FORECASTING the future is an unpredictable business. In 67AD, Emperor Nero took a break from fiddling practice and visited the Oracle of Delphi for a bit of foresight-seeing.
Rome’s ruler wasn’t best pleased when the high priestess said: “Your presence outrages the god you seek. Go back, mother killer! The number 73 marks the hour of your downfall!” A tad dissatisfied with his five-minute mystic consultation, Nero had the soothsayer buried alive. Unfortunately, thus far, Russell Grant has escaped a similar fate.
My cynicism regarding foretellers can be traced back to my early childhood when a shaman, or more correctly, a shawuman, hauled herself up the tenement closes, knocking on doors asking people if they wanted a tea-leaves reading. She looked the part, what with teeth that spookily resembled a row of vandalised headstones and a hairy wart on her left cheek. Patently, staring at soggy herbal detritus had not made her a wealthy witch – she lived in the rough side of Easterhouse where Mike Tyson was the Avon Lady. As the saucers, sorry, sorceress gawped into the cup containing PG Tips dregs, it struck me as being extremely unlikely that a product endorsed by well-dressed chimps could be a portal to that part of my mother’s life yet to come.
A key element of a teacher’s remit is to be an education Nostradamus. Management is always asking for predictions of pupil grades and pushy parents demand that you forecast wonderful attainment levels for their offspring. Sadly, even hitting their slothful child over the head with a crystal ball would not bring him out of his self-induced coma. Through experience, I realised that according a kid optimistic predicted grades led to hard times when the great expectations failed to materialise. It was a far, far better thing to underplay the cherub’s possible award; when he shockingly “over-performed” in the final exam, his parents were delighted that I had succeeded in preventing their son hurtling into the abyss of academic failure.
Like the Oracle at Delphi, when writing a pupil’s report card, Sir gained from ensuring statements had a degree of ambiguity. Working wiggle room into the prose ensured that Sir had an out if examination disaster befell a child; composing stark, veracious report cards was the preserve of foolhardy pedagogues.
Although a chalkie is usually proved correct in 99 per cent of his reports, there is always the odd exception that makes him appear a laughing stock. Just recently, deceased Eton schoolmasters received a collective posthumous pasting for their putdowns of John Gurdon, a pupil at the school. According to one Mr Chips, young Gurdon should say goodbye to any notion of being a scientist. Teaching biology to wee Johnny would be “a sheer waste of time”. Wee Johnny, or Professor Sir John Gurdon as he prefers to be known these days, was recently awarded the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in cloning. In the dominie’s defence, Gurdon had come last out of 250 students and scored 2/50 in an exam. Was it Sir’s fault that Gurdon was something of a late developer?
A teacher being horribly wrong about the future prospects of pupils appears to be a pan-European problem. As a secondary school lad, Adolf Hitler’s moral conduct was described as being “very satisfactory”. One of Albert Einstein’s teachers famously said young Al “will never get anywhere”.
Einstein’s relative success in the world shows that stinging criticism can be a springboard to future achievement. In my own case, one school report stated that I “was a daydreamer who spent too much time looking out the classroom window”. The flawed report omitted to mention that from my chair I enjoyed a panoramic view of girls playing hockey. Another report said that I should endeavour to lose my stammer; in terms of stating the bleeding obvious, it was up there with the Philistine police force announcing they were only seeking one suspect in the slaying of Goliath.
It perturbs me that intelligent individuals place great stock in the opinion of their teachers, allowing the snapshot thoughts of a chalkie to blight their lives. I find it astounding that, while unwilling to release his tax returns, Mitt Romney has thought it prudent to publish his school reports.
Perhaps his Tea Party friends divined it to be a shrewd move to win the upcoming election.