I am a teacher. Have you noticed?
When I first started teaching, I used to be very enthusiastic about everything and anything that would get a child to read. I love reading; it makes me ache, in a sort of slightly weird way but not as weird as you’re currently imagining.
As a teacher, your main mission in life is to make children love learning. Actually, as a secondary school teacher, your mission differs slightly in that you are hell bent on making children like the subject that you teach, for reasons of A Level class sizes and having nice displays of A Level work on your corridors, but it’s more simple than that in Primary schools. Therefore, the idea that a child would discover an author and get hooked on the written word is one that warms the hearts of many a teacher across the world.
However, as you begin to have taught for more than three weeks, you find yourself getting slightly (ie. quite a lot) less enthusiastic and notice that you’re down Cynic Street without an authentic word to say for yourself. Things that you know you should believe become replaced by continuous clock watching, calendar watching and trying to get. things. done.
Where at first, I was all about the reading and the letting the children be themselves and does it matter what they’re reading as long as it’s words and they’re enjoying it?, I became more about the pressing my lips together and trying not to shout at the top of my voice what the bloody hell are you reading that immediately after Anwar read it for?.
The main reason for this is David Walliams. Yes, I understand that he is a better writer than, say, Katie Price or Gerry Halliwell because, after all, he wrote sketches and yes, I understand that children enjoy reading books that other children are reading because it makes them feel like part of a group. I will even go as far as to say I understand that children like to read books that are about things that make them laugh, just like adults like to read books about things that make them laugh (overcoming anxiety in ten days, clean eating and mindfulness, for example). I am fully willing to accept that children do indeed enjoy the works of Walliams. I can even be pushed as far as to say that I don’t mind reading his books to see what all the fuss is about.
What really, really gets my goat, however, is that children seem to read nothing but David Walliams.
Nothing else.
Ever.
As each time a child finishes a chapter, another begins exactly. the. same. one., I am stuck in a continual loop of listening to children attempting (badly) to talk like the boy who had all his teeth taken out in The Demon Dentist, making terrible phonetic mistakes when reading about Lord Funt Hospital (I mean, really, is there a word he could have used that sounds less like a terrible breach of classroom language etiquette each time it is read? Which, by the way, is many, many times.) and the plight of poor Stella Saxby at the hands of her terrible Aunt Alberta.
But, and this is a big but, this isn’t the worst part. Oh no.
The worst part of it all is that Aunt Alberta has an owl.
I would like to interject here that I have absolutely nothing against owls. I, in fact, really rather like owls. Quite a lot. I like pictures of owls and I like the joke about the owl in the microwave. This is not anti-owl propaganda in any way, shape or form.
The worst part; the very worst part of all is that the owl is called Wagner. That, in itself, is a fine and wonderful name. I am sure the associated humour goes straight over the heads of most nine and ten years olds, but that’s also OK because it provided some merriment for me the first, second and third time I listened to the book being intoned by a small child.
What is not OK is that nobody ever seems to twig on to the fact that, like the other fifteen children in their class, they too must pronounce the name of the owl ‘Vagner’. It is a German name, and therefore we must pronounce it in the way in which our friends the Germans would pronounce it. I am happy for the lederhosen and milking stool to be left out, but saying ‘Vagner’ instead of ‘Wag-ner’ is absolutely crucial for purposes of reading and posterity.
And so, I find myself maybe twenty-six times each and every day shouting, ‘THERE IS NO WAG IN WAGNER’.
And does it ever sink in?
Of course it does not.
In resorting to desperate measures, I have made a banner for my classroom wall.
These are desperate times, people.
I did have some success trying to dissuade my small charges from reading something other than a book by Davy W. After sending home reading lists; having in depth conversations with all concerned about the importance of a wide and varied diet of reading books and offering myself to various gods in the hope that it may have a small impact upon what is placed in my reading tray in the morning, one of the little people promised he would try something new.
I awaited, trembling and wide-eyed for his departure from Walliams. I gazed at his book bag as he arrived in the classroom. I put down my pen and gave him full, rapt attention as he told me what he’d had for breakfast whilst sorting out his various possessions.
And then, hopes dashed, I leapt out the window as he, with a proud thrusting out of his chest, produced not a David Walliams but a…
…David Baddiel.
I rest my case.
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