BigMrJosh's Guide to being an Outstanding Relief Teacher

If you’re a teacher, you’re probably used to using the internet to find helpful websites that tell you the important parts of a speech or how to teach fractions or why Trinidad and Tobago has two names. (I suggest the classy blend of Trinibago).

But what about those teachers who are thinking of stepping back from the teacher rat race of reports, meetings, using the internet and generally being responsible for children’s learning? What about those teachers who want to become relievers? Where are the helpful websites for them?

Actually, those sites are available too. This one seems pretty reasonable. This lady has some great practical ideas for relieving equipment. Then there’s this one, who thinks a good reliever is someone who tidies the teacher’s desk for them. But none of these sites really tell it like it is. Even google doesn’t understand, because I did a search for ‘good relief teacher’ and all I could find was pictures of happy children. That’s not what relief teaching is about.

 I’m going to write all those sites a cheque, and I’m going to make it out to ‘reality’, because I would hate to think that all that I have learnt in the last 3 terms could go to waste.

Bask in my wisdom!

Be the Boss

I have heard that in prison (I have never been to prison. Generally, prison and working with children don’t mix) the first day you arrive you should identify the biggest toughest guy (or, you know, lesbian, if it’s a womens prison) in the whole joint. Then you should file your toothbrush down to a fine point and stab them in the exercise yard. This analogy is as good a starting place as any when you are a reliever.

A good reliever will look like this.

A good reliever will develop almost a radar sense that lets them know which children are going to make you want to pull your hair or their hair out. The first thing you must then do is catch that kid being sufficiently bad that you can justify making an example of them. If that means you have to plant marijuana in their pencil case then I’m sure nobody would hold that against you. Once you have thrown out the ringleader, the rest of the class is in the palm of your hands for at least 13 minutes. Then you’ll probably have to throw another kid out. Actually, if you can stick to that pace you will end the day with a class of 4 and they will all be girls who just want to read books about horses or impress you with their acrostic poetry about how cool you are.

Remuneration

Instead of using money, the government likes to pay teachers with the satisfaction of a job well done and a side serving of telling the entire profession that they could be doing better. (You know, you teachers could also be feeding and clothing these kids and maintaining their emotional security, while you’re at it.)

So why do teachers do all this? I don’t remember, because being a reliever has destroyed my brain’s ability to remember good times. But there’s some good news! You will get paid better than a regular classroom teacher.  That’s because you don’t get any holiday pay and there is a chance that on a given day no local teacher will require a mental health recharge, so there is some uncertainty about your income. Certainty of income is for wage slaves and sissies; relievers learn how to hunt and kill their own meals during those lean times like the start of term and long weekends.

Attitude to Children

I’ve already discussed how teachers get to do everything short of wiping a kid’s butt for a mid-level salary. Why do teachers do this? I asked my wife who, against all odds, cares about children still. She told me it’s because they actually care about children and want to ensure they don’t all suck at everything they do. There’s also some stuff about the look of joy on kids’ faces when they master a new piece of learning.( I personally think that’s a myth. I’ve never seen that.)

It’s tricky, though, because when you make the move to reliever you need to do the exact opposite. That look of joy thing, you still get that as a reliever. But it’s more like the look of joy that you would see on the face of a child who has just been given a piñata in the shape of a teacher. As far as they are concerned, you are their bitch for the day. In Star Wars, the Jedi are generally friendly chaps who do the right thing and ask themselves WWYD (What Would Yoda Do). Then Darth Vader comes along. He was a Jedi, but then he spent a day as a relieving teacher and turned to the Dark Side.

KEESH. Turn to page 17, children. KEESH. You! Zip it! KEESH.

The point I’m trying to make here is that relieving teachers are the dark side of teaching. We have to not care about children. That’s our job. Kids can smell caring, and it makes them savage. Plus, how can you care about kids whose names you don’t even know? That’s why I usually refer to kids as ‘blue t-shirt’ or ‘Spongebob’ or ‘Elf-ears’ or ‘Gingivitis’. Really any distinguishing feature is fair game.

Hours

When you meet a teacher, you may be inclined to say, “Wow, I bet you love working 6 hours a day and being on holiday all the time!”  My stock response to that aspersion when I was a regular teacher was, “Wow, you must love getting punched in the face!”

However, as a reliever I get to perpetuate this myth by actually leaving when the kids do! What I like to do is have them pack everything up a little bit early, then race them out the gate when the bell goes. My record so far is leaving 6 minutes before the bell that marks the end the day.

