The Tale of Dr Todd

Dr Todd was a senior lecturer at a college in the South of England that trained teachers for both primary and secondary schools. One of his roles was therefore to visit students in schools as they underwent their teaching practice, with a view to assessing their progress. So that is what he was doing on a sunny morning in February at a primary school somewhere in West Sussex.

As was his usual practice, he slipped into a classroom after the lesson had started, so that the young would-be teacher could get the class settled down and start teaching before he appeared. She had told the class of 9-year-olds that a visit would take place that morning, so they showed only a passing interest as he made his way to an empty chair at the side of the room.

The chair in question was next to the well-stocked classroom aquarium – a reasonably large fish tank in which an assortment of guppies, tetras, rainbowfish, and much more besides darted in and out of the caves and sunken pirate ships that the children had artfully made and placed in the tank. Fronds of weed moved to and fro in the stream of bubbles produced by the aeration pump that hummed gently away. 

Dr Todd removed his papers from his briefcase and, as he searched for a pen with which to make his notes, placed the sheaf of notes on top of the aquarium.

Or he would have done so had there been a top to the aquarium. There was normally a perspex cover with airholes that fitted over the top of the tank, but on this occasion the cover was propped against the wall. The child who had the responsibility that day for feeding the fish had forgotten to replace the cover, with the net result that Dr Todd’s papers were now either floating on the surface of the tank or starting to sink towards the bottom.

Not surprisingly, Dr Todd jumped up in alarm and did what he could to rescue the situation. This meant plunging his hands under the surface and grabbing hold of all the papers he could reach. He soon found that it was impossible to do this without attracting quite a lot of attention from the class of kids. For their part, their initial state of alarm at the sudden splashing and cursing coming from the side of the room soon turned to amusement. Any sight of an adult making a complete and utter fool of himself, especially one who had such an air of authority about him but who was not in any position of authority over them, was fair game for ribaldry, and that is exactly what Dr Todd got.

Dr Todd’s quandary was that he had to salvage his papers and at the same do as little as possible to attract attention to himself, while also trying to ensure that the student teacher could get on with her job of conducting the lesson that Dr Todd was there to observe. 

He therefore decided that this emergency situation could best be resolved by drying his papers on a nearby radiator, so he moved in that direction while trying to assure the teacher that all was well. He therefore took a large step backwards so that he could look in her direction while moving towards the radiator.

That was the reason why he didn’t see the large wastepaper basket that was positioned between the aquarium and the radiator. His right foot went straight in and promptly got jammed at the bottom of it. He may not have seen the wastepaper basket, but all the children on that side of the room had seen it, and they had a ringside seat as Dr Todd’s foot went into it and stayed there. This was slapstick comedy of a high order, and they responded accordingly.

Dr Todd had no choice but to drop everything and use both hands to extricate his foot from the wastepaper basket, which he eventually managed to do. The peals of laughter from the kids showed no sign of abating, despite the teacher’s attempts to make this happen. To be frank, she was hard pressed not to join in.

With his foot free and his soggy papers gathered together, Dr Todd realized that he had no choice but to beat a retreat. Any hope he may have had of retaining his dignity had long since vanished, so he uttered a quick apology to the teacher, opened the door, went through it and closed it firmly behind him.

So did the children immediately calm down and concentrate on their lesson, with a feeling of regret that the comedy show was over? Not exactly. What they knew, and what Dr Todd did not but had presumably just discovered, was that the door he had gone through was not the door to the outside world but to the classroom’s walk-in store cupboard.

There was therefore a moment’s shocked silence, followed by another burst of laughter. The teacher did her best to silence the class, as she knew that embarrassing her assessor any further was not a good idea. Her main worry was that Dr Todd would soon emerge from the cupboard and the laughter would resume. Presumably that was also Dr Todd’s fear, because he simply did not emerge from the cupboard.

Indeed, he did not reappear until the lesson was complete and everyone had left the room. His emergence only took place when the coast was clear and he could creep away unseen, his foray into comedy being a one-off event that he had no intention of repeating.

© John Welford

First Day at School

There was no question about it – I was definitely not looking forward to my first day at Oakdale Junior School in September 1959. That was because of my last day at Stanley Green Infants the previous July.

