During a turbulent first couple of years in teaching I taught the history of medicine module to a class of GCSE History students. Well, in theory I taught them.  Such was my tenuous hold over that class that it’s debatable whether anyone learned anything at all about that topic - other than the surname of the German microbiologist, Robert Koch.

They will remember his name if only because the deadpan Ethan would, each lesson, raise his hand and - brow furrowed - publically declare that he had forgotten the name of that “German guy with the Petri dishes”. Not being one to back down from a challenge, I foolishly responded every time. In my best German I would make that “ch” ending soft to the point of inaudible, doing my utmost to make his name sound nothing like the well-known male appendage. This, of course, merely caused whole sections of the class to lose it even more.

With the following year’s class I decided to ignore Koch’s contribution to medicine entirely and just to focus on Louis Pasteur. This, of course, was both cowardly and historically dishonest, just as it would have been equally wrong for the writers of the new GCSE history course to have ditched Koch for double-entendre reasons alone. He is still listed there, I was pleased to see.

Curriculum confidence

Although I mainly stick to teaching business and economics these days, I like to think that I would now have the confidence and experience to cope with Koch much more capably than in earlier times. If I were to teach that same history group  I would now quickly dismiss Ethan’s first intervention with an ironic “nice one”, or I might make that knowing “ba-dum” or mock-cheering noise now used to disparage old-school puns and double-entendres. In fact, today’s slightly more sophisticated classroom culture may make it a little easier to talk about Koch than in earlier times - though that very phrase suggests that it’s still a fairly perilous path.

History teachers are not alone here. Many other courses present these unavoidable hazards. Biology teachers, for instance, are always a little tense when looking at “organisms”, given the nature of some of their audience,  though it would plainly be an odd course that dispensed with the concept. Though maybe “beings” could be accepted as a replacement? Essentially it means the same thing and it would make life much easier for one particular underpaid and overworked organism.

Similarly, chemistry teachers appreciate that the blast furnace is an important industrial process. It, too, rightly keeps its place on the new GCSE syllabus. But why-oh-why does “slag” still have to be the name of one of the resultant products? It may have been around longer but why can’t teachers, textbook writers and online providers agree to abolish “slag” and simply stick to its official chemical name, “calcium silicate”?

Equally, life would be so much easier for saths teachers if there were another word for “sets”, for business teachers without “penetration pricing” and for language teachers if the German word for driving did not lead inevitably to a “fahrt”. Why can’t there be a different word there?

German is a language renowned for its simple but ingenious constructions - “durchfall”, for diarrhoea is a particular favourite - so surely they can invent just one more? Teaching is a hazardous enough “fahrt” as it is. Why not make the journey just a little easier by covering over some of these extra potholes?

Stephen Petty is head of humanities at Lord Williams’s School in Thame, Oxfordshire

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