There were only two times I remember there being sex education at our school. The first time was in biology class. My biology teacher looked like a cross between Magnus Pyke and Dr Snuggles. He was a decent man and a competent teacher. Normally we talked about animals or plants or we dissected frogs but this day was different.
For reasons I don’t quite understand, to this day, our biology teacher decided to forgo our usual lesson on things like photosynthesis and osmosis and decided to talk about how humans procreate, from start to finish with all the icky bits. Perhaps someone in charge of the cirriculum had decided we knew nothing about sex and needed teaching. We were eleven, so most of us knew something about sex in varying degrees. Maybe he decided to talk about this off his own bat. Was it improvised? Had he been up all night rehearsing? Was this the one lesson in the year he had been dreading for months, or looking forward to?
No. He hadn’t been looking forward to it at all. That fact showed in his whole demeanour. I’ve never seen a man get through a talk with such obvious awkwardness. During some moments, he looked like he was in physical pain.
The lesson stands out for two reasons, the strained seriousness and extreme effort of Pyke Snuggles to convey the basic biological processes of procreation and the doubled over please stop making us laugh, it really hurts now, no seriously, please stop sir, but he wouldn’t. We were not emotionally mature enough for this talk, not in a class setting. I like to think I was. For the first fifteen minutes, I sat there very composed and attentive and straight faced. After a while though, I was as bad ad the rest of them, who were practically rolling around on the floor clutching the stomachs.
It began with embarrassed sniggers but just got worse. Laughter and perhaps embarrassment is contagious. If he only knew, we were in pain too, trying to stifle our laughter but as with all these things, the more you try to stop doing something, the more you sometimes can’t stop doing it. Eventually, we gave in and let it all out. We drowned out his voice with our laughter. Perhaps that was deliberate.
I felt a combination of sympathy and distress for Pyke Snuggles. On one hand, I was sensitive to his extreme discomfort and frequent red face. On the other, I wanted him to continue, as this was the most fun I’d had in years. Even Fawlty Towers didn’t make me laugh this much. It was very conflicting. It was also painful to laugh so much.
At one point, he got cross with us and started shouting. This just made us laugh even more. It was at that point in mirth evolvement when everything he said and everything he did made us explode. We were far too over stimulated to back down now. It was like he was suddenly the best stand up comedian in the world and we’d paid good money to be entertained.
He gave up and we ended class early. As Pyke Snuggles exhausted stooped frame exited the classroom, I couldn’t help thinking he was going for a much earned lie down with a couple of Valium.
When I started senior school at the age of eleven, I was so excited. I loved first year. Of course now it’s all different, the school years are counted differently but in my day, the first year of ‘big school’, a rough comprehensive, in an economically depressed area of Merseyside, was senior school and we were called first years. One of the teachers I had in my form and year was a religious education teacher. He was handsome in a classical way. He had black hair and wild brown eyes with unfathomable depths in a pale waxy face. He wore white, beige, silver or brown suits, tight as anything, narrow tie, sharp crease lines down the trousers. It was 1981 after all. He was bang in fashion. He was like a showroom dummy who had come to life all of a sudden, but in a really good way.
Mr. Hanson’s lessons went by in a second. They were as light as a feather. They energised me and made me happy. He was the sun, the moon and the stars in the lessons but they weren’t lessons, they were intangible things, feelings and experiences. it wasn’t school and I wasn’t in a lesson. I was a child of the sky. He didn’t give me mind altering drugs but what he did do was allow me to be part of an experience that I will never forget.
He may have begun this particular lesson very normally, probably talking about the bible, scripture. Students always misbehaved in Religious Education. They didn’t take it seriously at all, not even half as much as any other lesson and they didn’t take those seriously either.
To them, R.E was a permit to mess around in class and especially in the comprehensive school I went to. Mr. Hanson was a lovely man but his patience had limits. He was already on the outskirts of sanity, so cracking up was an easy thing to do and that day he would crack up but in such a sweet and spectacular and entertaining way.
I think Mr. Hanson was so exasperated with the behaviour of the children in his class that he hatched a plan. Although, to be fair to him, he didn’t seem the type of person to hatch anything. The strange light behind his twinkling brown eyes always seemed to be in improvisation mode. In this lesson, I think his creative energies were on fire, or else I think he just didn’t give a toss. It was like he’d joined this thing, this teacher thing, in a working class comprehensive, teaching rebellious, out of control feral teenagers and thought, ‘Oh no, what have I got myself into? Okay, well, I’ll have move the goal posts. I’ll have to move them to survive.’
Mr. Hanson had weighed up his options, had drawn up a plan of battle tactics and came up with several modes of attack, whether he was aware of it or not:
The element of surprise
Distraction
Unpredictability
Confusion of the enemy through unprecendented behaviour, unbecoming for a teacher
He was talking about evolution versus creationism and the class were being particularly disruptive. Class harmony was compounded by the fact that his class didn’t have tables that four or five people could gather around. Instead, he had two person desks, widely spaced, all in single file in three rows. I quite liked the set up but groups of children couldn’t hang out together and fan the flames of rebellious adolescence, like naughty knights around a round table. It would impede them on many levels. It caused consternation, indignation and frustration, all the ‘tions’ that would lead to trouble for poor Mr. Hanson.
The cacophony of sound rising in the classroom drowned out the sound of the chalk squeaking along the board. Everytime his back was turned, they would all whoop and holler and throw screwed up pieces of paper at him. He would turn to us, everything would be quiet but the minute he turned to write, chaos would erupt again. Eventually, he stopped writing and turned to talk to us. This wasn’t going to work either. No-one was listening to him. There wasn’t one attentive face. Most kids were talking amongst themselves very loudly. The rest were in varying degrees of commotion and locomotion, the dreaded ‘tions’ again.
At that moment, that almost surreal moment of disorder and anarchy, Mr. hanson did somthing memorable.
He became Charles Darwin’s evolutionary ape.
He calmly threw away the chalk and his tranformation began. He hunkered down. He swung his arms down and out so that they hung lower than his knees. He started to move from side to side. He started making grunting noises, mimicking chimpanzee sounds. The class stopped talking and stared transfixed. His ape impersonation got more ape. He got louder and started screeching and whooping. We looked at him like he was crazy.
He wasn’t done yet, not by a long chalk, unlike the one he’d just thrown away. He jumped up on one of the front desks, in one deft mocement, still deep in character as King Kong. There was a collective intake of breath. Right now, he definately had the element of surprise on his side. He made his way down the desks, expertly jumping from one to the other like a practiced orangutang.
He went all the way down the desks, hooting and howling, pouncing atheletically from each one, right down to the back of the class. The girls at the back began to scream as he jumped on their desks. It didn’t help that he got off the desks for a while and ran around the entire room as an ape. As his drama tutor may have said, he really used the space. He then returned to the desks, gambolling up another row, picking up pencils with puzzlement and chewing on their tips. He nibbled an eraser, looked bewilderedly at a ruler and then hit himself with it. He took off his shoe, smelled the inside of it curiously and then tried to wear it as a hat.
As an ape, Mr. Hanson frightened the girls and rendered the boys speechless. When he jumped on my desk, I moved out of the way just in time. I suppose you could say it was scary but fun. I can’t remember how it all ended. I don’t suppose it really matters when you start so strong.
This is a slim, delicate looking guy in a sharp silver suit, with a face like a porcelain doll, doing a quality method acting performance of a primate. Uncanny valley doesn’t even begin to describe. It was the most exhilarating moment of my life. I’m sure for Mr. Hanson though, there must have been easier ways of making a living.
Things In My Head 