A tale of two teachers
When I was a teenager, PE lessons at school were the bane of my existence. Never the most sporty kid, I had to line up with the rest of my nerd friends and submit to the ritual humiliation of being sorted into teams to play football on a soggy pitch in suburban Nottingham.
I still remember the twice-weekly ordeal of the changing rooms: this felt like a no-man’s-land where the teachers—for obvious reasons—stayed well away from us, and a bunch of testosterone-addled sociopaths got to run wild for fifteen minutes. You kept your head down and got changed quickly, hoping that the target of abuse that week wouldn’t be you or your mates.
It wasn’t much better once you got out on the field to play. We had two PE teachers in my school: Mr Giles and Mr Mellor. Mr Giles was young, handsome and popular with everyone. Even us nerds looked up to him because he made it seem like with a bit of motivation, even us weirdos talking about Star Wars in the corner could develop a six-pack (or at least manage a few sit-ups).
Mr Mellor, on the other hand, was approaching retirement and clearly didn’t care too much about trying to engage with the less-motivated kids. In all honesty I don’t really blame him: the idea of trying to persuade a bunch of jaded teenagers to go and play rugby in November instead of surreptitiously listen to Linkin Park on someone’s Discman was an unwinnable task.
Back to the old school
In the end, he dragged us all out to the pitch and asked us to sort ourselves into two groups: the “more confident” players, and everybody else. He chaperoned the experienced rugby lads off to one end of the field, and left us rejects at the other end with a ball, a stopwatch, and some poor lad nominated to be the referee.
I remember Mr Mellor knew the nicknames of all the popular boys as well as their actual names, and they’d suck up to him shamelessly in return. While us loners, losers and layabouts tried to figure out the impenetrable rules of rugby—how do you form a scrum?!—he was off refereeing for the “more confident” players. Even at the time I could sense the injustice of it: we were the ones who needed the support, not them.
Mr Giles, though, he was a different kind of teacher. He caught me and some of my friends hanging around at the back of the group trying to avoid being picked to run laps of the athletics track. Noting my black nail polish (this was what I’ll fleetingly describe as my “goth era”), he asked us if our band was playing at the upcoming school concert, and confessed that he was once a teenage goth too, and told us to check out the Sisters of Mercy. The contrast couldn’t have been starker.
Staging an intervention
Later that school year I remember him spotting that a bunch of us weren’t getting much of a look-in during some other sport, and he moved things around so we could go inside and use the gym equipment in the leisure centre adjoining the school. Without anyone needing to spell things out, he’d figured out what was happening to us and found a way for us to save face and do something more enjoyable.
That same year, I got my school report back and found that Mr Mellor had written “Matthew has had a good summer learning to play basketball”, when of course I’d never once taken that class with him and he clearly had no idea who I was.
Seeing it from his perspective, again, I don’t blame him: I was never going to be a sporty kid and wouldn’t have stood out in his memory besides being one of the long-haired lads loitering at the back of the group. But the other teacher saw that too, and he found a way to meet us where we were, and make us feel seen.
I think about those two teachers and their different styles fairly often: what situations could I be in where I might be choosing the easy path for myself, because it’d be more fun for me or because I can’t be bothered to engage with someone different? Basically: what would Mr. Giles do?
Mini feels this week
The quiet poetry of, er, sending your mates stupid voice notes
Probably around the same time I was dodging PE lessons, my friends and I discovered a set of stupid Flash cartoons by David Firth (if you know, you know). Apropos of nothing I sent a voice clip of myself impersonating a random line from one of the cartoons to our group chat. Immediately someone else came back with a second one, then someone else did a third, and now we’re in danger of ruining the entire joke. Male banter can be dumb and repetitive and exclusive, but there’s also something extremely comforting about having a group of people with enough shared context and trust that you can send an out-of-context voice message in a stupid voice and immediately get one back. That’s my love language… possibly.
Thanks for reading – let me know if you have any memories of influential teachers who taught you something about how—or how not—to be a man. Share this newsletter with your friends if you like, and thanks for following!