I’m sitting here with two books in front of me: the first is my own book, Is There A Pigeon in the Room? My Life in Schools, which is published tomorrow.
It’s a memoir – hopefully an amusing and thought-provoking one – about my career in teaching. The other is my mark book for my first year in teaching, school session 1980-81. I was 23, very skinny, bespectacled, perhaps… possibly… a tiny bit camp and I had been appointed to teach English and history (the latter about which I knew almost nothing) at Daniel Stewart’s and Melville College (DSMC), the independent boys’ school in west Edinburgh where I had had my first teaching practice.
