The Blackboard Jungle

2011-12-01T01:09:00.003Z

My phone buzzes during poetry class. The plumber is coming, and I can't afford to miss his text. I blush, and check the phone as surreptitiously as I can, which is to say, in full glaring adolescent spotlight.

I fumble with a heavy nokia brick, barely functional, but still only 6 years into its shelf life. (I have moved from early adopter to late adopter as I age gracefully, and 7 years is about right for a phone. In a year, I will be able to consider a smartphone. Right now, a coloured screen is still a luxury too far.)

Jordan looks bemused. "Switch it off," orders Shannon, "switch it off and give us the battery. It's against the rules."

I actually am trying to switch it off, but ancient nokia bricks must be cajoled, not ordered. They don't perform just any old function you require, you know, they need to be sweet talked and pressured into it. This one doesn't 'do' voicemail, and will only tolerate one 4 minute call per day before it flounces into unresponsive inertia.

The phone is finally deadened. I point back at the jazz style poem with a half chewed pen. Jordan is not fooled.

"Is everything you own old fashioned, Miss?" he says, and I see myself through his eyes, suddenly. Ancient, out of touch, not possessed of an iphone. I wonder if he can imagine a world where we write only with pens, where screens don't respond to your finger. And why should he? Do I imagine the black and white tvs of my parents' era?

It only takes the image of my car - a battered white fiat, sixteen years this summer, with too many holes in its oil tank to live for much longer - to convince me of my new role, as the old bint of the classroom.

"Yes, I suppose it is."

2010-09-23T21:32:00.003Z

What a difference five years makes.

Athrawes is on maternity leave from her Head of Maths post in a tiny town in the South Island of New Zealand. I have just returned from three years in Peru, to teach in what I used to think of as a Phoenix school - rebuilt, renamed, restaffed, rebranded.

And what a difference, from the old South London performing arts comp. This new school (brand new school, price tags still on the furniture, paint still wet) is semi rural, but big, in the west country of the UK. UK education has been 40% privatised these days. The top and bottom end are owned and controlled by some other agency, not by government. It's out of state control, but is about 2 years on from having been the worst school in the country, statistically (I should have noticed that, yes, but applied on proximity basis only). It's wallowing in private funding, I've never worked in any building so modern and luxurious. I have 30 laptops in the cupboard, that I can give out to kids at will. My head of department shakes her head in wonder at the thought that state schools have to keep a record and a tally of their photocopying. It's been a bad school, but has followed a rigorous program of headhunting good, dedicated and imaginative teachers, so without a doubt will within five years be a good school, and within ten be one of the best in the country. (I have worked in rebranded schools, this one has everything it takes - it's just a matter of time.)

So, Guardian Education, who called me and my blog "jaded", I am officially bright eyed and bushy tailed again. Working part time, teaching English, teaching Languages (the timetable varies, I taught Animal handling last term), enjoying a cushier end of working in extremely bloody challenging schools for yet another stint.

Rebirth? Not likely. Chundering on. New place, new country, new continent, new shiny suit. Same wily little geniuses with dogs that eat homework. Chundering on.

2007-11-07T18:59:00.000Z

So Holly is learning English with me, and at the local uni (pffft!), and simultaneously on the internet. I realise this when she knows every slang word to every pop song, and when she drops her pencil, and accompanies it with a loud "Fuck!"
I look surreptitiously at the other students, some of whom are all of 13 years old, and realise swearing in a new language just isn't that impressive.
"¿Dónde aprendiste a hablar palabras malas, Holly?" I question, in my terrible terrible spanish, hoping that if any of them did hear or recognise it, that will suffice as The Teacher Disapproving of it.

Next day, and Holly is dropping things again. "¡Mierda!" she mutters, and I reprimand her again. Not that I care, but I already hear rumours that I'm the strictest teacher in the whole Andean mini city, I don't want to get a reputation for being the foulest mouthed, too. "oh, okay," she replies in English, then continues with several tonnes of force to yell "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK!" as a more polite alternative.

