Pharma lounge

Miss Snippet sat down in the teacher's lounge and tried not to sigh.  She was sure that sighing as you sat down was a sign of old age; she could remember both her grandmother and her mother doing it, and she was determined not to end up like either of them.  Which in her grandmother's case meant dead and in her mother's case meant trapped in a stifling nursing home chosen by Miss Snippet for its brochure's boast that it had better security that Alcatraz.  She occasionally drove by the nursing home to check that there were no signs of a break-out, and forwarded all correspondance from them on to her lawyer.
"Pill?" said the young man at the other end of the couch, and she started a little.  She gazed at him, her eyes narrowing as she realised that she didn't recognise him, either as a teacher or a student.  They narrowed even more when she started looking for familial resemblances to the headmaster.  He smiled and rattled a little brown plastic pill bottle at her.  "On the house?"
"Who are you?" asked Miss Snippet, her words coming out like a growl.  The young man looked a little taken aback, and lowered the hand shaking the pill bottle.
"Steve," he said, trying his smile again.  He put the bottle down on the couch and offered his hand, empty this time.
"I'm not shaking your hand until I know who you are and what you're doing in here," said Miss Snippet.  She adjusted her gaze to a glare, the one her class knew meant she was getting angry.
"I just said, I'm Steve."  His hand didn't waver, but nor did Miss Snippet's determination.
"And what do you do?  Are you the latest substitute teacher to discover why class 9K sent their teacher on a prolonged rest-cure in a not-a-mental-hospital-at-all-place by the sea?"
"No.  Are class 9K a bit rough then?"
"Why don't you take them for a maths class and see?"
Steve lowered his hand at last and picked the pill bottle back up.
"Look, I'm just trying to help," he said.  "You look like one of the good ones, right?  I hear there's some right nutters who work here, driving everyone else mad, so I'm just here offering some free samples of the kind of thing my company supplies.  They're just to help you keep your equilibrium when everyone around you seems to be going mad.  In fact," and he leant across the couch a little to Miss Snippet, trying to create the illusion of intimacy, "they tell me there's a teacher here who treats her class like underage unpaid labour!"
"Oh really?"  Miss Snippet almost leant in herself, but then decided that even Steve couldn't be so stupid as to not see that for the ploy it was.
"Oh yes!"  His voice dropped a little to a conspiratorial hush.  "They say her class built all three of the new annexes and that she hires them out to people to build paths, garages and the occasional two-storey extension.  She's the kind of person it's hard to keep your cool around, and these little pills, teacher's little helpers, are just what you need.  Look, I shouldn't tell you this, but we've even got a couple of little pills you could slip her, if you wanted a few quiet days."
"Have you offered these pills to 9K's maths teacher?" asked Miss Snippet, trying hard to sound conspiratorial.  She felt she got about half-way there, spoiled only really by the tone of disgust in her voice when she had to mention the weak teacher that the kids were clearly doing their best to cull from the herd.
"No," said Steve.  "I heard he's not easy to get to.  Secure storage, and all that!"  He even tapped the side of his slightly red nose with a long finger when he said that.
"Janitor's closet, actually," said Miss Snippet wondering if she could get away with twisting a finger at her temple.  She decided against it.  "The headmaster won't pay for treatment, so he's just locked away in a dark place until he stops screaming and trying to eat his own fingers."
"Really?"  Steve looked very interested all of a sudden, and his fingers curled tightly around the pill bottle.  "I might have one or two things that could help calm him down, now that you come to mention it.  I could perhaps look in on the chap and check he's ok, got all his fingers still, that kind of thing?"
"Come this way," said Miss Snippet bouncing out of her chair like a fifties-waitress given a hundred-dollar tip.  "I can keep an eye out for the headmaster while you talk to him.  Poor guy doesn't get many visitors."
She checked her watch as she led Steve from the staff-room, and was pleased to see that her class should have finished pouring the concrete now, which would an ideal place for Steve to trip and fall and disappear into a supporting pillar.

