Apathy Jack writes:

So, witnesses have come forward to verify allegations that Associate Minister of Education David Benson-Pope threw tennis balls at students, caned them until they bled, and, in one particular instance, stuck a (perforated) tennis ball in a student’s mouth and gaffer-taped his hands to the desk to prevent him removing it.

See, what the proles don’t understand is that sometimes the students need to be tied down and have tennis balls shoved down their noiseholes. That’s how teaching works.

Earlier today, in my Year 12 class, I was threatening to shoot a student with my staple gun, when she pointed out that there was a trainee teacher in the back of the room. The question came: “When you were training, did you ever see the person who trained you shooting students with staple guns?”

“Of course – Where do you think I learned this!”

So far, after watching two of my lessons, the trainee has seen me tell students to shut up, threaten them with various levels of bodily harm, hit sundry of them with, from memory, rolled up bits of paper, a Chinese paperback novel, and a range of hardcover exercise books, and repeatedly voice my desire to leave teaching to become a zookeeper, on the understanding that the animals would be easier to manage, and would smell better. Though I did exercise a remarkable amount of self-control and stop myself picking up a chair towards the end of one of the periods.

The next generation of teachers will learn The Correct Way Of Doing Things, dammit, and the children will be schooled.

(Actually, I do remember an incident from my long-ago days as a relief teacher. Some kids decided to tie one of their classmates to his chairs using their jerseys. Given that this kid was annoying me, I didn’t stop them. I don’t remember what he was doing that was so irritating, but I did have a faint flash of nervousness tonight at the thought that twenty years from now some kid whose face I don’t even remember might be on a current affairs show claiming torture...)

I must say, though, that a tennis ball on the end of an arrow is a brilliant innovation in the student-beating field – one that I’m going to have to investigate. (My school doesn’t have archery facilities, but I’m sure that one of the students will have an arrow that I can confiscate. Failing that, I’ll substitute the tennis-ball-on-arrow for the bowling-ball-on-softball-bat idea that I’ve been thinking about...)