Do you know anyone who is Split?

Ever see the movie Split? James McAvoy plays a character who houses at least 20 different personalities inside his head. Some are pleasant and some are very evil. But in reality, a person with just two personalities is enough to cause distress. For a brief moment in time, I went to a small sixth form college. Sixth form colleges in the UK are typically for students between the ages of 16 to 18. They teach a variety of subjects that either prepare you for doing your A levels or they provide vocational training such as a restaurant chef, carpentry, plumbing etc. The reason I mention this is because one of the subjects I was studying for in this place was for my O level French exams.

But there was something odd about this subject in that the college had a hard time finding the right teacher. From my experience of being taught by them, some were unreliable, some couldn’t teach and there was one who was so ill- mannered and rude that the class, consisting of us 3 students, were actually terrified of him. He’d be snapping and shouting if you got the answer wrong or pronounced a word incorrectly. In fact, his constant rudeness and snapping might actually have been the reason we always got the answers wrong.

When we related what was happening in class to our lovely English teachers, they were both very concerned and told us that the next time he spoke to us in that brusque manner, we needed to interrupt him and tell him that he needed to modify his tone of voice.

Strangely enough we went into his class one morning intending to tell him exactly this but he never showed up and we never saw him again. The feedback we got was that he didn’t like the college vibe! The point I’m making is that he was not Jekyll and Hyde. He wasn’t polite and ethical one day and a mean spirited, rude person the next. We knew who we were dealing with on a day to day basis and, therefore, learnt exactly how we could handle him the next time he continued his behaviour. But what happens if a teacher/lecturer/professor is indeed a Jekyll and Hyde character?

The weird thing is that some teachers can be selectively helpful and unhelpful at the same time. When I was at University in London in the mid-1980s I was shocked to learn that the Senior Science Tutor assigned to me one specific lecturer as my adviser for the year. I was very disappointed because I knew for a fact from other students who were not of the same nationality as this lecturer that he did not want to help them at all. But take one guess as to which students raved about him? You’re spot on. It was those students who were from the same country as him.

Could I have called him out on his selective approach? Yes, I could. Could he have penalised me for it? Possibly. Most students, like me, to whom he did a disservice just did the best we could without a decent adviser. It’s a terrible thing when teaching professionals alter their personality or behaviour depending upon who they are teaching. This, of course, can also happen at work. I’ve had bosses who were nice and supportive, I’ve had bosses who were selective in their niceness and I’ve had bosses who were really nasty. I’ve never had a boss who was a Jekyll and Hyde. Those are the worst kind and cause the most stress; more so than if you had a boss who was always nasty.

At least with the latter, you know who you’re dealing with and learn strategies on how to handle them. But with someone who is unpredictable, like the British weather, you can never prepare because you don’t know who you’re getting. It’s almost like having two bosses and you don’t know who you’re going to see today. The stress in such circumstances can lead you to make mistakes, just like my awful French teacher, because you spend your time worrying about his reaction rather than the task at hand.