My Shit Life So Far by Frankie Boyle

Author:Frankie Boyle
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Humor, Entertainment & Performing Arts, General
ISBN: 9780007324514
Publisher: Harpercollins Uk
Published: 2010-06-22T10:00:00+00:00

My main teaching placement was at a school in Muirhouse. It’s quite a deprived part of Edinburgh, near where Trainspotting is set. It was a community high school with really brilliant kids. My principal was an amazing woman called Margaret Hubbard, who pioneered media studies in Scotland and was really insistent on teaching kids to question who produced what they were watching and why. She toured primary schools with a class that taught kids to decode children’s programmes. It was called ‘The Ideology of Postman Pat’. She was great. The kids told me that occasionally her back gave out and she’d teach them while lying down in the middle of the floor.

Working in that area gave me a real sense of how marginalised a lot of folk are; how completely not invited to the party. Life there wasn’t terrible but a lot of stuff should have been a lot better. A couple of the kids walked me round their area one day, showed me where they hung out, and it just made me really furious at what the world was offering to them. The place was full of nice, spirited kids and their country just didn’t seem to give a fuck about them.

I had to recalibrate my expectations of the children a bit too. A bunch of the first-year guys started talking to me one day about the actress Isla Fisher, who was in Home and Away at the time. ‘Ooh, do you fancy her then?’ I asked, in the teasing manner I remembered my own uncles employing with me. ‘Got a wee crush on her?’ One of them looked up at me baffled, and blinked, ‘Sort of, Sir. Eh, it’s more that we’d all like tae ride her.’

I spent free periods and lunchtimes with the other students on placement. They were three women who were all beautiful in totally different ways, all immaculately dressed in skirt suits from Next. This led to me teaching many of my classes in a disembodied state of sexual reverie. Once, while my second years were reading a poem, I was only brought back to reality by the sound of my own grinding teeth.

I was never much of a teacher. There were often times when the complete unreality of the whole thing hit me. I’d see myself standing writing at a blackboard like somebody’s teacher. I was somebody’s teacher! It wouldn’t have been a whole lot weirder if I’d quantum leaped into the body of a 1950s housewife. There were only a couple of kids who were really unbearable. I sat them together so that if I felt the need to fart I could walk casually by their table. Kids never really think of teachers as farting, so they’d go absolutely nuts at each other.

There was a wee guy in my third year who was unbelievably gay. Well, maybe not actually gay but certainly destined for gayness. Once, I set that class a short story and got the usual selection of stuff about scoring the Cup Final winner for Hibs or Hearts, winning the lottery and so on.

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