United front
Jeremy Clarke
Iknew I wasn’t going to like Mr Troy, his biology teacher. My boy had told me Mr Troy liked progressive jazz. Just as there is an immutable psychic law that decrees I’ll like every New Zealander I meet, so there is a similar one that means I never like fans of progressive jazz.
My boy didn’t like Mr Troy, he said, because he was rude and vain. So when it was our turn to sit opposite him, the first of the three teachers we were going to interview during my boy’s parents’ evening, we presented a united front of antipathy, if not outright hostility, towards the man.
Mr Troy was law made flesh right down to his goatee beard and ponytail. ‘So nice to see you, erm, Mr Jones,’ he said, without looking up from the sheaf of exam papers he was shuffling. ‘The name’s Clarke,’ I said. He looked up. ‘Sorry. Foolish of me to assume that any of my pupil’s parents were also joined together in holy matrimony. You have my apology.’ He located my boy’s GCSE exam paper and rapidly scanned it. My boy had scored 14 marks out of 20, which is a D grade. Mr Troy attributed this below-average mark to my boy’s sloppy attitude to his schoolwork rather than to his ignorance of the subject. He urged me to consider as an example of this sloppiness my boy’s answer to the question: what is the function of the heart? He’d had to deduct a full mark (the difference between a D and a C grade, incidentally) because my boy had written, ‘It is a pump.’ He pushed the exam paper across the table so that I could see for myself and be as disappointed at my boy’s answer as he was. ‘What does the heart pump?’ he demanded angrily of my boy. ‘Blood,’ said my boy. ‘Well why the hell didn’t you put “blood”, then?’ Mr Troy gripped the edge of the table and slumped forward momentarily, a little pantomime signifying tedium, wasted effort, exhaustion. Then he prattled on for a bit longer about my boy not ‘contributing’ enough to classroom discussions. He didn’t bite, he said. If there was anything my boy didn’t understand he should feel free to speak to him after the lesson.
What Mr Troy failed to understand, however, was that neither of us were taken in by arseholes like him. Me and my boy watched his performance impassively, as we might watch an unusually extrovert gibbon behind the glass in the monkey house at Paignton Zoo. He dismissed us both, finally, with a quizzical look, dimly aware, perhaps, come the end, that our taciturnity was attributable to contempt rather than deference. ‘So what else might the heart pump?’ I said to my boy as we waited to see the next teacher. ‘Vanilla ice-cream? Shell Optimax?’ Next on the list was the English teacher. The inside information on him was that he had recently taken up karate. Instead of shaking his proffered hand, therefore, I bowed and said ‘Oss’ as I ought. And because he looked like a guy one could do business with, I asked him whether it was true what I’d read in the Daily Mail, that it was technically possible to pass the Shakespeare section of this year’s GCSE English exam simply by describing one’s own feelings.
He said that happily it was. Was it possible, then, I said, to fail the English GCSE exam? He’d be frank with me, he said. The only way actually to fail an English GCSE was for the child’s parents to take an appeal all the way to the House of Lords. However, these searching questions were possibly academic, he said, because the education authority was thinking about scrapping the GCSE examination system pronto and replacing it with something else. A signature beneath a copy of the European Declaration of Human Rights, perhaps? I said. A tick in a box more likely, he said.
I was getting the hang of the parents’ evening by now. We had about three minutes in front of each teacher before moving quickly on to the next one. It was a bit like speed dating. ‘I quite liked that last one,’ I said to my boy as we took our seats in front of the third and last teacher on our list, the physics teacher. ‘I’ve nothing to say about this boy,’ said this enormous beaming woman, ‘except that he’s unfailingly polite, always helpful and a pleasure to teach.’ Taking her literally, I thanked her, stood up again, and we took our leave. From start to finish, my boy’s parents’ evening had taken all of 12 minutes.
‘The function of the heart is to pump what?’ I said to my boy. ‘Blood,’ he said. ‘No. It’s cholesterol. Fish and chips?’ ‘That’d be nice,’ he said.
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