me get over the shame and embarrassment by supporting me in class and repeatedly highlighting and encouraging my other strong points, particularly writing and imagination.

He encouraged us to be nice and kind to each other and, even though he wasn’t a “zany” teacher, he made learning and ideas fun. He was kind and thoughtful and I’ve always remembered his generosity.

On the other hand, another teacher of mine was deeply spiteful. He seemed to hate being a teacher and he particularly hated anyone who wasn’t good at his subject. His teaching style: do one example on the board, refuse to help anyone who didn’t understand and then punish anyone who couldn’t manage their homework. We all had to get grinds.

Here’s a selection of some of our readers’ recollections:

"Very similar to The Young Offenders: there was a rule in my secondary that socks had to be pure white.

“Even a 1mm high single stripe around the top in palest pink broke that rule, and one teacher used to make girls take their socks off and walk around sockless in their school shoes for the whole day.

“Another teacher used to give lines as punishment. Sometimes she would check the lines to make sure they were done properly, other times she would tear them up without even looking at them but you’d never know in advance which she’d do.”

- Jean

“My English teacher who informed me that one can only use ‘gorgeous’ in a sentence when one is describing the queen’s coronation jewels. She brought her Yorkie to school every day.”

- Sandra Ní Dhubhda

“I can remember a few lads being told to write ballpark ten A4 pages on topics such as ‘a blank sheet of paper’ or ‘watching paint dry’. Needless to say, they weren’t read. It was psychological warfare.

- Colin Gleeson

“One of the boys in my first class was picking his nose, so our teacher wrapped his hands in those coloured elastic bands and tied his hands behind the chair. It was awful; he’d to stay there like that till it was lunchtime and when you’re six or seven that feels like hours away.”

- Rachel

“There were only two of us doing honours Irish and we had to share a teacher with the pass class. Due to teacher illness, there was quite a bit of disruption with our Irish studies. She reshuffled some of her other classes to make sure we got extra tuition from her when she had free time. She got all As and Bs out of her honours history students which was unheard of in our school.

- Name withheld on request

"I had a teacher in Brussels who used to taunt dyslexic students by stamping their work with stars to get their hopes up, then crossing the stamps out with red marker and laughing at them, mocking any mistakes they'd made"

- Aifric

“One of my primary school teachers asked two boys why they were waiting in the corridor. ‘We’re going to the remedial English class, sir.’ ‘At your age? That’s a disgrace.’”

- Alan Caulfield

- As Hamlet once said: 'Out, damned spot...’

- That was Lady Macbeth.

- Get out of this class, Moynes.”

- John Moynes