Glad to be geek

I have something to tell you and I hope it doesn't spoil everything we've built up over the time we've know one another. Perhaps you'd better sit down. Before I say what I have to say, here's a story from my childhood. I'm in my granny's front room. One of her friends is there. "Do you like football?" she asks me. "Mmm, only a wee bit," I reply. "You prefer a good book," my granny's friend asserts. She is correct, but on the spectrum of things Gregor likes and dislikes, football and good books are not at extreme ends. Beyond good books are exploring the moors looking for alien life and inventing things in the shed. You see, I am and always have been.... a bit geeky.

I promise you, I haven't been having geeky thoughts about you personally. I have no desire to come round to your house and install Ubuntu Linux on your laptop (though I will if you want me to). Nor do I lie in bed at night planning ways to get you to come along to a Star Trek exhibition. In truth, I tried that myself once and didn't much like it. There were mop swirls on the floor of the transporter bay.

It's much easier to be openly geeky these days. There are some well-loved geeks on television who defy the "badly-dressed, socially inept loner with poor personal hygiene" stereotype. (According to the easily googlable geek Venn diagram, socially disfunctional geeks are nerds.) Nevertheless, whilst many people assume that physics teachers are geeky anyway, it wasn't something I felt I could be overt about when I was in the classroom. Supposing an unreconstructed parent got to hear about it? I could have faced accusations of turning young lads away from their natural inclinations to go out and get plastered, opting instead to lie on their backs in fields looking for meteor showers. I must stress that my liking for old cars and, latterly, my enthusiasm for Livingston FC are not fronts. I genuinely do enjoy these things. My bookshelves are laden with Scottish literature and crime, with virtually no science fiction and fantasy to be seen. I own only one graphic novel (a Scottish crime story).

Working around the country helps me to realise that I am not the only geek in the Scottish education village. What's surprising are the number of people who fall into the "young, female and geeky" category. Now there's a title for a BBC3 documentary. So there you are, I am, have always been and always will be a bit of a geek. And you know what? It's never brought me anything other than pleasure.

What do you mean, you knew all along?

The Worst Pupil - A TESS Article

The nose, I once believed, was the organ responsible for both the sense of smell and for time travel. All I need is a whiff from the exhaust of a passing two-stroke motorbike and for an instant I feel exactly as I did when I was seventeen, riding and falling off my own bikes. Conventional physics says no to time travel because to move into the past one would have to exceed the speed of light and to accomplish this would require the conversion of an infinite amount of energy. Slightly less conventional physics (there was a programme about this on BBC 2) claims that the "many worlds" theory of quantum mechanics does allow for the possibility of time travel.

On occasions I have speculated on the consequences of going back in time. Always I return to the nightmare of the worst pupil. The scenario, which I may try to write a novel about some day, involves a time-travelling teacher being saddled with his or her worst possible pupil. Alone in my classroom, its walls decorated with science posters and the kids' Skills for Adolescence work, I review my own past, searching for my own worst pupil.

There was Fatman, the boy who made obscene shadowgrams on my screened drawing of the female reproductive system during a Standard Grade science sex education lesson. He and his pals gave a first year probationer a hell of a time twice a week for a year. I met them long after they'd left and they told me it had been "nothin personal", offering me a swig from their Bucky bottle as reparation.

It didn't start with probation. On teaching practice there was a prototype Fatman called Paul who took a dislike to me and was always going to get his old man up to see me. During a second year science lesson he realised that he'd seen the element sulphur before. He'd seen it in a joke shop and referred to the substance, in stage whispers, as "fartin' powder" until I finally found a sanction which made him stop. I told his "real" teacher.

Tommy - not his real name - was another science pupil who and contender for the "worst" tag. He belongs to my more recent teaching experience. Lacking the scatalogical streak of Fatman and Paul, although he did once threaten to show me his elephant impression which involved him turning his back, pulling out his trouser pockets and pretending to take down his zip, Tommy specialised in chronic attention seeking. They wanted to parachute him into Iraq to wear Saddam down. When you upset Tommy he went straight to the top, swearing never to return. He always did, usually with some bizarre prop - a plumbline or a bird's foot.

Would it be a torment to go back to meet those pupils as they were? Armed with the knowledge of how they would behave I might be better able to deal with them. But I have not revealed who the true worst pupil is. I did not teach him but he was a pupil in what is now my own class room. I found his book the other day. He is one pupil whose alternatingly shy to cocky behaviour I would have no sympathy for. His futile attempts to impress the girls in the class would not amuse me. I can picture him coming for a physics lesson, a subject which he copes well with. He is thin - he would say wiry - and his hair is ridiculously long in a style that was then fashionable. He mutters smart comments to his pal Scotty, thinking he is being daring and rebellious. Under his blue parka with its orange lining, its pocket on the sleeve for pencils and its furry hood, is his school uniform. He sneaks a look at his Honda catalogue before the lesson begins.

He has no idea that he will be a teacher in his old school, teaching physics in his old classroom.

The Worst Pupil

About twenty five years ago, three fourth year girls wearing ball gowns decided to rollerskate up Lanark High Street in aid of charity. This event lead to me becoming a published writer. A physicist colleague was supervising them but I went along as support. Said colleague had come out from Glasgow and handed me the newspaper he'd bought to read on the train. "Here, take that, I'm finished with it."

I had a look at it when I got home. There was an advert for their science fiction short story competition. I entered and got nowhere, though a friend was runner up. Undaunted, I tried again the following year and was a runner up, as I was again the next year. This lead me to believe that I might have some talent as a writer and I began submitting articles to the likes of the Herald (rejection) and the TESS (acceptance).

One of the not-quite-winning stories was called The Worst Pupil. It was a tale of a teacher who is a member of a secret society who have mastered "time viewing". They can look at a landscape and watch what happened there in the past. Wish-fulfilment on my part - I'd love to be able to do this when I stumble across remote examples of industrial archaeology on my rambles. Anyway, said teacher cheeses-off the grand masters of this organisation by leaking their secrets, discovering that the elaborate rituals involved in time-viewing are completely superfluous. He is told that they will send him the "worst pupil". He expects to be forced to view one of the troublemakers from his past but speculates that this will be no great hardship as he'll be better prepared to deal with them. Instead, he sees himself aged fourteen, and cannot cope. This is predicated on the teacher having been placed in his old school. This happened to me.

At the time, I think I would have found the fourteen year old me an embarrassment. I wrote of his failed attempts to be cool, of his chat-ups that were ill-judged to the point of artistry. Of pseudo acts of rebellion. I couldn't write that story now. If you're going to teach, I think you have to accept that a lot of that behaviour comes with the hormones. You have to treat it with a metaphorical hand on the shoulder rather than an equally metaphorical slap with a Monty Python fish. No exceptions, not even your younger self.

There are one or two things I haven't let myself off with, but that's another story, as was my tale of aliens observing someone doing the ironing. I won £50 worth of book tokens for that.