Adebayor's started so well for Man City
Sacked "racy" novel teacher speaks out
Tomorrow, your chance to hear the first interview with an who was sacked for writing a book about some of her pupils' fantasies, underage drinking and hints of drug use.
Leonora Rustamova, who was known to her pupils as Miss Rusty, was dismissed from Calder High School in Mytholmroyd in May after publishing her novel "Stop! Don't Read This!" on the internet. She's just lost her appeal. The book features some of the actual names of pupils and fellow staff.
More than 1000 people have also joined a social networking group oncalled Save Miss Rusty's Job.
You can speak to Leonora Rustamova and one of her pupils, Travis, on the programme tomorrow.
This extract describes Travis:-
Travis is the same but different again. He has eyes the colour of something from long, long ago and he must have Minotaur blood in him or something to be so stacked at sixteen. He comes in like a stranger enters a saloon, like he's expecting loaded guns under the tables. Have you heard that line...What do get if you mix three kilos of jam with three kilos of s**t? Well the answer is of course six kilos of s**t. When Travis is feeling defensive he talks like he had all six kilos for breakfast. Even for his size he can pack a lot of scorn. (And if you don't know what 'scorn' is- just ask him what he thinks of his ex-best friend's girlfriend, then bottle his answer -and that, is scorn). When he comes in chin down, looking at you from under his eyebrows you can expect a list of swearwords like he's got them belted into an AK47. But not that day. That day he was in one of his sweetie-moods; chatty, funny, encouraging. Awwww. Gotta say though, even when he's in his best mood he is totally unstoppable and he can talk like a burning car that's been shoved off the edge and is crashing through everything on its way down the mountain.
Although Leonora says the book is a work of fiction, it features five genuine teenage pupils at Calder High School, contains swearwords, has children skipping lessons, refers to a pupil flirting with a teacher and compares two youngsters to 'gorgeous Mr Gay UK finalists'. Here's another extract.
So that's the group. Five wild childs in their last year of school and me in mine, the only girl, and from a very different place. I'd never met anyone so pi***ed off with education as they were. They were sick of teachers squaring up to them with their flat eyes and their power shields. They had wanted rid of them for a long time and it didn't look like it was going to be much longer. By the end of the first week back in September, they had enough detentions lined up between them to start their own school. Where do you go from there?
It was never boring being in a class with those guys, but it was more like an acid trip than a class. For a start you could never even be sure how big it was - which is a fairly typical problem on a trip so I'm told. Sometimes the class was as big as one person (when the exclusion room had taken its cut) and sometimes it was like Bring a Friend Day and they were followed in by sullen mates who'd been spat out of the system somewhere else.
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