"Holly!" I remonstrate, but there's nothing I can say. Fuck is clearly a punctuation word, just as it was in London, and not offensive. Or a cool word, maybe. And this is the problem when students get to a level approaching fluent, too - that you just can't, for want of a better word, fuck about with English slang, you need to know exactly when it is appropriate and when it's a slap in the face with a wet fish, or you're going to be in very very hot water.

So I sigh, sit across the classroom, prepare a mental speech in Bad Spanish, and launch into a description of how (In Theory) when I worked in London, in colegio, a student who used Holly's favourite word would have certain rapid consequences. (In Theory). Their carrera would terminate. (In Theory) They would end the day by looking for a new school. (In Theory)

It's not exactly true, but it's a context. You want to use that word, you need to know its texture. I think again about the stories of what really did happen in that London colegio, and how tame "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK" really was, and cross two fingers behind my back.

Holly's embarrassed. After a minute or two of silence, she mutters to her textbook, in English, "sorry."

2007-07-15T19:35:00.000Z

But that wasn't why I stopped writing. I got a job - in addition to the other two jobs I was working - training future English teachers, in a local pedagogical institute. Twenty hours a week, contact time (teaching time, to the un-industrialised): it didn't seem a lot. That was before I realised how presence is valued way more highly than action, in a bureaucratic culture.

Presenteeism. I was obliged to turn up at 7:40 (it was meant to be 7:45, but the industrial clock was set wrong, all the better to cut your wages with, little girl) and sit mutely in what was known as The Teacher's Room. A hallowed space of bare desks, bare walls, missing departmental plans, broken cupboards, and, beneath the obligatory statue of the Virgen Maria, a lone, half speed computer, viciously competed for at all times. No matter what my teaching schedule, what my activities, I was required to remain in this carcel from 7:40 until 1:30pm each day. There was nothing to do there, there was no function the emptiness and solitariness of the room allowed completion of, and lessons came to represent a welcome escape from the cold silence of The Teacher's Room. Staff ran to the desks, feigning energy, enthusiasm and punctuality, then sat, vacant, staring above heads at blank, grimy walls. In six weeks, I saw only one man working. By the beginning of first class, teachers would slam their briefcases (ostentatiously opened, like a portable bureau, to give four papers covered in nonsense an air of desperate efficiency), and run impatiently out of the room, with all the appearance they had students waiting. Outside, they would sit, aimlessly, at a bench in the yard, lacking class, task or students; impatient only to escape the death stillness of The Teacher's Room.

Three afternoons a week, I was required to attend the desk warming; I never did discover what purpose this random presenteeism achieved. Staff told me this - this seven hours per week of extra deskness - was a free consultation period, when students could question me as to the assignments I had set. Students who were either in class, or had paid work elsewhere during these hours. When I questioned the complete and utter lack of students in the student consultation periods, they scoffed at my overzealous demands - wasn't I aware that these students had a lot of work to do?
Not by the amount I saw the teachers grading, they didn't.

By around ten am, the thirty strong staff had mysteriously disappeared. They would reappear magically, thirty of them ghosting the yard and the terraces, five minutes before the factory card punching machine clicked over to half past one. On an illegal recce to a local eatery, I discovered the entire administration sitting eating pastries. The local cafes were a mine of gossip, of staff - student romances, of in fighting, plotting, and machinations. Any business that took place inside the school could only spell ill: anything of positive import would be hidden in a local cafe. I learnt to work the system, to sit behind the cafe door, and scout students for my other school. The private language school I co-own here. My other job.

I was teaching around 37 hours a week. This is a lot, by European standards, but not impossible*.
What made things difficult was the schedule: 7 till 1 at the Pedagógico, teaching serried rows of 30-40 young adults, in bare rooms and a big american blackboard.
3:30 till 5 at the Acilo de los Ancianos, teaching village girls and illiterates who wished to join the Catholic convent who cared for the old, the infirm, and the mind-blown of the city. Lessons took place below a side altar, in comfy chairs, while lurid Jesuses watched over the class. 7 till 10pm at my own school: small 4-10 strong groups, with CDs, DVDs, computers, textbooks, everything the larger schools didn't have. Or didn't care about.

