The Science Teacher that Disappeared
In around 2009, when I was about to go to university to do a humanities degree, the news media was full of people asking why kids weren’t interested in science anymore. The way the conversation was framed, it always made out that it was kids’ faults for not being interested in science. We all wanted to be on TV and be famous. We’re all airhead millennials. That’s the explanation.
But then I thought back to how science was taught at my school and realised: hang on a second: in my school we had over 20 science teachers over a 3 year period. And these weren’t just substitute teachers. We started the year, had a guy who said he would be our science teacher for the year, and then he ran off and quit a few months later. At one point biology was being taught by a Maths teacher until they could find someone to fill the post.
I know of at least two science teachers from my school who got fired for watching porn on school computers. There was also a completely different one that the kids used to call ‘pervert man’. I don’t know the story behind that.
By contrast, the humanities department was full of wonderful teachers that I have really fond memories of. Science and humanities were like night and day at my school.
With an experience like that: is it any wonder I never showed any interest in science? If kids don’t like science anymore, its probably not just a millennial thing, the nation’s lack of people interested in science goes back generations.
There’s only one science teacher from this period whose name I remember now. Her name was Miss Shenell. We had her for three weeks in 2004.
Like all science teachers we had, she was hopeless. She was an older woman with long white hair in an unironed white blouse that looked like it was made out of crepe paper. She had very wrinkled skin on her forehead that made it look like she was always frowning. She had a light and airy voice that made it sound like she was speaking from far away inside a tunnel.
She couldn’t control the class at all. She was meant to be teaching us biology, and of course, a bunch of teenagers being taught about how different animals reproduce are all going to start giggling and refuse to let the teacher get a word is edgeways. She handed around a scan of a worksheet showing two chickens having sex that made everyone burst out laughing.
After three weeks, we all showed up to our lesson as scheduled. Miss Shennell didn’t arrive, so we all sat talking to each other.
Soon, it was 10 minutes past time and Miss Shennell still wasn’t there. I was doodling in the margins of my notebook. Someone took out speakers and connected them to a CD player and started playing music.
About half an hour later, a small group of school admin people came in, who’d had complaints that our class was being noisy. They all looked confused and were looking through bits of paper.
“Who’s your teacher?” they asked.
“Miss Shennell,” we all responded, and they looked confused.
There WAS no Miss Shennell. They had no record of ever employing a Miss Shennell. They were confused because a different science teacher had apparently been double-booked to take this class for the last three weeks and it took until now for someone to realise the mistake.
We never saw Miss Shennell again.
So yeah, that was my secondary school science experience. Two fired for porn and one was a ghost.
