The Good, The Bad, And The Homicide-Inducing

I have a number of students who make me light up just by walking into the classroom. There's Sensitive, a lovely, quiet boy with a side parting and a propensity for wearing roll-neck jumpers; he blushes every time I talk to him, and after I recently found my name and a rather flattering cartoon of me surrounded by hearts in his textbook, I now know why. Then there's Sunshine, who won my heart in her very first lesson with me by telling me that her favourite hobby was, "smiling," - and she wasn't lying. There's Earnest, who works harder than any student I've ever known and always has her hand up, but regularly bursts into tears because it never seems to make a difference - she has an A* for effort and enthusiasm but an F for actual ability. There's Philosopher, a brilliantly imaginative boy who often teaches me things when he weaves in original ideas and information from books he's read or documetaries he's seen into his presentations, and who is desperately trying to cultivate a moustache in an incredibly endearing way. There's Mr Boombastic, a cheeky little so-and-so who tries to chat me up in class (in that very French, charming way) but who is all talk - he turns as red as a beetroot if I ever joke back to him.

And then there's Prima Donna*. She is a tall, willowy blonde who is naturally going to be a famous singer one day, so she doesn't need to worry about a silly little thing like English. Unfortunately, she's also the coolest kid in the class so everyone else follows her lead: when Prima Donna talks while I'm trying to explain something, so do all the others.

Every teacher has a student - usually more than one - who gets to them. I know various ex-teachers who, years on, still shudder when they say certain names aloud. My family and partner know Prima Donna's name well, such is the amount of dread and foreboding in my voice when I mention her - and I usually do have to mention her a lot. I will admit that her class have, on at least one occasion, driven me to tears - thankfully once they'd left the classroom - out of sheer frustration. One of the problems of being female is that it's difficult to be heard over lots of noise; if I raise my voice, it just becomes high-pitched and shrill. There's a reason Margaret Thatcher had to have training to lower the pitch of her voice if she wanted any hope of sounding authoritative in Parliament, or even of being heard at all.

So when you manage to finally get somewhere with a student like that, you could practically bottle the relief and euphoria that flows through you. There is a human child in that devil spawn after all!

It happened completely by accident. I'd planned a lesson on star signs and horoscopes, not expecting much, so I was amazed to hear Prima Donna say, "Ah, c'est cool, ça," when she read the sheet I'd given her. It turned out that she was massively into astrology, so she got stuck in to dissecting the character analysis for her star sign straight away. And where Prima Donna goes, the others follow and soon they were excitedly discussing their star signs and writing horoscopes for each other.

I couldn't believe it. I don't expect that it will last long, but it felt incredible when, instead of the usual pouts, churlish silence when asked a question and haughty looks, she even called me 'Madame' and asked about some of the vocabulary. God knows what'll happen in the next lesson - I obviously can't do the Zodiac every week - but I feel a little glimmer of hope at least.

As an added bonus, I asked them how many believed in their horoscopes and about a third did. Then I gave them what I told them was their horoscopes from the day before - in fact, I'd taken some from the internet over a month earlier and doctored them a bit. Almost all of them gasped about how spookily accurate they were; in the next vote, the number who said they believed in horoscopes doubled. I still haven't decided whether or not to 'fess up.



* Up until an embarrassingly late age, I had only ever heard this word spoken, and so I thought it was actually Pre-Madonna. It made sense to me: a wannabe diva who hadn't quite got there yet. It wasn't until I finally read the libretto of Phantom of the Opera that I realised my mistake...