Agatha Sparks

Agatha Sparks

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The thing that gave Oscar in 10S away was the expression of concentration on his face. Sitting in the back corner of the classroom, his hands under the desk, he was staring fixedly down at his lap with an inane half smile hovering around his mouth. His mate nudged him, and he looked up with a guilty start. Quickly, his features took on a look of studied innocence.

Phone? Me? I’m doing the work, Miss.

Really Oscar?

Miss Sparks shook her head slowly, affecting disappointment.

Oscar, there are only two reasons why a boy of your age stares at his crotch for an extended period. Please tell me it was just a phone you were fiddling with down there.

Oscar doesn’t understand the question. He is mystified. He feels victimised. Stand up? Why should he stand up?

Mate, she’s got you. Just give her the phone, says another boy.

Miss Sparks extends a hand and smiles. Thank you, she says.

Oscar hands her the phone. He is not happy. He wants to know when he can have it back. His human rights are being violated. It is a v-i-o-l-a-t-i-o-n, man. It’s well muggy.

Not for the first time, Miss Sparks bites her tongue and walks away. The phone will be in the school safe in reception waiting for him at the end of the day. Like it was when his human rights were violated yesterday and the day before.

Three other phones are surreptitiously slipped into pockets around the room.

This is Miss Agatha Spark, English teacher – her chief weapon is dogged and relentless consistency in the application of classroom rules and routines.

Oh, and a soupcon of sorcery – but don’t tell the Head unless you want to be carted off to recover from your stress-related anxiety attack.

 

Agatha Sparks is careful about the application of magic in the classroom. It is not a pedagogical strategy recognised by the DFE and it is not sanctioned by St Mildred’s Academy for boys. Not that they had ANY idea what she was truly capable of – but isn’t that the case for so many women.

 

Oscar was not caught on his phone in the middle of the test because his teacher was a witch, he was caught because he was a teenage boy doing something entirely predictable. Staring at pictures of tits on the internet. Again.

 

Agatha went back to her desk and sipped her brew. It was cold. And then it wasn’t anymore. A biscuit appeared in her desk drawer – for later. Charlie Platt’s pen wasn’t working – and then, before it became an excuse to down tools, it was. Elvis (yes, parents can be cruel) tried to ping an elastic band across the room but it backfired and hit him on the nose. Hassan found a five-pound note in his blazer pocket – enough for a hot lunch and a bus ride home for him and his brother on a cold and rainy day. He could have sworn the bully who had cornered him this morning had taken it. A certain thug from 9G developed a nasty rash on his left bum cheek. He would be too busy scratching it when Hassan passed him in the corridor. The itching would get worse whenever he thought about hitting someone – which was often. You would have thought that it would have worked like some sort of aversion therapy, but no.

 

Walking down the corridor on her way to break duty, the boys coming towards her gave her a slightly wider berth than they might for someone else although not one of them could have told you why.

 

Agatha entered the staffroom and sat in her usual spot near the window. Tea was poured, biscuits were dunked and sighs were heaved.

Have you seen the email from the Head? Setting up a new school… cushy number for some… bugger – should be on duty… Cotter’s in isolation again… booked a holiday in the Seychelles…retirement…

 

The chatter was familiar, soothing.

Hey, Agatha – shift up a bit. What’s going on with Oscar? He was spitting teeth in my lesson. Thinks you’ve got it in for him.

He was lucky I only took his phone, Bob. It’s not like I turned him into a toad. Or a duck.

Eh? Why a duck?

Be good if you really could.

What?

Turn the kids into toads…

I don’t know, Bob – toads get a bad press. I’d rather be a toad than a duck – nobody wants to eat a toad.

Bob laughed but gave her a funny sideways look – he was not entirely sure she was joking. Neither was she for that matter.

 

Agatha has a soft spot for toads, in fact. Reptiles in general, but toads and frogs in particular. You might think that this stemmed from being of a magical persuasion and having a frog as a familiar, but you would be wrong. Too cliché. Black cats are similarly predictable and therefore out of the equation. No. The soft spot came from the works of Miss Beatrix Potter.

 

She calls all frogs Jeremy and thinks them quite enchanting.  Agatha once had a boyfriend called Jeremy whom she had also thought enchanting. He had turned out to be a bit of a knobhead. She also rescued a frog from a watering can and placed it in her lily pond in the hopes that it would take up residence. To her delight, it had. It may occur to you that these facts are not unrelated.

