The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

My teachers at Bishop Vesey's Grammar School were a weird lot. Here are some of them.

Mr Buckle

Some of the teachers at Bishop Vesey's were robots. I don’t mean that in a metaphorical sense; I mean it in a very real, literal sense. Because they were so boring, emotionless, and dry that I truly believe they were robots masquerading as humans.

Take Mr Buckle for example. He was my geography teacher in Year 7. If anyone is secretly an android, it's got to be him. He reminded me of The Demon Headmaster because he looked the same and he had the same weird, monotone voice.

Mr Ormond

Mr Ormond, my Chemistry teacher, was another boring teacher. In fact, I would go as far to say that he was the most boring man in the world. He was certainly the most boring person I've ever met.

Though he was only in his 50s, he seemed ancient. His movements were slow and rigid. His body seemed heavy. He always wore a grey suit (grey just like his personality - dull and emotionless).

I never once saw him laugh. I never once saw him smile. I don't think he even knew how to laugh and smile. He had the personality of a rock. His facial expression was of constant consternation, like the one in the photo above.

His lessons were, without question, the most dull and monotonous lessons I ever received at Bishop Vesey. It didn't help that the topics he taught us were extremely dry - things like 'fracking' and 'hydrocarbons'. The whole lesson he'd drone on, in a slow and monotone voice like that of a stroke victim, with phrases like "The electron arrangement of an atom is most stable when all electrons are in the most tightly bound states that are possible, that is to say, when they occupy the innermost shells." This man had no place teaching children but he did have a place in putting insomniacs to sleep. He actually won an award once at an insomniac conference for putting a record 72 people to sleep just with the sound of his voice.

Where do they get teachers like Mr Ormond from? Is there a special place where schools hire strange, boring men to teach children? Maybe Mr Ormond came from the same assembly line as Mr Buckle?

The side bench

Despite being an emotionless robot, or maybe because of it, Mr Ormond was very good at stopping class disruptions. If anyone dared to talk to a friend during class, Mr Ormond would immediately tell the culprit to go "to the side bench". In fact, I believe it was a subroutine hard-coded into his programming:

IF
	Student misbehaves
THEN
	Say(Student_name + " side bench")

The side bench was a place of cruel solitude and humiliation. It was a long workbench at the side of the classroom, away from the other workbenches where the other students sat. To be sent to the side bench was a mark of shame.

A student called Alexander Papachristophorou (that was his real name - I bet he thanked his parents for that one) often talked in class and to this day, I can still clearly hear Mr Ormond saying, "Papachristophorou, side bench". "Papachristophorou, side bench" was practically Mr Ormond's catchphrase, like how Anne Robinson's catchphrase is "You are the weakest link. Goodbye." Mr Ormond said it so many times that it's become permanently ingrained in my brain, the same way you can get spots in your vision by looking at the Sun for too long.

Mr Jones

Mr Jones was another Chemistry teacher. He was younger than Mr Ormond but somehow just as boring if you can believe it. Of all the teachers at the school, the chemistry teachers were always the most boring. I guess if you spent most of your day in a school laboratory, you'd become boring, too.

Thankfully I only had Mr Jones for a couple of lessons while the real teacher was off sick. If he'd been my teacher permanently then I would have melted my own brain with the Bunsen burner to escape the tedium.

In one lesson, he spent a whole hour going through a mock exam test we'd taken the lesson before. He just talked on and on and on like someone who's had a lobotomy. He went into every question in the most boring of detail. Meanwhile, we just had to sit there and waste away part of our childhood. I'll never get that part of my childhood back and it's because of Mr Jones.

Ms Heaviside

Then there was this Maths teacher called Ms Heaviside. Her problem was that she had no ability at all to control the class. At all.

All through the class, there would be constant disruption. Boys would talk and chatter and blatantly ignore Ms Heaviside's increasingly desperate attempts to restore order.

Ms Heaviside's catchphrase (most teachers at Vesey had a catchphrase for some reason) was "Please!" She would say "Please!" and "Boys, please!" over and over in an attempt to restore some order to the classroom, but this was to no avail. No matter how many times she begged or said the word "Please!" no one would pay her any attention.

I can still hear her now. "Please! Please! Please!" I think I might need counselling after everything I suffered through at Vesey.

Eventually, she would give up and go and get the deputy headteacher, Mr Oldham. We were actually afraid of Mr Oldham as 1) he was the deputy head, and 2) he was very good at shouting at you and making you feel scared.

"I'm appalled at your behaviour!" he would shout. "Ms Heaviside is a teacher and that means you must treat her with respect!"

Anyway, once Mr Oldham had gone back to his office, we would behave well for a few minutes but then the class would gradually devolve into chaos again. And so it would go on, lesson after lesson. I wonder how much of my learning of Maths was damaged by this. It seemed we barely got any learning done.

This one time, the kids in the class conspired to slowly move their desks towards Ms Heaviside, inch by inch, while her back was turned towards the chalkboard. She knew what was going on but she had no power to stop it. The desks came closer and closer. "Please" she probably said. Eventually, she was pinned against the chalkboard by desks. She couldn't move. She pretended to find it funny but really I think she was dying inside.

