Teachers will be back at work soon, so get ready for a lot of stress talk. But back in the learn-or-get-walloped days, when the words "teacher" and "stress" never appeared in the same sentence, I had a teacher who conducted geography classes as a kind of manic quiz show, with no prizes, only punishments.
"What river is Budapest on?"
"The Rhine. No, sorry, the Danube."
"Too late, too late," he'd cry and give you two whacks of a leather. He even got us to learn off by heart all 70 lines of Tennyson's Ulysses, without explaining anything, pausing only to mention that the phrase, "Myself not least", was an example of litotes or meiosis. There was no need to upset ourselves rummaging for hidden meanings. If anyone did raise a tricky point he was told it was a very good question and that we'd come back to it later. We never did.
But last year there were reports of kids taking tranquillisers to help them cope with pressure. And English teachers now have to get themselves all stressed up digging for themes in everything they read.
You know the kind of thing. You read The Daffodils, by Wordsworth, and then: "Now, what's that poem about?"
"It's about this man out walking and he sees all these daffodils and. . ." "Yes. But what's it about? What's the theme?" A hand goes up.
"It's about flowers".
"Yes, but why is he writing about flowers?"
"I dunno. Maybe he's a pansy."
This goes down very well with the hard men, who haw-haw like donkeys and start blowing kisses. Order is restored and another guy speaks up. He has just noticed that the third word is "lonely".
"He's lonely," he says.
The teacher is excited. A possible theme.
"Good. If the man is lonely, one theme might be. . . ?" He's waiting for someone to say "loneliness", when a hand goes up.
"The first line is a metaphor." "What's that got to do with it?"
"It says, 'I wandered lonely as a cloud'. That's a metaphor. 'As' and 'like' are used for metaphors."
"No, they're not."
"That's what you said yesterday."
"No I didn't! Can anyone tell him the difference between metaphors and similes?"
Nobody can, because nobody cares and by this time everybody is back talking about soccer or the latest Louis Walsh creation.
I am reminded of my own teaching days, when I was doing this theme business with a class, and I remarked that we had now done three poems in which, sometimes even obscurely, the theme of death was treated.
"What a f---ing subject," said a surly voice from the back.
Now, to tell the truth, I agreed with him. But there's no point being a teacher if you don't stand on your dignity a lot, so I went into stress mode, with a big rant about language and manners and civilisation. It killed the atmosphere stone dead, of course, and everyone got ratty and unco-operative. All over those lousy themes.
Earlier this year we were told that droves of people with masters' degrees and doctorates were giving up their fancy jobs and rushing to become teachers. Let's hope they have some of the serenity of those teachers down in Wexford who got their principal into trouble. When they had a class off, they didn't grind away correcting homework or preparing their next lesson. They just nipped off to another school and took extra classes there. Obviously those characters are wasting their time in classrooms. They should be running stress-avoidance sessions.
A teacher I knew once - let's call him James - also had that stress-free gift. He was always organising or refereeing school football matches, or attending "development meetings". Taking classes interfered with his busy life.
I was walking round the school with him during exams when we bumped into a crowd of students strolling round aimlessly. James was highly indignant.
"Where are you going? Why aren't you doing your exams?"
"We were told to leave the exam hall because there was no exam for us."
"Of course there was an exam for you. What subject should you have?" "Maths, Sir."
"And who's your Maths teacher?"
"You are, Sir."
Fazed? Not James. He just told them to find an empty room and wait there until the exams were over. Then he said to me, without a hint of irony: "They can do nothing for themselves. They have to be told everything."
Perhaps there would be less stress if life's weighty themes were treated by studying games, not poetry. Look what you get from a simple football match.
Somebody plays well, supports the others and scores the winning goal. Praise all round. Goodness and final reward. Heaven.
But the selfish player wants all the glory, ignores the others, and the team loses. Muttering, moaning and name-calling. The outer darkness. Hell.
A whole religious experience and nobody gets stressed or says a word about metaphors. You could even analyse the game next day in class, breaking it down to its component parts and using it all for homework.
You have now probably found the perfect way to stop them talking about football all day. It works with poetry, anyway.