Grading to a curve

Miss Snippet sighed and stared at the class's English homework.  Ever since the headmaster had decided that the school needed more innovation things had been getting harder and harder, with the job potentially taking up more and more of her free time.  She had solved a lot of these issues by passing the workload onto the children, but now it was slowing down her plans to be able to undercut the current cafeteria suppliers on fresh produce and reduce her income for the year.  It was surprising, she felt, but it seemed like all that the headmaster's solutions did was generate new problems.
She picked up the first book, and then the headmaster's new instructions for grading.  He'd felt that grading honestly was dishonest and lead to the school appearing to have some better teachers than others, which failed to show a united front.  He'd also expressed worry (dithered, thought Miss Snippet) that it might lead to teacher's deliberately sabotaging each other's classes in order to gain some kind of competitive advantage.  Which she had, in fact, been doing, and resented him spotting it.  Then he'd decided that grading to a bell curve was too American, which met the staff complaints that they were having to give inappropriate marks to students in order to fit them to the curve.  But he'd decided to simply pick another curve, which not only made it clear he hadn't listened, but left them trying to find ways of grading to that curve that didn't require sophisticated computer models and algorithms.  For the moment, they were grading to a finite sum of sinusoids, and Miss Snippet had realised that she could achieve this with a random number generator and a fourier transform.
The random number generator beeped, spitting out the first grade, and Miss Snippet put ticks and crosses at random on the page and wrote the grade next to it.  As she closed the book the generator beeped again, so she sped up her marking a little in order to keep up.  Five minutes later she had finished.
Now she came to their site reports, which weren't graded at all and which she actually paid a lot of attention to.  She cared very little if they understood the difference between a gerundival adjective and a continuous present adverb, but she cared a lot if their estimations for the cost of digging up the playground, ploughing in a hundredweight of manure, and planting it with marrows, cabbages and raspberry canes were wrong, badly written, or hard for the other children to follow.  Her pen tracked each line in the reports, and her calculator waited patiently for her to encounter another set of figures that needed checking.  It took two hours, but in that time she realised that Jane Ather was attempting to conceal the loss of four hundred pounds of sharp sand, and that there was a possibility of subsidence if they dug any closer to the school kitchens.  Pleasingly, Godfrey, the foreman this month had spotted both as well and made recommendations.  She accepted that they should stop digging towards the school and reinforce the edges that they already had, and rejected his proposal of staking Jane out for the ants that appeared to be colonising the football pitches.  Her pen wavered for a moment, as she considered that the best punishments provided very visible examples, but finally decided that it didn't meet the crime.  Something less lethal was probably more suitable.
She smiled happily as she laid the last report down.  People thought that children were only good for teaching things to, but she was living proof that child-labour could be a very viable proposition.  She could hardly wait till they started turning ten and she get them doing some seriously heavy labour.

Spot of tea

"A spot of tea, vicar?"
"Where?"
"Just there, on your... trousers."  Colin winked.
"Oh my, that won't do!  What will the other parishioners think?"
"Well vicar, I do have a washing machine.  I mean, the wife has a washing machine."
"What a jolly good idea; I'll just slip them off and if you could pop them in there for a cycle–"
"CUT!"
Miss Snippett stared aghast at her class of seven-year-olds, who were supposed to be performing a scene from A Man for all Seasons, and were apparently about to start undressing.  Not that she felt there was anything to get excited about there, but she was aware that the parents who would be attending the Spring Play might get a little excited by it.  And not in the applauding frantically and writing to the headmaster to recommend her way, either.
"What is going on?  I left you with Act two, scene three to rehearse, and although Thomas More was deeply religious, I don't believe he could have been a vicar.  Especially since the play deals with the events that led Henry VIII to found his own church."
"Er, we couldn't understand the words, miss," said Colin, looking angelically unrepentant.  Miss Snippet, who'd found his with a different copy of Hustler every time he'd had a tea-break when she was using them as navvies to build a school garden, was not deceived.
"And?"
"So there was this other script that was easier to follow, miss."
"And where did this script come from?"
"There miss."  He pointed, and several other children in the class nodded, suggesting that he might be telling the truth.  She looked where he was pointing, and frowned.  It was Miss Flebbers desk.
Miss Flebbers had joined the staff just after the nativity play, when the headmaster was keen to hire people who clearly weren't related to him, or looked like they were likely to drink copiously and then catch fire in front of the parents.  She was broad, tee-total, claimed to be vegan and allegedly went and built houses for homeless people on her weekends.  She wore wellies to school which she didn't always remember to change out of, and she had her own teabags in the staffroom that smelled like mildew.  Miss Snippet had been instantly suspicious of her, and had spent the first few days spreading the rumour that she didn't build houses for homeless people, but instead built houses out of homeless people, until Miss Davenport told her that she felt that she wasn't really giving the newcomer a chance.
Miss Snippet held her hand out for the script, and George, who was playing the vicar, surrendered it.  It was a handwritten manuscript and when Miss Snippet turned the page to see what happened after the vicar took his trousers off she dropped the manuscript in surprise.
"How much of this did you read?" she asked, hurriedly picking the manuscript back up again.
"Just the pages you saw, miss," said Colin.  She suspected he was lying, but she wanted to believe the lie.  Except that she couldn't resist asking: "And why aren't you playing the vicar, Colin?  I thought you liked to have roles with titles?"
His silence, the very faint hint of a flush to his cheeks told her that he was well aware of what the vicar was about to invite in just a couple of pages time, just as the look of bewilderment on George's face suggested he'd been in for a surprise.
"Right," she said.  "I don't think this is appropriate for your parents, but a Man for All Seasons is, so we will return to rehearsing that.  Colin, you may hand out the correct scripts and we shall start from the top.  That is, the start of the scene."
She walked over to Miss Flebbers's desk as she spoke, intending to put the manuscript back.  When she opened the desk though, she saw that the manuscript was one of at least eight, and paused for a moment.  She flicked to the back of the manuscript she was holding.  It certainly looked complete, so perhaps Miss Flebbers wouldn't notice it missing for a few days.
She closed the desk and shoved the manuscript into her handbag.  She really ought to know what kind of woman she was dealing with here.
"Right, children," she said.  "Action!"