Dispel those autumn blues by reading about the unpunished crimes of your fellow-teachers in the TES online staffroom thread asking “what have you stolen from your school?”
First, there is the adventurous aesthete: “Three sets of beautiful Victorian cupboard doors Idown three flights of stairs from the top of the building Iinto the back of the car Iand away.” Then the holier-than-thou:
“I have no school property at home. None at all” (He provides everything himself.) Then there is the resentful leaver who stole her head’s keys on her last day and the Robin Hood who removed a portable overhead projector from his lavishly funded specialist school to take to his new, run-down, semi-rural school.
Many are the cries that teachers give more in time and equipment than they take in pens and paper (“I stole laminating pouches! But they stole my life!”) Most scandalous is one teacher’s revelation that she was invited to send hundreds of old textbooks to the caretaker for burning - and that beautiful, 70-year-old desks were put on the bonfire too.
The Diary is beginning to picture a tasteful, if eclectic retreat for retired teachers, with Victorian cupboard doors, old wooden desks, retro curtains (from the school hall), acres of glue-sticks and laminating pouches to play with and a restful ambience created by the chiming mobiles of unwanted computer disks.