 

For the record, Agatha had only ever turned one child into an animal, and not for very long. The boy in question had thoroughly deserved it – nasty little rat. He had been in Year 8 at the time and was one of those children who know just how to push a teacher’s buttons. He was a serial chair-swinger and there was always detritus under his desk when he left the room. He did just enough work to keep out of trouble, but you could tell he was going to underperform at GCSE and bring down the class average.

His worst crime, however, was that he was brilliant at getting other people into trouble without ever being detected. He was just there – on the fringes – of any incident. Hands in his pockets, whistling the song of youthful innocence while someone else got taken away by the head of year.

The boy who was his favourite patsy was no angel, but he was more sinned against than sinning. He came from a home where meals were irregular, washing of any description was rare and love was non-existent. One morning there was an email requesting work for him in the behaviour suite, and rat-boy was sniggering about it.

And then ratty made his mistake. He asked to go to the toilet. Agatha allowed him to go with a kindly smile, and a wave of her hand. He did not return to the classroom. Rumour was that a member of the Senior Leadership Team had found him trying to climb a drainpipe in the playground and completely unable to explain why. He had no memory of where he had been or what he had been doing – or whose class he had come out of.

He is a sixth former now and still an obnoxious little bastard. He has a Saturday job in a local supermarket on the cheese counter and is dating a mousey little girl with tiny dark eyes and a small twitchy nose. He really can’t stand cats. Coincidence?

The thing about being a teacher with magic is that you can get away with an awful lot if nobody puts two and two together. And nobody is going to suspect you of being a witch in the 21st century because they don’t exist, do they?  

 

Old Teachers Never Die

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Every school has a ghost or two hanging around. Mostly they do very little harm, hanging around in the staffroom or drifting in and out of the science prep room. St Mildred’s Academy has several of them.

There’s Mrs White who haunts the corner of the staff room near the noticeboard. People don’t sit there because there is always a draft and a faint smell of cabbage. She has been knitting the same complicated scarf for nearly fifty years. In death as in life she is always there, clacking her needles and letting off the occasional silent but deadly fart.

Trevor cleans the brass on all the door handles every week. He is observed by the spirit of Charlie Brooks, caretaker from 1921 until 1943. Charlie doesn’t think much of Trevor’s technique – or indeed of any of the new-fangled ways of doing things.

Peter Grimshaw had been an RE teacher, back in the 1980s. He had been killed on his way to school one morning in an altercation with a bus. There had been a squeal of brakes, a small crunching sound and that was that. The teacher had picked up his bicycle and pedalled away from the scene – or at least his spirit had. His ashes were scattered on the local pond where he liked to feed the ducks and his name was inscribed, alongside Mrs White’s on the plaque in the school’s memorial rose garden. He’d been a nice man, but his behaviour management was non-existent and the kids had taken the piss.

Agatha had encountered him one evening when she had stayed back to do some marking.

She was sitting at her desk with the door onto the upper corridor open when a figure appeared at her door, looked in, and waddled over to her desk. Agatha noticed two things about the way he moved immediately. First, his feet were splayed out so that he walked a little like a penguin. Second, he walked straight through the desks that were in his way.

Yes? Can I help you?

The phantom jumped, stared at her, and then promptly disappeared. Good. Ghosts can be a pain in the bum. They are basically people who didn’t have the sense to know they were dead, or else they lacked the social skills to know when it was time to leave. They clung onto what had been their life and wouldn’t let go. Persistent buggers the lot of them. And they usually wanted something difficult, time-consuming, or impossible.

Agatha turned back to her marking – a pile of essays on A Christmas Carol. Very appropriate given the circumstances she now found herself in. The teacher was dead to begin with…  

Three and a half essays later, the figure appeared once more. It wore brown slacks, laced up brown shoes and a cardigan with patches on the elbows that were more ‘make-do-and-mend’ than fashion statement. Truly, the spirit was embracing the stereotype. Agatha could quite clearly see it hovering in the corner of the classroom. Literally.

Can I help you with something?

You can see me?

And hear you, yes. Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but I’ve got quite a lot of-

The apparition swept closer to her and made a sort of rattling sound in its throat. To say it looked upset, would be a bit of an understatement. It glared at her and then jabbed a finger at the back wall.

They’re throwing out my resources. Years of work. All my transparencies… You’ve got to stop them!