I'd competed hard to get the Pedagógico job, see. Four hours of demonstration classes, for student teachers, for directors, for staff, for Ministry of Education bigwigs and nabobs. One competitor, one who was my employee at the other place, though not for long, reported me to the local police, the radio, the Ministerio de Educación. He said it was unfair that a rich foreigner should win a job that a Peruvian could do. He accused me of schmoozes, of bribes, and, bored by a daily routine that consisted largely of colouring in, I enjoyed confounding him by beating him in a fair fight. A two hour lecture on psycholinguistics, in spanish, prepared overnight, was a total relief after months and months of wondering at best how to clean dirty rice from a pan with cold water.

It was only when I won the contract did I discover that a Peruvian word of mouth contract cannot be broken, Did I discover that the Institute expected me to teach without books, without pens, without paper, without curriculum, syllabus, library or the faintest whiff of materials. When I tantrummed about it, told them they were a joke, the teachers had a whip round and got me 4 sheets of ripped and crumpled paper. No pen.
To get pens required signed and certified chits from the director, submitted to a frightening woman who lived in a dark cave of 1950s style stationery. I asked the director for a sheet of paper. The director said no.

I pointed out that there was no syllabus, there was no course, there was no curriculum, that they had badly misunderstood what the term 'phonetics' actually means. That to teach English Literature by feeding Shakespeare into Babelfish, stamping it down till it looked like spanish, then proferring it to students with the demand they translate it back into English was not only wrong, but deeply aberrant. This, surely, qualified as impossible*? That the students couldn't speak English anyway, and this might be more of a priority for trainee English teachers. That the rest of the English lecturers had an English vocabulary that stretched to 'hi, how are you?'
The director pointed out that if I wanted to teach, I needed to write seven syllabi. To their specific specified specifications. Which were a secret. And in Spanish.
By Thursday.
I stared meaningfully at the $200 flatscreen computer on his desk. There are no posters, there are no tables to sit at, there are no books, no posters, no dictionaries, and no records, no grades, no exams. He did the shrug I've come to loathe, the 'not my problem' hunch, the 'what can you do' eye roll. "What can I do," he mumbles, sadly, "this is Perú."

This is Perú, so how can you expect me to be anything but corrupt. Sheer disbelief attacked me ten times a day, there.
Anyway.
Anyway, anyway, anyway, anyway. After five weeks, I discovered the Ministerio didn't want to pay me. (I'm a foreigner. Foreigners are rich. We shouldn't need to pay them.) Nobody had wanted to tell me, in case I got angry, and embarrassed everyone, so they had kept it to themselves. In classic Peruvian face saving style, they thought it was better if they made me angry until I wanted to leave. After all, a rich foreigner could not be expected to value a job the way a good honest Peruvian would. After all. I found out the secret, by a process of local cafeteria-based shenanigans, told them I would work until the end of the month, help them find a replacement. But without the presenteeism, without the daily hours spent silent and useless in the carcel, thankyou. I preferred working for myself, in my own school, after all. As soon as the foreigner-lovin' director went away, in hope of finding another teacher, the administration struck. There was a replacement. Here tomorrow. Sign this paper. Write here. You have to renunciar your employment. Don't come back. Don't be here tomorrow.

The tomorrow arrived, and with it a much anticipated full night's sleep, and by lunchtime, my wee village school was full of trainee English teachers, looking lost. Nobody comes to the class. Nobody arrives. What is happening. Please come back.
I returned to the institute, and the sub director asks me why I had failed to turn up this morning. I explain what had happened, but there is a national strike, so nobody can identify the absent administrator who fired me, on the hush hush. The story is rubbish, nobody has authorised such a thing. They apologise, and ask me if I will work two more days, until they can get a new teacher. I haven't a clue if they're telling the truth, or if it's more face saving, but it doesn't really matter to me. Politics is not a game I enjoy dirtying my hands with. And I miss the students, I miss having something to do with the day, I miss feeling useful. I agree to work two more days. As long as the fucking job is not forever, I think, angrily, I can deal.

Next morning, another teacher, one Señor Hitler, slams the door in my face. You may not enter the classroom, he says. We have other priorities. The staff at this school are scared. They don't need someone coming in and actually working, they don't need someone who can speak the language they are paid to teach, they don't need someone rocking the boat.

