PART FOURTEEN OF SCHOOLTIME SCANDALS: OVER THE HILL, BUT NOT QUITE OVER 'THE DALE'...

Nah, she wasn't this hot - almost

Her name was Miss Dale, and she was seriously

sexy.  Small, blonde, early 20s, she usually wore a blue
denim mini-skirt and also indulged in some serious sadism
that too many teachers of the period were prone to.  She'd
a nasty habit of punching your arm several times to empha-
sise whatever point she was making, and I certainly wasn't
the only kid who suffered from a bruised upper limb in
her class.  Where did such rage come from?

One day, she decided to test our spelling by reading

out words to the class, so that we could then write them in

our jotters to be marked by her diminutive, angry self.  One

of the words she uttered was 'yawn', which, due to my famil-

iarity with MARVELs' THOR, I took to be 'yon' and thus

wrote it in my jotter accordingly.  She then collected our

efforts and sat at  her desk to evaluate them, while we

busied ourselves with something else.

After a while, she called me out to her desk and be-
rated me for seemingly misspelling the word, then belted

me with the tawse - solely for what she considered my lack

of spelling ability, not because I was cheeky or anything.  50-

odd years later, I now know just what an utterly inept teacher

she was not to have considered the possibility that I'd been

thinking of another, perfectly legitimate, phonetically

similar word to the one she'd had in mind.

Surely her response should have been:  "There's two

words pronounced that way, define the one you mean."

Then it would've been a simple case of me explaining exactly

what word I'd had in mind, and her then asking me to spell the

other, the one she was looking for.  The fact was, I'd spelt the

word properly, it was just a different word to the one she'd

been thinking of.  And yet that glaringly obvious possi-

bility never occurred to her.  What a thicko.

I did learn a few valuable lessons that day 'though.

Firstly, that teachers weren't always right;  secondly, that

Miss Dale, 'though sexy, was a bitch - and thirdly, there's
no way clearly hormonal people should ever be tasked with
imparting knowledge to any group of children, when their
main method of teaching seems to consist of punching

and belting them until they 'learn' things.

This was primary school, mind, so we're not talk-
ing about teachers having to deal with surly and unruly

teenagers - we're talking children of only 8 or 9 years old.

What the hell were educationalists thinking of back then?
As I've said before, kids today don't have a clue about
just how lucky they are compared to ourselves.

As for Miss Dale?  I have absolutely no recollection

of ever seeing her again after I left primary.  Maybe she

left before I did.  However, it would be nice if she learned

how to manage her anger issues and went on to become, at

the very least, a competent (and kinder) teacher.  The

alternative simply doesn't bear thinking about.

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