Mr Carney

My rugby teacher was a bizarre old man called Mr Carney. He had white, wiry hair like the hair of a mountain goat or the head of a mop. Contrasting with his white hair was his red skin, which was always, always red, as if he suffered from chronic sunburn.

In winter, he would be wrapped up in a thick, warm, fleece-line coat made from an animal's fur, the kind horse-racing bookies wear. Meanwhile, the rest of us would be shivering.

"Stop being pussies!" he'd shout at us. "If you're cold, then chase the ball!"

He was always in a bad mood. His expression was always one of displeasure as if he had just shat himself and the soiled pants were making him uncomfortable.

When Mr Carney first saw me — a tall, slim boy — he had high hopes for my career at Vesey as a rugby player. But when he saw me play and realised that I couldn't throw, kick or catch the ball, he was bitterly disappointed. He never got over that disappointment and he would look at me sometimes with an angry expression like he had just bitten into a cake and realised it was actually cat shit.

Mr Carney was one of the teachers who would call us by our surnames as if this were the army and not school. "Pietrzak!" he would yell at me. "Stop standing there and chase the ball!"

He was a big fan of coded instructions. Before a scrum, he'd get one team together and assign everyone a number. "Right, you're 12, you're 14, you're 20, you're 25, you're 30" and so on. Next, he'd say something like, "Blue means go left and red means go right". I think next would come shapes - "triangle means grab the ball and run with it, rectangle throw the ball to someone else, and square means do a somersault into a tree". Then finally, just as we were walking away, he'd add to the complexity by casually saying something like, "And if I cough before I give the instructions, it means do the opposite."

Why the instructions had to be in an elaborate code, I don't know. It's not like Alan Turing was on the other team.

And come to think of it, why did we need instructions in the first place? He should have just let us play rugby, I don't know.

So we'd get into scrum position and he'd shout something like, "Red 14 Blue 35!" and some of the more athletic boys would throw the ball around for a bit until the ball went out of bounds or the pile of bodies got dangerously big. Then it was time for another scrum. Every two or three scrums he'd completely change the code just in case someone on the other team had managed to break it.

Fun fact: Mr Carney became an actor, starring in films such as Films Confiscated from a French Brothel as Baron von Harden and Damn Good Pie as a chip shop attendant.

Mr Boulton

Mr Boulton was an ancient Latin teacher. All his movements were slow and stiff due to old age. He was so old that he might have actually existed in Roman times for all I know. Maybe that's why his level of Latin was so good: he was a native speaker, having learned it back in Ancient Rome.

I drew several comics of him, which I still have to this day.

Comic 1

This first comic is based on when Mr Bolton sent my friend Dominic out of the class for talking. But Mr Bolton forgot about Dominic and Dominic was left standing outside for the entirety of the lesson.

Comic 2

In this comic, Mr Boulton is half an hour late for a lesson, which is ironic because he was always telling his students off for being late.

This comic is based on true events - Mr Boulton really was half an hour late for a lesson once. He must have fallen asleep in the teacher's lounge or something.

Comic 3

Mr Boulton was fond of giving out detentions for the most minuscule of infractions, as this comic shows.

Comic 4

In this comic, Mr Boulton's authoritarianism extends even to insects.

Comic 5

As you've probably guessed, I liked drawing comics of Mr Boulton. Maybe it's because his weird personality made for such a rich mine of material.

Here's the fifth and final comic I drew of My Boulton. This comic is a reference to Mr Bolton's notorious slowness in everything he did. So slow, in fact, that it took him several years just to write a single letter on the chalkboard.

But how Mr. Bolton survives a period of several years while the corpses of his students decompose, or why his students remain perfectly seated while starving to death in the first place, is unknown.

Other teachers

Other memorable teachers included:

• Mr Harvey - A Business Studies teacher who would chew constantly. What was he chewing? I never found out. He used to hit his desk with a ruler when he got angry, which was often. One time he hit the desk so hard that his ruler broke. Adding to the hilarity, it was a ruler he had confiscated from a student.
• Mr 'Philly' Coulson - A Physics teacher who, like Ms Heaviside, struggled to control the class but, unlike Ms Heaviside, would get extraordinarily angry and shout at everyone.
• Mrs Blakemore - An elderly IT teacher who knew less about computers than the students she was assigned to teach. This is not an exaggeration. We really did know more about computers that she did. Well, about Microsoft Publisher at least, because we liked to use it to make paper aeroplanes.
• Mrs Holden - a Maths teacher with a horrible croaking voice (I think she had a throat problem) who was actually a decent teacher, to be fair to her
• Mr Downes - a Biology teacher who was fired for making child porn
• Mr ??? - A music teacher I had in Year 7. I can't remember his name. All I remember is that he was utter, utter shite. He was by far the worst teacher I ever had at Vesey, and that's saying something, because many of the other teachers were crap (see Ms. Heaviside). He seemed to know nothing about music and nothing about teaching for that matter, which is not ideal when your job is teaching music. How he managed to get a job at Vesey is beyond me. I can only imagine the school were so desperate for teachers that they hired the first man who applied for the job. One lesson, for example — and this was the entire lesson — he told us to make words from the seven letters of the musical scale (ABCDEFG). He was very pleased that someone came up with DEBAGGAGED, a 10-letter word. This did nothing to further our understanding or appreciation of music.