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standing at the back. The noise was like a local football derby, and only for a stunning Polish girl running up and presenting me with flowers at the door, I probably would have wet a portion of my new trousers. Sheplanted a kiss on each cheek, which took me by surprise, and, after exchanging a few words of welcome, dashed away into the mob like a startled deer before I could even get her phone number.
    I took a seat near the front, nodding keenly at random individuals along the way, doing my best to look as if I already belonged. But I could feel the eyes behind me, along with the giggles and whispers and the prods of fingers in mid-air.
    It was natural for the girls to be staring, surely. Not only was I the sole foreigner on the staff, I was also the youngest and, by the looks of it so far, the only male. It was an enviable position to be in, if it weren’t for the fact that this was a school and I had a responsible position in it. I focused on the prospect of having to get up in front of all these girls and make them learn the English language. That, and the appearance of another young male teacher, soon drove any other thoughts out of my head.
    The ceremony began with what I gathered to be the National Anthem and a student body, consisting of four girls dressed in white blouses and short black skirts, marching in from the corridor with a flag. I couldn’t keep my eyes off them, distracted only when I had to stand and bow as the director introduced me as the new English teacher. Finally, after various speeches and applauses, the student body stood again with the flag and the whole assembly filed out and into theclassrooms.
    Lessons actually began quite well. At least, I was able to remain reasonably composed. I had been practising a strut of confidence on my empty corridor, and the technique of not looking up until I was at the desk with the ledger open. I remembered teachers in school who did this, and they were all bastards. Not that I wanted to be a bastard, but there was just something authoritative about it, I felt. That technique didn’t last too long. Ignoring the students at the beginning of each lesson is a bad way to start.
    In the beginning, it was all trial and error of course. When you walk into a foreign class for the first time you don’t know how good their English is. So you rant on anyway, until you realise they haven’t a clue what you’re saying. Staring back at you wide-eyed like budgies on a perch, their awful silence steadily creeps into a whisper before lurching forward into chaos. Before you know it, you’ve lost control of thirty-five teenage girls. And you won’t get it back. It is the longest forty-five minutes you will ever have to live through. Because of a few pretty bad days early on, I learned a number of basic rules quite quickly.
    You have to learn all their names. That means all of them. There is nothing as devastating for a teenager than to be the only one who appears to have been forgotten by the teacher. It is like having a bad skin disease or some horrendous smell disorder. So, I askedthem all to write their names down on large pieces of paper and place them on their desks in the mornings.
    The word got round the school quite quickly that this was my method, and immediately all the girls in the new classes had made large name tags from pieces of white card. By day two it had almost become a competition. Almost. Some were fastidiously coloured in, with flowers, the seaside or pictures of an eye winking with long lashes. Others were simply scrawls. I could quite quickly separate the more diligent and creative students from the layabouts, simply by the amount of effort they put into these name cards, and was quite proud of my early forays into classroom psychology.
    The first ten minutes of every lesson was taken up with me making an arse of myself trying to pronounce their names and admiring their handiwork. But I was quite prepared to make an arse of