I should also mention that relievers get to have all those fancy holidays everyone talks about, but since you don’t get paid to take them are they really holidays? I just call them being unemployed.

Punishment

Inevitably you will have to deal with misbehaving children as a relief teacher. Personally, I like to take it back to the old school. After all, I’m usually the only male teacher half of the kids I get will have before high school, so I might as well also be the only teacher who hands out draconian punishments the likes of which they will never see again.

Here are a smattering of my favourites.

Ironic Lines

The teacher writes this on the board:

God, I hate writing lines. Why do I do this to myself. Every. Single. Time? The teacher said quite clearly to stop throwing that pencil around, and what did I do? Damn it. I feel such a sense of remorse and failure right now...

Copy anywhere from 1-20,000 times, depending on how much caffeine you’ve had. When they hand them to you upon completion, make sure to scrutinize them carefully for exactly one second before savagely screwing them into a paper ball and tossing their agonising work straight into the paper bin.

Sit Outside

Always put them by a window where you can see them. This one works best when it’s lightly raining. I do give the kid a chair though. I’m not a monster.

Dictionary Time!

The dictionary is such a rich and versatile source of punishment. Try all of these and pick your favourite.

Tell S to start at a word like ‘nuisance’ or ‘disruption’ or some other such significant word and keep copying until you tell them to stop. This has the bonus of improving their vocabulary.

Give them a page number (I like page 56) and tell them to write all the digraphs. If, like me you don’t know what a digraph is, that just makes it more interesting.

Give them a list of words that epitomise their behaviour and tell them to find their page numbers in the dictionary. Then get them to write a story using all of those words correctly, on pain of death.

Student Archetypes

There are some common elements in most classrooms, and early recognition is the key to prevention. Memorise this information, lest you meet these students one dark day.

The Chair Chucker – As a relief teacher you will need to be adept at defusing tense situations. A staple in New Zealand schools is the chair chucker. I suggest this course of action for dealing with them.

S: (chucks a chair.)

T: I see you are good at chucking chairs. But catching is really key, because I’m good at chucking chairs too. How are you at catching chairs?

Nameless Student – Ever been unsure of a student’s name, but you're pretty sure it’s not Justin Bieber, like they keep telling you? I will call a child whatever name they give me for the entire day, even when the novelty has worn off for them. I will try to work a sneer in with it each time though.

Even better is when two kids decide to swap names for a day. This makes them feel invincible. This doesn’t bother me either, because I will call James - whose real name is Luke – James for the whole day. And if James should incense me enough to get his name on the detention list, imagine how Luke - whose real name is James – will feel when I pass that name onto the teacher? They have unwittingly shackled themselves together chain gang style!

The Helper – Almost every class has that one student who knows in their heart that you are a gibbering moron and that their teacher would never rely on you alone to run their class. They will correct you on every nuance of the daily programme that you have missed.

It will start something like this:

T: Nicola. Is Nicola here?

The Helper: Nicola usually comes late.

T: I don’t care.

Helper: When Miss is here she waits for a few minutes, and then marks the roll again when Nicola arrives. And it’s Ni-CO-la, not NI-cola.

T: Right, so today we are going to do some maths and some writing and some other cool stuff. (Sees helper with hand desperately reaching for the sky.) Sigh. Yes?

Helper: You forgot to change today’s helper name on the board.

T: I will kill you.

As you will see in the above example, there is only one course of action when dealing with the helper. You must do the exact opposite of whatever they suggest. Eventually they will recognise the futility of their actions.

The Stupid Kid – This is the kid sitting in the corner trying to use their left nostril as a pencil sharpener and their right nostril for a gold mine. Then realising they can't breathe. If this kid is in your class all year they are a constant source of anguish and bemusing horror for their teacher. But for a reliever the stupid kid just provides a day of light-hearted slapstick hilarity. Enjoy!

Questions and Answers

Here I will provide some typical questions that you will be asked as a reliever and some possible answers you may want to use.  Please note that not all of these questions are questions and not all of these answers are appropriate. In this section, S stands for student and T stands for teacher, and if you were unable to crack that code without reading this bit then you need to be working in the fine professions of chemical testing or medical science. As a test case.

S: This is booooooring.

T1: You know what’s boring? Your face.

T2: I’m sorry, your teacher actually arranged for a clown to come and entertain you, but I assassinated him and took his place.

T3: Can you even spell boring? Good, find it in the dictionary and write out the definition 80 times, once for every decibel of annoying you just fired into my ear holes.

S: Where’s ooooour teacheeeeeer?

