I don’t see why I can’t be an Olympian

I don’t see why, just because I’ve got classes to teach, that I can’t be an Olympian. I want to stand on the winner’s podium, wear a gold medal, and have the national anthem played for me.

The normal sweaty athletics and synchronised-swimming and equestrianing-about are all just brawn and training and weights and press ups and sweating and steroids and – ooh can we say that? No really, long jump? Run run, as fast as you can, you can’t catch me I’m the long jumping man. And triple jump? Why not hop-scotch or tree-climbing?

Anyway, if teachers ran the Olympics we’d have less brawny events and more brainy ones.

There’d be accuracy events like scrunched up A4 lobbed into a bin at the back of the classroom. And endurance events like notes on the whiteboard just before exams, and sprinty events like getting to the staffroom at morning tea time when there are cakes. (Spikes make the difference.)

And how about trading bitter nasty insults across a crowded staffroom – ‘yes, that outfit does make your bum look big’, ‘the kids like my lessons better than yours’, and ‘did you buy your degree at a university or did you make it yourself?’

And the winners among us will get huge sponsorship deals. Imagine your school’s Head of Maths’ face splattered all over the outside of overhead projector pen packets, or your Biology teacher’s big cheesey smile beaming at you every time you buy photocopier paper “Use Acme Copier Paper – you too can have friends like mine.” And late-night infomercials with your Principal selling things like blue memo pads, evasive staff-meeting responses and 101 clever ways to raise funds for running a school.

Some more events for the teacher-Olympics: paper-clip chain-making, speed stapling, shouting at children (a bit old fashioned, but the grunting-sweating Olympics still is the discus), juggling tasks, balancing lunch in one hand, marking in another and managing the bus line with the other.

I know, I know, I can hear the counsellors out there squealing with angst, I can smell their hands wringing. ‘These events are all so competitive, they’re all so winners & losers’, and I know they’re saying ‘if we all work together we can achieve so much more’, and ‘there’s no I in team’. I guess they’ll want an event like ‘trust-falls’ in which either everyone gets a gold medal or no-one does.

I think I’ll leave sprint-marking to the young guns. We older teachers will have to contest the smart sports, like report writing and appearing to be awake during assemblies and setting up SMT during staff meetings (my favourite).

Oh and by the way, only teachers can play in the teacher-Olympics. No one from NZQA, or the Ministry, or ERO is allowed.

Right, to my training.

— Peter Giddens