The Rye Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

worth.
    â€˜Good luck!’
    He thanked her and smiled. Over her shoulder he could see the victor of the tug-of-war using the spade to smack his adversary. When he closed the door the butterflies seemed to hold a vibrant delicacy, almost as if at any second they might fly away.
    A few yards further down the corridor he called on Laura Fulton, the probationary teacher. He paused outside the door for a few seconds, listening to her voice, and when he entered she made a movement that was alarmingly close to a curtsey and then coloured with embarrassment. It was the first day of her first teaching job and when he looked at her he was unsettled momentarily by how young she looked – a slip of a girl with brown eyes and thick black wiry hair pulled into a ponytail, standing in front of a room full of children. She wore a red top with black silhouettes jogging across it and matching red cords, and she looked so fresh that he smiled longer than he meant to. Behind her the class stared at him, wide-eyed, and the children grouped round circular tables who had their backs to him swivelled on their chairs.
    â€˜Well, Laura, how’s it been going? Ready to jack it in yet? They say the first ten years are the worst.’
    She laughed and lightly flicked her ponytail out of her collar.
    â€˜ It’s going quite well. I’ve been reading to them and they’ve been very good. It’ll be easier when I learn all their names.’
    He was glad he had a probationary teacher. If she possessed any aptitude at all for the job he would help her become a good teacher, help her understand what it was all about and in return he would gain her loyalty. It was a pity she would never realise that he had saved her from Reynolds. The children had started to talk, some chairs scraped and she was glancing anxiously at the class, worried that the rising current of noise was a reflection on her control. Turning her head sideways she gave them a loud shush.
    â€˜Noise isn’t such a terrible thing. It just means they’re still alive.’ He told her his joke about the cross-eyed teacher who couldn’t control his pupils and then she asked if she was to show him her lesson plans each week.
    â€˜I sincerely hope not. I’ll look at them if you want, but I’m happy for you to get on with the job and we’ll talk at regular intervals about how things are going. I see, too, there’s a probationers’ induction course during the year, but a fat lot of use it’ll do you, and I know because I’ve taken two of them. They always end up as a bitching session where everyone swops their horror stories, compares the size of their classes and number of free periods, then either goes away feeling hard done by or counting themselves lucky. But nobody really learns anything.’
    She was looking up at him, her brown eyes and unbroken attention encouraging him to flow on.
    â€˜The classroom’s the only place you can learn. In teaching there’s lots of ways that are wrong but there’s no one right way, so be confident, step out, don’t be frightened to make mistakes and learn from them. That’s what it’s all about.’
    She thanked him and the genuineness of her tone made him feel good. Two small girls came up hand in hand and one of them said that her friend needed to go to the toilet. He held the door open for them and took his leave, watching the children’s diffident progress down the corridor, unused to being out on their own.
    Mrs Patterson appeared. There was a phone call for him in the office – a sales rep trying to sell him a new reading scheme which was supplemented by a range of computer software. He listened politely for a while and then declined the package as being outside the range of his budget. There was a parent waiting to collect her daughter who had been sick and he offered sympathy and made some comment about first day nerves. There were more returns and an