First principle: Grown ups beating non-grown ups is wrong and bad, so in playing someone who does, you are not playing a nice person,
OK? Anyway playing bad guys is always much more fun than playing good guys.
First principle: Grown ups beating non-grown ups is wrong and bad, so in playing someone who does, you are not
playing a nice person, OK? Anyway playing bad guys is always much more fun than playing good guys.
Of course, your bad guy (or girl, sorry) must think he or she is right up there with the angels, but that is not, emphatically not, the case.
You are working at a school that just should not exist in 2007; if the LBTH ever had it forcibly explained to them, they and the police would descend like a ton of assorted building materials in very short order and your teaching career would end in a trip to the slammer on Rule 43, a brief notoriety on the front page of every tabloid, and inclusion on a certain register.
You break the law just by turning up to work in the morning – that's all they’ll have to prove to do you for complicity – if this whole sorry situation goes public, you are in deep, deep trouble.
Fortunately, your employers in the Birching Block are sufficiently well connected to have seen off a team of private detectives without even breaking sweat (see Prescott’s Report), and with LCPS entering its 21st year, you are probably safe enough to continue belting stroppy students in the name of turning their attention from lust and larceny and towards learning for the foreseeable future.
The first big question is, why are you doing this? Aside from your immediate colleagues, nobody else does; something in your head says that what you do is OK, but what's the something?
Role-play is about making decisions and running with them, and you teachers have maybe more to think about than the students – they know why they misbehave (lust, greed, anger, stupidity…); the question for you is why you continually try to stop them (by means that demonstrably don't work!) instead of throwing up your hands, leaving them to it, and taking a new career with the Inland Revenue.
So why? Come on.
OK, more questions…
What's your name?
Some people use their own, some create one, and there are more reasons than anonymity: Your teacher persona is not you – you don’t cane people to make them do as they’re told; you do it because they like it, but the teacher is doing something that the student really hates, now that’s not you.
How clever are you?
Not all teachers are clever – my woodwork teacher was as thick as absolute fuck, and it’s not as if the LCPS are that fussy – you've got strength on your side, and that means you don't necessarily have to out-think the students.
It's important to bear in mind that teachers do not know everything – some even admit they don't – one of the central precepts of role-play is that we all have areas of ignorance.
Please, if at all possible, try to resist the temptation of an academic honorific; doctors and professors belong to another age of teaching, not the grimy urban Bastille that we are creating.
What's your subject?
'To whack as many students as possible' is probably a yen that you satisfied a few years ago! What you are after is – well – the thing you are after – what drives your actions? For instance:
'I want to avoid the police.'
'I want to be Head.'
'I want to seduce a colleague.'
'I want a pay rise.'
'I want to enlighten young minds.'
This gives rise to another question: Why?
How do I mean to achieve this?
There can be lots of answers; here's a few ideas to start you off:
'Invent new ways of capturing the students' imaginations.'
'Discover yet more fearful forms of punishment'.
'Try to be a good team player.'
'Get a gang on your side by supplying them with contraband.'
'Carefully undermine the position of a selected colleague.'
Try to work out which other members of staff are your allies, and which your enemies.
How did you end up at LCPS?
Presuming you have a teaching certificate – though this is never going to be a binding requirement at LCPS
– you've had formal training, and could be working in a mainstream school for better pay, happy in the security
of honest living; since you are demonstrably not doing this, there must be a reason.
What is the reason?
Do you disclose this?