True tales of classroom chaos
After three years of teaching at Truss, an inner-city sink school, Francis Gilbert has been offered a job in the English department at his old school, a nice suburban comprehensive. Like a prisoner out of Colditz, he feels like he’s just landed a job in toytown. But, with Mr Morgan, the deaf old English teacher, still cackling, the staff room politics in tatters, alarming complaints from the parents and, worst of all, the memories of his own disturbed childhood suddenly rushing back at him, how long can Gilbert’s dreamland last?
Reviews of Teacher on the Run
“Teacher On The Run is a compulsively readable confessional”
Bill Greenwell, Independent, Oct 2005
“Gilbert spends lesson after lesson desperately waiting for the bell to release him from his misery and, night after night, wakes screaming, drenched in sweat from dreams in which he is facing the dreaded Year 9 dressed only in sheets of grammar exercises that the monsters proceed to Hoover off him”
Chris Woodhead, Sunday Times, Sept 2005
“Gilbert hesitates at one point about whether to write or teach. My guess is he will never give up teaching, because he could not do without that violent, volcanic, life-affirming roar that writer only ever hears at second hand.”
Hilary Spurling, Telegraph, Dec 2005