I Heart Me by David Hamilton

happened to a colleague, Ian Anton. He burst out laughing. ‘We’ve all had that class,’ he explained.
    I was adamant he hadn’t.
    He told me that just about every schoolteacher in the world had had a class like that.
    If that was what being a teacher was all about then I wasn’t going to be in the profession for very long. I wanted an easier job.
    Ian said I could quit the class if I wanted to, but he challenged me to use my own teachings to get through this difficult time. He knew I was writing a self-help book, and here I was, needing the help. The irony! As Fiona would be in on Monday, he suggested I spend the weekend working on my own self-development and see how I felt about the class afterwards. If I still felt the same, then Fiona would be able to find a replacement. But if Ifelt different, it would help me a lot as a teacher if I continued with the class.
    I spent a lot of time visualizing that weekend. I saw myself standing and walking around the class with confidence. I imagined myself speaking with confidence – each word slow, measured, clear and projected with ease. I also did it for real. I stood in power poses and walked with power around my bedroom, pretending I was teaching decimals, ratios and proportions with the utmost clarity and confidence.
    By Monday, I did feel a lot more confident. Still afraid, but more confident. And something Ian had said had got into my head, about it being best for my long-term growth if I saw it through to the end. I could turn the whole thing into a self-help lesson for myself. Somehow that made it easier to face.
    By the time I arrived at the class on the Thursday I had done so much visualizing, power posing, power walking and power talking, that I automatically moved into that style. There was still a lot of noise and misbehaviour, but I handled it better. It helped that the class was reduced in size, from 20 to 12. Most had been dismissed, for a variety of reasons.
    I’m not sure how it came about, but one of the boys asked me a question about my life. I told them I had a PhD in chemistry and had previously worked as a scientist developing drugs. Then I gave them a quick five-minute lesson on what real drugs were – the medicinal kind. I explained that roots and leaves found in rainforests seemed to help people with illnesses like cancer and that the chemical was extracted and given to chemists like me,who then made several of versions of it, tweaking a few atoms here and there, to see if any of them worked better than the root or leaf itself. I gave them a few examples on the blackboard of the kind of alterations we made and why we made them, and explained that one of these would eventually become the white pill that you get from the doctor.
    They were amazed. One asked me if I knew about space travel. His dad had told him that Star Trek would be reality one day. So I explained that ‘warp technology’ was actually when you pulled two pieces of space together so the distance wasn’t a trillion miles, but just a few yards. I held up a piece of paper, poked a pen through two ends and pulled the paper together so the pen was a bridge. I told them it was called an Einstein-Rosen bridge, after the two professors who figured it out.
    I was stunned by how fascinating they found it. ‘This is mad shit,’ said one boy enthusiastically. They all wanted more. So I made a deal with them: I’d give them 20 minutes of mad shit each time if they gave me their attention for the rest of the lesson.
    That’s how it went for the next 10 weeks. As well as decimals, ratios and proportions, we covered organic chemistry, quantum entanglement, neuroscience, the placebo effect and many other topics. We even devoted a session to aliens.
    It worked. By the end of the course, everyone in the class got an ‘A’. I fondly remember handing a marked test paper back to a large tough-looking boy with a deep, gruff voice. As he saw the