Teachers make bad students

How long can one sustain a staffroom conversation about Angela's Ashes? Well, like the rain in the film version of the same, it seems it can go on ad infinitum. Particularly, when some rustic swains eschew the celluloid medium until pressure and sheer curiosity compel them to face the big screen. This, it seems, is what happened in our book-orientated Academy. The cinema buffs, i.e. myself and A.N. Other, built it up and tore it down repeatedly day in, day out, until gradually our disinterested colleagues were forced through the portals of our local cinema or else be forever viewed as pariahs and lesser mortals. However, we decided that with the advent of spring we would finally lay the book and film to rest. We all agreed on one matter in relation to it - namely that it was a teacher like ourselves who fired Frank McCourt's imagination and started him off on his literary career. Armed with this feel-good factor we return enthusiastically to our classrooms seeking some latent creative writers who will give us a favourable mention in their memoirs. Hope springs eternal - and spring is in the air.

Two of our number have spanking new zero-zero cars parked outside our Academy. Another has had her four hub caps removed (euphemism for stolen) in a local car park and yet another is struggling with his amateur mechanic skills to urge his old banger to pass the NCT test. Our P.O. reminisces about the time many years ago when his car was in such a state of neglect that a mushroom actually grew under the front passenger seat. He suggested that Eanna Ni Lamha would be proud of him and that it would have been the first organic vehicle and very environmentally friendly. Our computer lessons, phase two, are continuing apace, and even if some of us are not making gigantic strides in the IT department, nevertheless I find it is a salutary reminder of what life is like on the other side of the teacher's desk. If our pupils behaved the way we teachers do in computer class we would definitely go "ape".

Teachers as pupils are a veritable disaster. We are attention-seeking, fearful of our peers, talkative, inattentive, interfering, impatient and often bordering on the inane. We get frustrated easily and if our endeavours don't meet with immediate success we become irritable and disheartened. The plodders persevere, while the insecure feign nonchalance - and there are helpers and clowns too.

We are a microcosm of any classroom, and when we return to our own side of the teacher's desk I am sure we look on our proteges with more sensitivity, sympathy and compassion.