thefridayfive | The Friday Five for 27 June 2025

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This week's questions were suggested by

bindyree.

1. Who was your favorite teacher?

2. Why was that teacher so special?

3. Do you think teachers get paid enough?

4. Do you have a favorite year of school?

5. If you could travel back in time and tell yourself something now that would have helped you get through school, what would you say?

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From:

softfruit

1. Who was your favourite teacher?
Mr M. In his double-act with Mrs C, but she was never my teacher. Given what I'm about to write about them and they might still be alive let's just do initials.

2. Why was that teacher so special?
They were a bit of a double-act in the school.

Mr M: was silly. He was the kind of teacher who teaches sport but is not absorbed in sport jock type culture. He was the only person who ever got me to trust them enough to learn a little bit of how to swim - and that entirely verbal as despite very poor sight I didn't have glasses yet to see what I was being instructed in.

On our first day, he insisted to a class of 9 year olds that he was 13 and school leaving age was just lower when he was a kid so he was already a teacher. And we knew he was lying but it set up a slightly... fun and fantastical way of teaching and being.

Probably most because he took it on the chin when, having given us a class assignment to write about "what would you do if you were head teacher" I wrote a very short piece of barely a paragraph. I just wrote that I would (probably in these words) "change it so PE lessons have proper games like chess as an accepted alternative to games for idiots like rugby". As a rugby-loving soul, he asked if I had thought of things other pupils had written about. Wouldn't I want a swimming pool because it would be fun? "No, I can't swim." Or school to finish at 12 noon, or only be one day a week? "I don't think the head teacher has the power to do that I think that's the government". I was nine and I was too wise about the world for that assignment.

Mrs C: was silly. One time she knocked on the classroom window while I was in a lesson with Mr M. This is a window that was, for a normal building size, about three storeys up from the ground; she had borrowed a very big ladder from a window cleaner. She banged until he opened the window whereupon she held up a suitcase and said, "(name) my love, I have packed my things, climb down this ladder and run away with me". He had to explain that he was too busy teaching right now and she should come back after school. God knows what her class were doing while she went off on this silly stunt but it's something every nine year old in the room will have gone home and told their parents about.

Another time we had a bird nesting box stationed in the school grounds. She told the head that the box had a nest and the birds had laid eggs. Cue all the pupils being called out of class to stand around and watch the head announce this and that we all had to be very quiet and not go near the box in break times in case we frightened the birds or the chicks were harmed. Mrs C stood next to him as he said this and then reached into the bird box and took out two eggs, popped one in her mouth and ate it and offered the other to the head saying "try one they taste lovely". They were sugar-covered chocolate eggs that she had planted in the box to wind the head up. How she never got fired doing that kind of thing in the early 80s I will never know.

3. Do you think teachers get paid enough?
Yes. I had a fair few teachers in my extended family this is not some casual sneer! There are people in other walks of life who are paid far too much to my mind, so perhaps I agree with people who think teachers do not get paid enough just with a different moral direction dimension involved. Teachers are paid enough but other people are overpaid making teaching look under-respected.

4. Do you have a favourite year of school?
My final year, age 17. I was starting to be out about things like my sexual orientation, and thanks to moving to a better run school with a different culture from my previous ones was not getting verbally and physically assaulted most days, which made life so much better. I started being able to be myself outside my own head in a way I had never done before.

5. If you could travel back in time and tell yourself something now that would have helped you get through school, what would you say?
Don't get crushes on the following people if you can help it, they don't go well. Do talk to that other crush though, she's not as scary as you think.