You did not come to work yesterday, he says. So we rescheduled. Maybe you can do your class later, he says, if you have decided now you want to work here. Maybe you can do six hours in the afternoon, when I have finished. There's a peculiar tinge of hot blooded shame to any conversation where someone is insulting you, coldly and barefacedly, in a tongue that is not your own, and you have to ask them to slow down and repeat that insult, please. Again, more clearly, please, tell me how shit I am.

Why don't you go home, he says. You are not wanted here. Your type, who doesn't want to work. I see the extent of the fear that I will replace people in this institute. I see suddenly how much they hate me, for being something they fear they are not.

So I left, I called on the sub director, I called on the real director, a mountain of apologies are offered, including Señor Hitler's head on a plate. Hitler simply stares at me, venomously. His card is marked by the bloody foreigner, now, when all he'd wanted to do was slope off home a bit early. Fucking gringos, eh?

We're very sorry, we're grateful you have helped us, we realise you might not want to come back now, and no, we're never going to pay you, dear. Can you give us your grades, now?

It's not every school in Perú, it's possibly not even representative of anything in this country. Since that point, the teachers have been on huelga nacional, national strike, a nice relaxing introduction to the end of semester, and the four weeks of August winter holiday. A bunch of them sing songs around a candlelit coffin in the city square on Friday nights, and in Lima, they riot, break windows, frighten children. It's mostly politics, and precious little education; and at its worst it isn't totally dissimilar to the love of paperwork and loathing of actual student progress that rules child-rearing institutions in my own country.
But, by gum, it was a shock.

2006-12-22T23:28:00.000Z

It's a shock, the transfer from teaching at a British state school to teaching at a small school in private sector Peru.

Four days this week, teachers didn't turn up, or didn't feel like teaching. I was drafted, without preparation, to stand substitute. Why not? What's wrong? I get paid, don't I? What preparation could I need?
A child turns up to take an exam, and is given the wrong paper. It doesn't matter, he hasn't paid for next semester's classes or his certificate anyway.
A whole class (not mine) fail their exams. They get given a different exam, one even more moronic than the one they achieved 16% on. Why? We want their renewed subscriptions.
Nobody invigilates exams. What does it matter if the students cheat? Results are paid for, not earnt.

The perpetually aggrieved upturned nose, the safe moral high ground of British state schools and their inverted snobbery seems very very far away.

2006-12-12T22:25:00.000Z

Like a naughty child avoiding her homework, I've secretly started teaching again.

Only Different.

The Blackboard Jungle began as a diary of teaching English literature to a bunch of disaffected, disturbed, and disarmingly creative adolescents in an inner city London comprehensive.
This is what one would term a Difficult Day Job.
When DfEE fatigue finally set in, I jumped ship at the big sign marked 'BURNT OUT: nearly there' and went travelling for ... um, well, two years. Overkill? Perhaps. (I did tell you the part about 'Difficult', right?)
My co-contributor athrawes blogged (almost) a year of learning to teach, as she completed a PGCE in Maths in Welsh village schools; you'd think it was as different from the mean streets of Catford as you could get. However, the story of kids setting fire to the playing fields convinced me there are failing schools in all sorts of contexts.

What else? In India, I finally read the novel which inspires our title here, The Blackboard Jungle. It's brilliant. Read it, if you can.
Brilliant and scary, because the same disaffected, disturbed, disarmingly creative students are described in 1950s NYC as I taught in South East London, as athrawes is teaching in South Wales.

And this is the whole problem, the whole spasming reason teachers ever Burn Out.
It brings back all the despair teachers feel when they realise that disaffected, disturbed, disarmingly creative students are entirely predictable.
That education as a political football, full of shiny new initiatives for the press, and no real practical thought for the students, is entirely predictable.
Teachers and students; caught between two unvarying opposing forces.
It's not a wonder that I jumped ship after twelve successful years. It's a wonder anyone stays so long.

But this year is Only Different.

This time, I am writing for you from a new country, a new career. In the two years of no blogs, I made a new home for myself in the Andean mountains of northern Perú. Amazonas, to be precise. I teach English to Peruvian students at a private language institute.