T1: Passed out blind drunk on the couch if your behaviour today is any indication.
T2:The Principal received a phone call from your teacher this morning that consisted of four minutes  of screaming before the line went dead. Then they called me.

S: Annoying student stole my rubber/pencil/thunder/lunch/soul/rugby cards/mojo/ruler!

T1: And?

T2: I would break their jaw. But you probably shouldn’t.

T3: Your class stole the pigmentation from my hair. Do you see me complaining?

S: Our teacher aaaaalways lets us do this.

T1: If I did everything your teacher did I wouldn’t be here right now and would subsequently be much  

happier.

T2: Either your teacher is an idiot or you think I am an idiot. Which is it? By the way, if you tell me your

teacher is an idiot I am lawfully bound to report it to the Principal. If you tell me I am an idiot. Well... we’ll see what happens, won’t we. Go.

The Nintendo Seal of Parenting

Some people say that divorce is damaging to children, but I consider myself lucky. It meant that I was raised by three parents: a mother, a father and a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

There are literally tens of books about parenting as a Mum or Dad, if you are interested in that sort of thing. (A few parents of kids I teach could stand to maybe pick one of these up some time.) But not much attention is paid to the important lessons children learn from that third, some would say ‘completely inappropriate’ parent. But what those stuffy blowhards don’t realise is that the NES taught many valuable life lessons to my brother and I, its willing disciples.

Sure, we learnt practical stuff, like if you run into a tree hard enough a fairy might fall out, or the benefits of plumbing as a means of cutting down on your transport time.

But we also learnt a lot of abstract concepts. Nintendo helped us become better people. Well, helped me.

Lesson #1: Be a Goddamn Man

Nowadays every second Nintendo game is about grooming your horse or getting your hamster from the vet to the mall before the timer counts down to homework. But 20 years ago the only reason a horse would be in a Nintendo game was because you would be riding it into the middle of a massive battle against a 12-foot Pig-god; a hamster even less likely, unless maybe it had been mutated into a fierce warrior. Back then, games were made for men, and by men I mean pre-teen boys. In a very-hard-to-find game entitled Earthbound (or Mother, if you’re Japanese. No, I don’t know why) you learnt that when aliens invade the Earth with the help of local gangsters, it’s up to a bunch of cap-wearing kids wielding baseball bats and yoyos to protect the populace. That’s called responsibility, bitches.

A-well, better grab ourselves some baseball bats and yo-yos, mosey on down to that there meteorite and beat the tar outta whatever comes out.

Lesson #2: If at First You Don’t Succeed

Remember the Virtual Boy? No, but with good reason. It was terrible. What if Nintendo had thrown their toys out of the cot after the resounding failure of the Virtual Boy? We never would have seen the likes of the Nintendo 64, the Gamecube or the Wii! Remember that time, I wrote that blog that sucked? Me neither, they’re all solid gold. But in the event that that happened would I give up? No way! Because another thing Nintendo has shown me is that persistence is key.

Lesson #3: Modify your Expectations

The first game I chose to buy myself for my NES was Legend of Zelda, which pretty much set my life on its present course. I was taken by the gold box, by the gold case and I was also intrigued by the little gold ‘Nintendo Seal of Quality’ starburst. ‘This seal is your assurance that NINTENDO has approved and guaranteed the quality of this product,’ it said reassuringly. That’s nice.

I think it was about 2006 that Nintendo realised that consumers don’t want quality interactive entertainment. What they want is to spend all their disposable income on games developed poorly by Korean developers. Hold on though! What about the Nintendo Seal of Quality, guaranteeing the quality of the games released for Nintendo systems? It turns out that employing that clairvoyant division was a great idea, because 14 years earlier Nintendo removed the words ‘approved and guaranteed’ from its seal (which had since also been renamed simply Nintendo Official Seal) And replaced them with ‘evaluated and approved.’ In all honesty, that is still a little bit optimistic for some of the stuff coming out nowadays. It’s only a matter of time until the Nintendo Seal will represent that ‘Nintendo has recorded on the back of a napkin that this game exists and will be unable to look you in the eyes while they sell it to you.’ Even though it’s not always for the best, Change is constant.

Lesson #4: A Hundred Bucks!

Have you ever paid $150 for a video game? It’s getting a little excessive, in my opinion. I’m no economist, but if games keep going up in price by $20-$25 every generation, I may have to revise my cryogenic head-freezing life insurance plan. Because who wants to be revived in 3027 just to find that Final Fantasy 607 is going to cost $28000?

