ABSTRACT
In the morning, before school starts, the teachers at Downtown sit or stand around in the staffroom reading papers, chatting and smoking. While there was some variation in who sat where, there were informal groups centred on each of the three coffee tables in the staffroom. The typical distribution of the teachers across the three tables partly reflected friendship networks, but the tables were also sites for different activities. Staffroom news is selected arid presented in terms of its relevance to common problems and issues. An important feature of staffroom news at Downtown is the predominant concern with the 'behaviour' of pupils; in other words with those features of them relevant to the problem of maintaining 'order' in the classroom. The rhetorical function of staffroom news can also be detected in the kinds of explanation implied in the typifications.
