In the doghouse

When I first started teaching back in the seventies, Design Technology hadn’t been invented. I was quite simply the Woodwork teacher. In one of my classes I had a lovely young lad who was very deaf and made use of a really old fashioned hearing aid which you could switch on and off. The project he was working on was a dog kennel. The kennel was enormous as was, presumably, the dog. It was almost complete and on this occasion he had wriggled inside it and was  hammering away happily. Unbeknown to me, for his own comfort, he had turned off his hearing aid!.

Towards the end of the lesson I gave out some written work and the young lad in question, for reasons best known to himself, chose to go back into the kennel to do it. The lesson duly came to an end and I dismissed the class, locked the workshop door and went off to break. About half an hour later I let in my next class and their lesson got underway. You can imagine my surprise, not to mention that of the whole class when, about five minutes into the lesson out of the kennel popped a head, closely followed by a body, asking “Is it break time yet, sir?” I was obliged to explain to my colleague why one of his pupils was late for his lesson and, for the rest of my time at the school, I was never allowed to forget the incident which caused great amusement amongst my colleagues.