ABSTRACT
One of the authors can remember a particularly striking lesson in a workingclass comprehensive school in Sheffield. He was sitting at the back of the classroom, observing a mixed class of twenty-one students, with eight boys and thirteen girls. The memorable aspect of the lesson came from the wild antics of two boys sitting at a front desk. They spent most of the lesson singing or humming, putting their feet up on the desk, fighting, pinching each other’s books, calling out, having a laugh. The lesson was interrupted, time after time, by the two boys demanding attention from the teacher. It was like having two over-grown cuckoos in the classroom, with yawning wide beaks crying out for immediate satisfaction.
