Dear Thomas, 

What do you do if a colleague has married a hedge-fund manager, and all she talks about is her new Aga and the installation of underfloor heating in her palatial residence? 

She doesn’t seem to be aware that the rest of us can barely afford the rent on a tiny room in a shared flat. I don’t want to be rude, but… 

Ed Blanchard 
Banbury 

My teacher colleague keeps reminding us how rich she is

Dear Ed, 

In a similar situation, I once said, by way of a snub to the art mistress who was explaining, not for the first time, that her husband was a senior partner at somewhere or other, “I don’t understand why you bother going on with teaching? Surely you could just give it up?”

To her credit, she was indignant. It was important, she said, to do something worthwhile with her time. 

All the staffrooms I’ve ever known have contained a broad social spectrum - or, perhaps more accurately, economic spectrum. Even when I was at school in the 1970s, it was known among the pupils that certain members of staff were rich in their own right. And others, because they said so, were poor - or less well off, at any rate. 

Mr MacDonald and Miss Wilson, both of chemistry (why was chemistry such a hotbed of private wealth?), for instance. Miss Wilson was also supposed to have been in receipt of a Nobel Prize, but she did have an Alfa Romeo, if evidence of her substantial wealth was called for. 

In my first job in a former secondary modern in a North London suburb (this was the late 1980s), the home-economics mistress (I think cookery, childcare, etc was going through a phase of being home economics then) was an amazing figure. Her conversation was tinkling and hostessy at all times. Her husband was huge in construction, and her son had followed in his father’s footsteps. The dreadful worry was the daughter-in-law, who had no conversation. 

Entertaining was so important in the construction world, apparently. For instance, she’d been placed next to Peter Costain at a dinner (you may not know, but Costain are a huge engineering company. They built the channel tunnel), and he was the most charming man and so easy to talk to, but she’d been completely tongue-tied. 

On she fluttered, this really very nice lady, quite unaware that she was addressing a group of people just about managing on their teaching salaries, with few or no luxuries and certainly unknown at dinner parties where tycoons were present. 

Blame the unexciting pay

Is there more economic and social diversity among teaching staff than in other professional workforces? I think so. It’s the unexciting pay. 

In my day - I say this as more or less fact, without prejudice - it was mostly women who had husbands or partners in more lucrative jobs. Well, you might say, any job would be more lucrative than teaching. Maybe now there are more men teachers with rich wives. 

Either way, it’s just not right. For as long as the teaching profession is systematically undervalued, you’re going to get certain teachers “funded” by richer partners, while the rest have to make do with what they’re actually paid. Thus tensions arise in the staffroom. 

Perhaps at the bottom of it all is a deep-seated idea that teaching is a nun-like calling of self-sacrifice and abstinence. Wanting to be properly paid is somehow unseemly, showing a lack of dedication and seriousness. This is possibly why the better-off can’t resist giving a flash of their other life of luxury and freedom. 

It’s right to resist though. In one staffroom I heard of, a notice was put up: “Will members of staff please refrain from referring to their houses in France.” Certainly, pointed remarks are in order. 

(Here I must confess myself a bit guilty. I was talking about the electric windows in my car one day. This was when such things were a novelty. A colleague snapped, “I’ve never had a car with anything other than wind-down windows.”) 

More generally, there is consolation. What use, just now, is a house in France? Since the financial crisis of 2008, combined with technological improvements, made items such as sound systems enormously cheaper, conspicuous spending has lost its edge. 

So manically signalling your Aga and your lavish refurbishment budget is not only declassé, but out of date. 

Should you contradict your headteacher in public? 

What to do about wrong orders? My mother, who turned 97 in February, recalls an incident at her boarding school in the 1930s. The junior girls had been promised that they could stay up until the end of a concert that was being put on, and wouldn’t be required to meet the usual deadline of bed at 8pm - awfully early, anyway, for girls of 12 and 13. 

So why then did the headmistress stand up at a certain point during the concert and announce that the junior girls would now leave, it was 8pm, their bedtime? 

Out in the corridor, after they’d trooped out, humiliated, in front of all the others, these girls were sparking with fury. Can you blame them? A promise had been betrayed. 

One of their number had a brainwave. “Let’s tear up our programmes,” she said. So they did, leaving the debris in the path, as it turned out, of the headmistress and her guests who passed by that way later. 

Curiously, there were no consequences of this outrage. Somebody must have failed to inform the headmistress of the concession made to the junior girls, and then didn’t have the nerve to contradict her publicly. But she should have been contradicted. 

You may recall that true incident of a junior pilot who could see that the plane was going to crash but was fatally overwhelmed by the authority of his superior.

Several times, I’ve seen sports teachers interrupting the head in assembly to prevent the award of the wrong cup - and even, on one occasion, to say that the cup was not to be awarded at all. A good head won’t mind. 

Thomas Blaikie was a secondary English teacher for 25 years. He is author of Blaikie’s Guide to Modern Manners (4th Estate)

Do you have a problem you’d like Thomas Blaikie to address? Send it to tes.lifelessons@gmail.com