Agatha sighed. It is one of the downsides of being magical, being able to see and hear the departed, and this chap was not going to give up and go away quietly.

Following him as best she could, given that he could move through walls and she could not, she made her way down the corridor to the last classroom on the left. It was a nice room really with big sash windows that opened, lots of shelving and not too many display boards to be covered and kept looking nice. There were signs that the estates staff had been at work in there: a set of metal steps, lots of dust and a brand spanking new television on the wall replacing the old electronic whiteboard. Nice.

Four large filing cabinets lined the wall at the back of the room; their drawers had been emptied and the contents now resided in back plastic bags ready to be removed to the school skips behind the swimming pool.

Muttering to himself, the ghostly teacher flitted from bag to bag in a vain endeavour to rescue his precious papers, but like poor Marley’s ghost, without the power to touch them. Poor thing. It looked at her beseechingly and Agatha pulled a random selection from a bag: faded ‘OFSTED ready’ lesson plans, dusty hand typed worksheets differentiated for learning types, overhead transparencies with learning aims, envelopes full of cards for sorting activities, banda sheets…

Time to get tough.

Look, you were clearly a hoarder, Peter. Can I call you Peter? And this stuff is no use to anyone now. Look…

Agatha switched on the new television, connected the laptop on the teacher’s desk and pulled up the R.E. departments resources on the VLE. The crestfallen spirit watched her – his mouth falling open a little. She spoke not unkindly but firmly…

We’ve moved on, ducky. And it’s high time you did too.

The ghost waddled towards the television and inspected it, floated across to the laptop and shook his head sadly before slowly dissolving into nothing.

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Training Day.

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It is a warm September morning. Having rained steadily for a week and a half, the sun has come out and is shining with all its might. It is going to be a lovely day for a walk, a picnic, lying on a beach with a book, chatting with friends over a glass of wine. It is not a lovely day for being crammed into the school hall with a hundred other teachers listening to a briefing on the latest pedagogical fad which the speaker has only a faint grasp of and an hour to fill. To be fair, today the speaker is an expert, but they were brought in at the last minute to explain a complex idea in fifteen minutes as the Deputy Head needs the rest of the time to talk about the school improvement plan.

There are some situations where magic is of very little help at all, and this sort of INSET day is one of them. Things Agatha seriously considers doing…

1. Having a personal emergency – say, her house is on fire - that takes her away from all this, right now.

2. Setting off the fire alarms across the school and causing black smoke to be seen emanating from the Science block.

3. Having a lethal spider (Sydney funnel web should do it) discovered in the hall.

4. Speeding up time.

5. Disappearing the visiting expert in a puff of smoke.

Problems with these solutions

1. Whilst tempting, it would be selfish to escape alone, leaving her colleagues to suffer – and Agatha may be many things, but she is not a selfish person.

2. Again, tempting – there would be a visit by a shiny red fire engine and all the lovely fire-fighters – but diverting a vital resource is socially irresponsible.

3. Lethal spider infestations are not unknown in schools – she could get away with it, but what if it bit someone?

4. The last time Agatha did this there were consequences. Time always has to slow down later on to compensate and the last lesson before Christmas went on for three and a half hours.

5. She could be sent somewhere lovely – like the beach – but then would likely think she was losing the plot altogether, and that wouldn’t be fair now, would it.

Eventually there is a coffee break, and everyone piles into the staffroom. It pays to get there quickly, or the P.E. team scoff all the good biscuits and take up the comfy seats with their manspreading. It’s a good moment to observe the different types of people who make up the teaching profession. According to Agatha, there are 5 species regularly seen in schools:

1. Starry-eyed youngsters in their first few years of teaching who think that direct instruction and quizzing have just been invented. Bless them.

2. Frazzled middle managers continually checking emails on their phones and jumping at the mention of Ofsted. They are keeping the ship afloat and they know it.

3. Senior leadership wannabes, dressing for the job they want, perfecting their professional detachment and signing up for any course with a 5-letter qualification at the end of it.

4. The unsung heroes. The teachers who plough on, day after day, just doing the job to the best of their ability because they genuinely love it.