In order to make the transition as painless as possible – that was the general idea – we were all ushered the short distance between the two schools so that we could spend the afternoon in the care of the teacher who would be looking after us when we returned after the Summer holidays.

Oakdale Junior was one of the largest primary schools in the Borough of Poole, taking about 150 new pupils every year, divided into four classes. These were rigidly streamed with promotions and demotions at the end of each term for those children who exceeded expectations or failed to reach the expected standard. An assessment had already been made at the infants’ school so the streaming came into play right from day one.

That meant that I was placed in Class 4, which was the A stream. The top two streams, in classes 3 and 4, were housed in a separate classroom block across a side road from the main school. It was to this block that my group of pupils was conducted on the afternoon in question.

I could never have imagined the shock that was going to befall me and the other children from Stanley Green. This had been a very progressive school for its time, housed in a building that was only about five years old when I joined the school in 1957. Every classroom was light and airy, with a door leading to a garden area in which lessons were sometimes conducted on fine days in Spring and Summer. Learning through play was a strong element and there were no teachers to whom one could not take an instant liking.

However, the teacher who greeted us in Class 4 at Oakdale Junior was far from likeable. This was Mrs Barnett, who was not only considerably older than most of the teachers at Stanley Green but had also come from a very old-fashioned tradition of teaching in which strict discipline was the top priority. She made it clear at the outset that our job was to attend to her every word and not let our attention flag for an instant. She ordered us to our places – each child at a desk in a row instead of the groups at tables that we had been used to – and told to look directly at her and not even think of talking to anyone else.

Not unnaturally, some of the children wanted to take a look at their new surroundings and pass the odd comment to a neighbour. When Mrs Barnett caught a child doing this she pounced on them, dragged them to the front of the room and whacked them three or four times on the back of the leg with a ruler. This happened several times during the afternoon, either for inattention or failing to answer a question correctly – which was usually because Mrs Barnett assumed that our Stanley Green teachers would already have drilled us in pieces of knowledge that they clearly did not think we were ready to learn.

So that was why I spent a terrible Summer holiday absolutely dreading my first day at Oakdale Junior School. I’m sure that I was not alone in this among the future members of Class 4.

My mother dropped me off at the school on my first morning, but she did not know about the separate classroom block and I was left on the other side of the main school building. I therefore had to ask the crossing warden, who controlled the traffic lights at the busy road junction outside the front of the school, where I had to go. She told me to go through a gate in a high fence, which I duly did, only to find myself in a playground thronging with kids – boys only - from all the years in the school.

A whistle blew and the children were instructed to form up in lines according to the class they now belonged to for the new school year. I joined one of these lines, hoping it was the right one, and followed the instruction to stand to attention then turn left and march off through the cloakroom and into the long corridor off which all the classrooms led. I simply followed the leader and found myself in a classroom that was nothing like the one I remembered from July. We were soon joined by the girls, who had been marched down from the other end of the corridor.

A roll was taken, but my name was not on the register so I could not answer “present” as every other child was able to do. I just sat there, feeling very confused and wondering when Mrs Barnett would show up, because the teacher in front of me was certainly not the harridan I was dreading to meet again.

A few minutes later Mr Knight, the deputy headmaster, came in and asked if there was a John Welford in the room, which there certainly was. He told me that I had placed myself in the C stream and needed to follow him to where I should have been. “Here we go”, I thought. “I wonder what sort of mood Mrs Barnett will be in”.

I was duly taken across the side road and into the correct classroom – Mrs Barnett’s lair.

But Mrs Barnett was not there. Instead, there was a very pleasant young lady called Miss Robinson who welcomed me with a smile and showed me where to sit. She turned out to be an excellent teacher who treated children in a far more civilized way than Mrs Barnett had done and never used any form of corporal punishment on a child, not that she was ever placed in a position where this might have been a possibility.

It turned out that our afternoon with Mrs Barnett had been the final few hours of the latter’s career before her retirement. Why she had decided to end her days as a teacher by whacking as many children as she could is anyone’s guess, but we were all mighty glad that the school had chosen a replacement who was far more deserving to be termed a teacher.

© John Welford