"My daughter got the mail today (it's Sunday), apparently they have another week off

FredG · 6 January 2016 at 11:42AM

DaftyDuck wrote: »

Many years ago, a schoolteacher criticised my essay writing as being "unconvincing". I thought it was a really rather good essay. As did several classmates, and my father, who was a professional author of many years and writer of many academic books. When I pointed out to said teacher that he had corrected a spelling mistake that was, in fact, correctly spelled, he gave me a detention, so I could "learn from my mistakes...".

{I really did not like that teacher, not just for this. He was a physical bully who delighted on picking on certain children, and reducing them to tears. He named, in class, a friend of mine, with bad acne, "Spotted {"rude" abbreviation of Richard}", a name that hung over him, and crippled him, for years... I admit, I did not like that teacher....}

So, I nicked some school headed notepaper. I wrote a redundancy letter to that teacher. I expressed regrets, complimented him on his many years service, his communication skills, his forward-thinking, and regretted that, owing to Departmental cuts, the school were forced to take the unfortunate step of parting ways. I wished him all the best in finding a new position which, I assured him, he would have little difficulty in finding. I stated that the school expected him to clear his desk by the end of the week, and that a small leaving "do" would be held to mark the occasion.

It took most of the next day before he discovered it was not genuine. He was pole-axed by it. Several other members of staff started suggesting who might be next in line for the chop. It was only when rumour reached the Deputy Head that enquiries were made, and the letter revealed as a fake.

I suspect he suspected who had written it; luckily (for me) I was never asked directly. However, I suspect he found my writing style rather ... convincing.

He remained a deeply unpleasant bully long after I had left.

This is fantastic. I was a bit of a chancer at school too.

We had an English lesson where our regular teacher who was quite relaxed was too ill to come in and unfortunately was replaced by the head of the department who was basically a bulldog.

Not much got past him and unfortunately he came up with the excellent idea to collect homework as students exited the classroom at the end of the lesson.

Unfortunately my best friend and I had already been in a bit of trouble in the year and decided rather than await in the procession of 25 students all handing in their homework (which as we blatantly hadn't done it we couldn't do) we'd escape the fate by exiting through the window.....from the 1st floor!

It was only a 9-10 foot drop so we hung from the ledge and dropped and got a heroic round of applause from a group of Year 7's.

He didn't notice our escape and was baffled when we handed in the late homework the next day. We felt like Indiana Jones. To this day I can't believe some of the stuff we got up to at school and still came out relatively respectable.