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At the chalkface: Favourites

Teaching staff
They surfaced, like Bill and Ben, from under thick foliage and a large lid. As their tutor and moral icon, I was summoned to give the varmints a grave lecture on their criminal silliness. My heart wasn’t in it. “You know you were laughing, sir.”

We must be fair, firm, impartial, keep a cool distance and never become emotionally involved with any of our pupils – dormant swots, raging maniacs, distrait intellectuals, plain dullards, callous thugs, the deeply sensitive, “model” students, whatever – the classroom has a glorious Chaucerian variety but they must be treated all the same.

We are never their friends – and we never have favourites. Except, of course we do.

You can’t show it, you never let them know it, but you do.

Just as you secretly have non-favourites, the wreckers and the wind-up artists you would like to temporarily annihilate, whose absence was a delight.

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