5. The old guard – grey of hair and spines of pure steel. Lesser men and women had fallen in battle, but these stalwarts are still standing, and God help you if you nick their mug. These marvellous people have a motto:

“We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, for so long, with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.”[1]

 

Agatha herself dimly remembers being 1, tried 2 and hated it, thinks 3 are a pain in the arse and is well on the way to 5. Her mug is sacred. So much so that she has allowed herself a rare bit of personal magic – her mug has a protections spell on it and no good comes to those who “borrow it”.

 

It must be said that while the pandemic did bring with it a positive avalanche of challenges to be overcome, one of the innovations it forced was online training days. These, Agatha and most of her colleagues considered, were a vast improvement on the usual procedure. From the point of view of management, it turns out that teachers do way more work if they are not together in the same room gossiping, and tasks are completed much more efficiently. If Mr Peterson from maths spends the entire day grumbling about what a waste of time it all is, who cares? No one can hear him!

 

From a teacher’s perspective the wins are many-splendored: because of not having to drive to school, you could pitch out of bed at least an hour later than normal, pull on something comfortable and log on. No need to put on makeup, brush your hair or wear a bra. No need to disguise your true feelings about the latest nonsense from the DfE or pretend to be interested in some new-fangled theory. Best of all, you can consume tea and biscuits all day and – when nature calls - you can go to the loo without explanation or apology.

 

For anyone of a magical persuasion, the upsides are even greater.

 

At home and unobserved, Agatha could set the vacuum cleaner to work, have laundry fold itself and put itself away, and clean the cobwebs out of the high corners. She had to be careful with things like mowing the lawn or cleaning the window of course – if the neighbours realised what was going on, she would either be burned at the stake or – more likely – inundated with requests for domestic services.

 

You might be thinking that Agatha could surely do these things while at school. If you are, I refer you to the instructional video “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” by Walt Disney.

 

Residential Education

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9.45 am.

Four coaches wait in the school car park. Inside the sports hall, 178 boys wait eagerly to be allowed to board them and the requisite number of staff try to keep a lid on them.

Miles and Hiren are eating their lunch. The egg sandwiches were a mistake that many people are going to regret later.

Blessing has forgotten his asthma inhaler – luckily there is one in reception that he can have.

Ilias, Thomas and Karl are seeing who can hold their breaths the longest and Karl is turning blue around the lips. The staff are letting him get on with it: if he passes out he will be sent home in a great flurry of concern for his health and safety, and quite frankly that would be a plus.

Daniel wants to know when we’re setting off, how long it’s going to take to get there, will we stop at the service station, which service station, how long will we stop there, will there be a McDonalds, is there a loo on the bus and what happens if we crash.

It’s going to be a long four days.

Agatha has been put in charge of a coach. This is what happens when you are careless enough to allow colleagues to think you are vaguely competent. She has been given a bucket, three lined paper bags, two bottles of water and some paper towels. Agatha has brought an anti-nausea potion with her in a little spray bottle, and she has liberally spritzed the inside of the coach with it. She has also brought a sleep charm but has not deployed it: no-one would believe that 54 highly excited children had all fallen asleep voluntarily on the way there. On the way back would be a different matter…

There’s not a lot involved in leading a coach really. If you can get from point A to point C with out losing anyone at point B that’s all there is to it.

12.25 pm

The four coaches of the apocalypse have arrived at a service station. Inside there are businesspeople, sales representatives, lorry drivers and elderly people out for a jolly who have no idea what is about to hit them.

13.15pm

178 children have been rounded up, herded to the coach park and counted back onto the coaches. Inside the service station, order is being restored by a small army of cleaners.

15.30pm

Four coaches pull up at the “Suffolk Broads Outdoor Activity Centre” and the staff - those blessed angels- swoop in and take charge of the boys who, lugging oversized suitcases and bags, gradually disappear into the accommodation.

 

Agatha has been given a group of twelve boys to look after for the trip. Two of them are sharing a room opposite her. Their names are Henry and Ike and they are not just best friends, they are like brothers. They are polar opposites to look at. Ike is small and wiry and always moving; Henry is built for comfort, not for speed. But they are inseparable. There is no magic in the world so powerful as a friendship like that.

 

The first morning dawns bright and breezy; Julian is standing on the shore of the lake. He is wearing a buoyancy aid, a helmet, and a hang-dog expression on his face. It is October, there is a nip in the air, and he is feeling less than confident that he won’t get wet today. Standing next to him in solidarity are his mates Huey, Dewey, and Louie. If Julian isn’t getting on a paddle board, then neither are they.

