What Was She Thinking? Read Online Free PDF Page A

minute?”
    At the time, I was aware of none of these particulars. But I received a general idea of Sheba’s troubles from the gleeful staff room hearsay. The word on Sheba was that she was a short fuse type. An exploder. One lunchtime, a fortnight into term, I overheard Elaine Clifford describing what one of her second-years had told her about Sheba. “The kids go wild on her apparently,” Elaine said. “She, like, begs them to be good. And then the next thing, she loses her rag. Curses at them. Bloody this and F that. All sorts.”
    This worried me a good deal. The head tends to be pretty soft on cursing. But, strictly speaking, uttering expletives in the presence of the children is a sackable offence. It is not so uncommon for teachers—particularly inexperienced ones—to start out negotiating with unruly pupils and then, when that approach fails, to resort abruptly to anger. But, in most cases,
these transitions have an element of calculated or affected ferocity. The teacher is performing rage. If children see someone like Sheba truly losing control—shouting, swearing, and so forth—they are delighted. They sense, not incorrectly, that a victory has been won. I wanted very much to take Sheba aside and tell her, tactfully, where she was going wrong. But I was shy. I didn’t know how to broach the matter without seeming like a busybody. So I kept my own counsel and waited.
    In Sheba’s third week at the school, a geography teacher called Jerry Samuels was patrolling the property for truants when he passed the Arts Centre and heard what sounded like a riot inside Sheba’s hut. When he went in to investigate, he found the studio in uproar. The entire second-year class was having a clay fight. Several of the boys were stripped to the waist. Two of them were endeavouring to topple the kiln. Samuels discovered Sheba cowering, tearfully, behind her desk. “In ten years of teaching, I’ve never seen anything like it,” he later told the staff room. “It was Lord of the Flies in there.”

2
     
     
    Y ou never appreciate what a compost your memory is until you start trying to smooth past events into a rational sequence. To make sure that I maintain maximum accuracy in this narrative, I have started putting together a time line of Sheba’s year at St. George’s. I store it-along with the manuscript—under my mattress at night. The time line is just a little thing on graph paper, but I believe it’s going to be very useful. Yesterday, I bought a packet of stick-on gold stars at the newsagent’s. I shall be using these to mark the truly seminal events. I’ve already used a star, for example, to indicate the first time that Sheba and I spoke in the staff room. After that, there’s a bit of a blank until Sheba’s fourth week at St. George’s, which is when, if my calculations are correct, she met Connolly for the first time.
    The occasion for this meeting was a session of the school’s Homework Club. Notwithstanding her difficulties in maintaining order, Sheba was expected to participate in the full range of staff duties—playground patrol, canteen shift, and, perhaps most daunting of all, Homework Club supervision. Haitch Cee, as it is known to the pupils, is held in a Middle Hall classroom every weekday, between the hours of 3:30 and
6:00 P.M. It was set up a few years ago by the head, with the official purpose of “providing a quiet working environment for those who might have difficulty finding one in their own homes.” It is a deeply unpopular institution among the staff, mainly because it tends to double as a dumping ground for children who have received detentions. Club supervisors usually find themselves having to deal with the school’s worst pupils at a point in the day when those pupils are at their most restive and difficult.
    There were ten children in the Homework Club on the afternoon that Sheba was supervising. Immediately after she began taking attendance, a violent dispute broke out