Those who can't...

I'm being a right curmudgeon at the moment - there are a million good things I could say about my job as a teacher, but just because it's misanthropic-blog-fodder I'm highlighting a downside. Perhaps it really is a case of too much perspective.

What I'm moaning about isn't teaching, nor is it teachers, as such. Rather, my beef is with when these two worlds combine.

To explain, as I came to college teaching via university lecturing, I have to attend evening classes in order to gain a formal teaching qualification. This, coupled with regular course/departmental meetings, means that I regularly get to observe teachers being taught. There's more abundant irony than an Alanis Morissette lyric meeting.

You see, you'd expect that people who spend 9am til 4pm every day, asking classes of students to listen, stop chatting, put their phones away etc. to behave impeccably when a fellow teacher, a comrade in class control, attempts to address a crowd of which they are a part. This couldn't be further from the truth. Perhaps teachers' brains are hard-wired to assume that everything they say is worth hearing and that every classroom is their classroom. Perhaps the excitement of being surrounded by fellow teachers really is too much, and it's only natural that the gossiping flows the moment the students have gone. Yet I still can't help but be surprised at the phenomenal levels of rudeness that some teachers display in such a situation - especially when the team meeting/training course in question is in place for their benefit. It's the ultimate blind-spot - often the worst culprits are the teachers who suffer most from (or, at least, complain the loudest about) the behaviour of their groups.

At the training session I attended tonight, I saw two teachers passing notes and two others mumbling to each other throughout the course leader's presentation. In these situations, I'm always reminded of this legendary piece of television, yet frustrated by the fact there's no camera for me to silently transmit my disgust to, in true Tim Canterbury/Stan Laurel fashion.

Of course, it's important to share experiences and ideas with your colleagues. But if you added up the amount of time in your life that's been wasted by misbehaving classmates at school, timewasting fellow students at Uni, or procrastinating, self-absorbed colleagues at work, I'm sure the total figure would be frightening.

And of course, right now it's me who's self-absorbed, and you could argue that writing a blog is just a glorified form of procrastination. But I wonder if any other profession can boast such a perfect form of ... is hypocrisy too strong a word? ... let's settle on ... professional irony. I'm sure there are some pretty unhealthy GPs out there, and there have always been corrupt politicians and immoral journalists. But, just now, nothing seems quite as blatant, or quite as annoying, as a naughty teacher.