Games have always been expensive though. Back in the NES days it used to cost me $100 for a new game. That’s $100 Australian. This is how much I paid for the Addams Family back in 1991. I don’t know how I got such a sum of money at the ripe old age of 9, probably through a combination of plaintive begging and the mowing of 1100 lawns. I put my money down and took my new game home, reading the instruction book from cover to cover in the car (because you had to read the instructions back then). At home, I put the game in the machine and fired it up. Then I turned it off, ejected the game, blew into the end of it, put it back in and turned the machine back on.

The amount of time it took me to do all of this is pretty much equivalent to how long it took me to ‘clock’ (win) the game. That’s right; I dropped the GDP of Micronesia on about an hour’s entertainment. I could have played the game again, but since replay value wasn’t invented until 1996, there wasn’t much point.

From this I learned... um... that hard work is its own reward? The value of a dollar? Truth be told, I’m still pretty dark on the whole thing.

You can see in this screenshot that the player has no money and only three lives, which means they have only just started and, paradoxically, have nearly finished the game.

Freckles, Part 4

I have had one request for me to continue Freckles. Which, by the way, is all I need! So here it is, the fourth installment in a planned series of 3. Sigh.

So, not a bull fighter. In fact my calling was something entirely new. In 2010 it’s hard to find anything new; most things are third generation at least. And more than that, I was unique. Blazing a trail, a modern day Lewis. Or Clark. Whichever was better. But early on we were still finding our way. And as a 9 year-old boy I could never have imagined the strange path my life would take.

My suspicions were confirmed: we had picked up a trail. With a hard copy of Mr Tonkin’s face, it was a simple matter to draw and decode his freckle map. As Cory’s freckles had led us to Mr Tonkin, so did Mr Tonkin’s freckles lead us to Jessie Masterson, eventually. Our difficulty once again was in the fact that the freckles provided us with a location, not a person. A high school girl who worked behind the counter at the Kilgore street corner dairy Fridays after school and all day Sunday, Jessie was a hard one to pin down. Several fruitless afternoons were spent lurking around the dairy awaiting signs of freckles. By the third day the elderly owner had convinced himself that Cory and I were trying to rob him and he chased us out with vague threats to call the police and/or our parents, interspersed with healthy doses of profanity. Undeterred, we mustered our courage and returned, luckily just in time to catch Jessie about to begin her shift.

I could tell within moments of speaking to her that she saw us as just two goofy kids, playing around. But she was prepared to humour us, so that suited our purpose fine. Our experience with Mr Tonkin had proven that the disposable camera was an indispensible piece of equipment for our task, probably even more so than the permanent marker. To think that complete strangers would happily let us ‘join the dots’ on their faces was rather naive. To have a photo taken by two strangers wasn’t exactly normal either, but our chances of success were upped considerably. Jessie was old enough for her features to have begun their bloom into a beautiful adulthood and young enough to luxuriate in the attention. Her wavy red hair stretched halfway down her back and framed her face like one of those rings of fire that lions jump through. But there was nothing leonine about her face. Her lips were soft and prone to curling up in a quick, cheeky grin as she spoke to us.  Thinking us nothing more than young admirers, she was more than happy to not only provide us with a photograph but to pose stylishly for it. I still have the photo of Jessie Masterson, one leg tucked demurely behind the other as she leaned against the dirty white walls of the Kilgore street corner dairy. Starting with her, I began to print two copies of each photo, one to mark the freckles and one to keep. What happened to her I do not know.

Nowadays we keep a database so we can maintain contact with all of our ‘freckles’, which has become both a name for the group as a whole and the feature that makes them of interest to us. 

Together, Cory and I collected 46 more pieces of the puzzle before the day when the inevitable happened. You can only photograph strangers for so long before you get on someone’s bad side. A young mother took offense at Cory and I trying to surreptitiously photograph her stroller-bound toddler. And she called the police on us. For some reason they did not believe that our motives were pure. With the agreement of our parents, who had been putting up with our freckles obsession for many years now, we spent a night in the cells. That was where Cory told me that he was done. He no longer wanted to catalogue the freckles of the world with me. I begged. I pleaded too, but to no avail. By the time my Mum came to pick me up the following morning, Cory was already gone. 

Our friendship would not recover.

BigMrJosh’s Guide to How Not to Name your Band

Every 8 minutes, I have a great idea for a name for a band. I retain that great idea for about 3 minutes. As yet, I have been unable to form a band within that time frame. But when I do, I want to be ready.

