They’re adolescent boys and they think about sex a lot more often than once every two minutes. When Susan Elkin, aged 21 – her skirts as skimpy as her worldliness – lands in a gritty, grubby, badly-run boys’ Deptford secondary school in 1968, she finds her sex-obsessed, curious, thuggish, smelly, criminal pupils quite a handful. And as for the staff …
Fresh from the innocence of a girls’ grammar school and absurdly unreal teacher training in rural Sussex, she has some rapid learning to do as one of the first women employed to teach urban teenage boys in the raw.
Please Miss We’re Boys is the true story of how one naive young teacher faced down the challenges in that sex-fuelled environment, and eventually worked out how to do the job in those pre-Ofsted, pre-league table, pre-National Curriculum 1960s.
Susan Elkin is a freelance author and journalist with over thirty books to her credit. She taught English in secondary schools for 36 years.
Today, her busy working life includes being education editor at The Stage and blogging for The Independent
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