Agatha sighs. Dewey makes the mistake of showing a glimmer of interest in one of the boards and Agatha seizes the moment…

Dewey, just come and help me with this board, would you?

Miss, I don’t –

I know, Dewey, that’s ok. But just pick that end up, would you?

Ok.

Wow. It’s pretty heavy. I guess they’re really stable. Oh! Look at Fred! He’s waving. Let’s just put this one on the water, eh?

But…

Great. Just put your feet here. Now hold this paddle for a second. There you go – just paddle over to where Fred is!

Agatha’s foot nudges the board firmly and Dewey paddles off. He turns round and grins.

I’m doing it!

​

Right, Huey and Louie – come over here a second. That’s right. What’s that Huey? You think you could give it a try? Excellent. Louie – You’re not going to let Huey go alone, are you? No? I didn’t think so… Off you go…

Julian is watching. His heels are dug into the soft earth of the shore and his bottom lip is stuck out so far that a bird could land on it. Agatha puts it to him that he is the only one not to have at least given it a go. She put a little emphasis on the word go. Think, she says, of the conversation in the form room when everyone else is talking about that great morning paddleboarding. He will be the only one with something to prove. But hey, it’s his choice and if he thinks his pride can stand it…

Julian slumps towards a board, gives it a desultory push out onto the water, climbs on and paddles away. Agatha climbs onto the last board. The instructor gives her an approving nod. Huey, Dewey and Louie cheer their mate on and the four of them paddle off together. There is splashing and shouting and laughing.

When the instructor calls “time” on the activity half an hour later, Julian looks over at Agatha.

What? Already? Can we do this again tomorrow?

No magic was used to create this moment, but more than a little was created by a teacher being more stubborn than her charges.

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Of Spells and Spelling

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Did you know that the words grammar, glamour and grimoire are actually the same word? Education and magic are linked, so while you might think that there are better ways for a modern-day witch or wizard to earn a crust (there are certainly less stressful ones) it’s not the strange choice it might seem. The holidays are good, it’s never dull, and there’s a decent pension at the end of it.

Miss Agatha Sparks was born into a family of teacher-wizards. Generations of them. One of her ancestors was even the headmaster of a prestigious – and expensive – public school for boys in the 1840s.

Sir Edward Watson Sparks had attended his local grammar school in Cheltenham and had excelled in mathematics. He had gone on to Cambridge where he gained honours and was among the middle ranks of the “wranglers” at the tripos. Bully for him and all that.

Agatha once taught at a public school for girls. It was back in the 1970’s[2] and it was all very “Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” at the start – straws boaters, gym slips and Latin. By the end of her tenure, lacrosse had been replaced by “aerobics”, the classics had given way to Media Studies and the chemistry department may or may not have had a deal with the local pub. But I digress…

Whether one teaches Art History at Miss Snooty-Snoot’s School for Young Ladies or Citizenship at Arse End Academy, the teaching of spelling and vocabulary is going to be an important part of your job as an educator. All teachers (primary or secondary) should have a basic grasp of synthetic phonics, a range of strategies to help your charges improve their fluency and the discipline not to wet your knickers when they write something hilarious…

In the 1980s, Agatha taught at a comprehensive school in a small Midlands town. It was a warm afternoon and – as was the fashion at the time – the children were busy with a “creative response” to ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Circling the room in the approved manner, she saw one girl busy drawing two dead ponies with their legs sticking up in the air, tongues lolling, eyes rolled back and buzzing with flies. Was this a clever metaphor for the Montagu and Capulet families and their corrosive effect on society? Or were these horses emblematic of the young lovers and their fate?

No, Miss! It’s from the prolapse, innit? A plague on both your horses….

Meanwhile, Year 7 were reading a delightful book about a child who steals some goo from her father’s laboratory and grows a creature in a petri dish on her windowsill. The creature grows limbs which resemble those of an octopus. The children wrote to explain what had happened in the story…

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The creetur grew bigger and bigger and it grew a head and a nose and a moth and lots of testicles all over her bodie.

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And of course, THIS is the book that the Ofsted Inspector picks up to look at when he visits…

 

 

[1] This (or something very like it) was originally said by Czech historian Konstantin Josef Jireček. Agatha considers him “one of us”.

[2] Witches are like Boxer the Donkey in ‘Animal Farm’ - very long-lived. They often fake aging, retire, and move on so as not to arouse suspicion.