Coming up with the right name for your band is absolutely crucial. After all, most listeners will hear the name of your band before they see how awesome your beard is. First we need to be aware of the don’t dos.

Spelingmistayks and other assorted grammatical no-nos.

No matter what Facebook, Twitter and every rapper on the planet are trying to tell you, don’t be fooled: bad spelling is not cool. Removing vowels from a word is equally not cool, and if you think it is, try reading this: nqvcl. That’s right, it says unequivocal. Don’t know what unequivocal means? That’s cos you’re spending all your time writing texts like ‘OMG, mi m8s r so awsum!!!!’ (Actually, I put a comma in there, so it’s not as bad as it could be.) What was my point again? Oh yeah, read a goddamn book!

There used to be this band, right, and they were called Limp Biscuit. No one knew what that name meant, but that was okay, ‘cause it didn’t stop there. In an effort to make it even more incomprehensible, they decided everything should be in lower case (limp biscuit) and then maybe just misspell the whole thing (limp bizkit). Finally, to really ram it home, let’s remove that pesky space in the middle. That gives us the utterly perfect name limpbizkit. My understanding has always been that ‘biz’ is short for business. So a ‘biz kit’ would have maybe a notebook, a stapler, some pens, that sort of thing. They may as well have called their band floppysuitcase.

Dishonourable Mentions: Linkin Park, lostprophets

Numbas 6000!

15 years ago, all you had to do was add some kind of number to the end of your band’s name and you were automatically 1.5 times more awesome - What the hell, 311’s whole band name was just a number! But this is no longer the case. Adding numbers to the end of your band name is now just recognised for what it really is: a desperate attempt to add mystique and possibly length to your band’s name.

Dishonourable Mentions: Blink 182, Sum 41, Powerman 5000)

What The?

What about if we add ‘The’ to the name? That’s a word that’s definitely underutilised in English. What do you notice about the following band names when you take the 'the' away? That's right, they suck. When 'the' is the most important part of your band's name, you have not hit on a winner.

Dishonourable mentions: The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Killers, The List Goes On... (Not a band name. But it totally could be.)

Rude!

You can get out of a limousine with no panties on all you like, but if you decide to call your band something like Da Cunnilinguists 6000, expect 17 U.S States to set your billboards on fire.

Okay, enough theory, let’s get real.

Some Real Life Naming Mistakes for you to Learn From!

Lady Antebellum – Classic bad naming. This is a two-part name, one word of which is clearly made up. So I’m going to focus on the lady part. First, let us consider the 1:2 ladies to beards ratio. Clearly beards are more prominent in this band. I get that they wanted to emphasise that there is a lady in the band, because everyone loves ladies, but perhaps a more appropriate name would be ‘Lady Beardface’ or ‘The Bearded Ladies.’ Both those names, I think you’ll agree, are still sexy, whilst being more representational of the overall image of the band.

Even after a totally democratic vote, the one in the middle refused to grow a beard.

Eve6 – Naming your band after an episode of the X Files is cool. Until the X Files starts to suck and you’re still putting out records. And then the X Files finishes and you’re just three guys making music who gave their band a girl’s name and a goddamn number.

"So guys, what happened to the other three ‘Eves’?"

Funeral for a Friend – Why a super awesome Welsh Alternative band would name themselves after an Elton John song I will never know. I mean, that’s not even close to the same as Radiohead naming themselves after a Talking Heads song. What I do know is, whenever you look up Funeral for a Friend on the internet, Google decides that you’re gay.

I’d wear black and look all morose too if guys kept posting photos of themselves in frilly pink g-strings on my fan page.

Name it!

This is all well and good, you say, but it doesn’t help me name my band! Salvation is impending! When I was younger, Marvel comics used to be made of paper, and at least one page per issue was devoted to Stan Lee rambling on about whatever he felt like. Kind of like this blog, actually. (Mental note: find and emulate Stan Lee’s blog) But in one issue, his innermost thoughts took a hiatus and instead my young brain was rocked by the superhero name generator!

Its methodology was simple: two columns, one column made up entirely of adjectives and verbs, the other of sweet animals or other awesome nouns like ‘volcano’.

The same principle can be applied to naming your band. Just choose one word from the first column and one word from the second column.

Column One Column Two

Lady Beardface

Sweet Volcano

Smashing Leopard

Terrific Dandelion

Dynamite Pumpkins

Cincinnati Bowtie

Tiny Monster

Extreme Phallus

Spider Man

Total Fat

Thrashing Butterfly

Some of these combine to make actual band names, which is as close to proof as I am interested in having in this blog.