My Michael Jackson Story.

Back in the eighties I was teaching at a comprehensive school in Salford. I discovered that the school possessed a video recorder that had been donated by a former pupil. Video recorders were fairly new back then, I imagine now every school has DVD players and computers coming out their ears. The school had a couple of famous ex pupils, Ben Kingsley and Albert Finney to name them both but the donator wasn't either of them. The Video recorder had spent all it's time in a store room because no one had bothered to set it up. So I went out and bought a bit of cable and wired it up. A few weeks later Michael released Thriller and one of the girls in my registration class brought in the video to lend to a friend. I offered to show the video that lunch time to any one who wanted to watch not really expecting more than a few people to turn up. When I got to the video room there were a couple of hundred children waiting. Over the next 3 days I showed it about 15 times to about half the school including many of the staff so Michael must have been popular. I am not a fan but I can recognise genius when I see it.
A few months later I was again in the video room when a little incident happened. Nothing to do with Michael but still interesting. It was the last period on a Friday afternoon and I was due to teach 4D some maths. These 15 year olds had learnt all the maths they were ever going to learn and some one had given me a tape about tessellation and I decided that a walk up to the video room and 20 minutes watching shapes fit together was the easy option. By the time the tape ended it was only 5 minutes to home time so I stopped the tape and expressed the wish that the pupils had enjoyed the show and as it was only a few minutes to the bell would they all mind very much watching the TV program that was now running. At that moment the head teacher walked in. This guy wore suits that must have cost £200 but looked like he had been to Oxfam for them. Anyway he must have wanted me for something, I never did find out what. Now I was standing with my back to the screen and had no idea what was showing but at 3:30 it was fairly safe bet the BBC weren’t showing a porn movie. He took one look at the TV and shouted loudly from the back of the room, “I though you were a maths teacher Mr Banks.” Now this was a typical example of this man’s bad manners. Even the children look surprised. I looked at the TV which was showing a nature film, Twenty rabbits were in a field eating grass and other things. So much for the BBC not showing porn films. “I am a maths teacher,” said I. “Today we are covering multiplication.”
There was a slight intake of breath from the class and then some one laughed and the headman stalked out. Shortly after that I decided that I had spent enough of my life in teaching and got a job as a driving instructor.