It's no longer a deeply personal process because students 'have no other way out of their lives', but because this time I also run the school.
My classes vary between 3 and 10 students, not 27-50.
One of my primary duties is dragging school fees out of the students.
My students are a mixture of adults and teenagers - the shock of not being able to chase students around the room to demonstrate differing pronunciations of 'steak' and 'stick' has already set in. (Around the exact moment I later had to sit in front of said student at the bank and apply for a business loan.)
I have much more interest in grammar, now it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to anybody.
I don't teach to any exam, because the exam is something I imaginate in order to persuade students to cough up wodges of cash for fancy certificates.

And I don't have a governmental curriculum to follow.

It's still teaching. Only Different.

We'll see.

2006-05-14T10:44:00.000Z

Nicked from a letter to a friend and ex-colleague, one of several who's this term given up a career in inner city teaching:

Do I miss teaching? Yes, of course. There were moral certainties involved in a job like that (which appeal to someone lazy like myself, because then I don't have to sit around and invent my own moral certainties). But all I have to do is think about either the workload, or the dull thudding frustration of being part of a system that was basically wasting kids, processing them into drug dealing, building, teen motherhood or petty thieving by the truckload, and paying a lot of gaseous lip service to the idea of opportunity, but never actually doing anything to change kid's life chances - it doesn't take much to remind yourself why you left, and why you should stay away.

How many musicians and poets did I teach? How many politicians or philosphoers? How many lower echelon bank tellers, ex-cons, and checkout operators?
Exactly. The stated aims, and the real aims of the british education system are constellations apart. The real aims? To shut people up, look busy, and get the current administration re-elected.
Everything else is a game. The kids aren't even the counters.

A year out of it is not long enough. Not by half. I met a teacher from Whitechapel in the Andaman islands, who temps three or four day s a week for six months of the year, then spends the rest of the year in Asia. It seemed the only acceptable approach if one no longer respects what the job stands for. Be cycnical, do it for cash.
She said that every morning in England was a flat choice: go to work, or sit in the park? It struck me that that sentence is always true. As it happens.

2006-05-04T15:50:00.000Z

Hmm. No posts for ages. Chalk shortage.

In lieu of which, I shall boldly, wilfully, and without the authors' authority reprint a few things people who work in british schools - schools in cities, schools in the countryside, internationals schools - have emailed me through this last term:

1. This term has been a bit insane - the kids are vile, the staff are worse.
Discipline non existent and senior management team off sick, skiving, certainly not there when you need them (Ryan, put the table DOWN!).

We have a fire "test" every week - each and EVERY week, every friday when the little darlings clearly don't like whatever lesson it is that they have on friday and the firemen come out and we all stand in the rain again. This week at least we had a real fire to show for it - sweeties had set fire to the playing field (hard to do in the countryside, what with all the RAIN. Shows ingenuity and forethought to come equipped with petrol).

If this had been my first post i would have quit by now. I wouldn't send my dog to that school (a good thing to say to the headmaster in an exit interview? Nah, I still want a reference)

My teaching has, as a consequence gone downhill like a Norwegian Olympian. All efforts are directed towards trying to establish and maintain some form of control. Have failed to maintain and am still on the establish stage.

I have no job. There are no jobs.

2. Needless to say, the chaos and stress at school is propelling me ever closer towards the front gates. I am oscillating between insanity, depression, occasional good days at work and trying to keep focused and practical about travel. Key is to detach myself emotionally - not something i find easy, but am making plans.

Last term a deaf student threatened to jump off the roof ( I have now changed rooms to the ground floor); recently an intruder with a knife came into the school; mass flouting of 'rules' and open defiance - obvious truanting of lessons by many just wandering corridors, or perhaps teachers like me have just said no more to some students.

3. The boss is a nutter. It is her school and we have to do everything her way. In different circumstances I wouldn't work there. It would annoy and infuriate me. But those were the old days, the days when I lived to work. Now I work to live. Now I just want a job that doesn't keep me away from my home life, a job that pays me a decent wage and a job I can do without any stress or strain. This job offers all that. Because the woman is a nutter, she takes all the pressure off - her desires are so pedantically written down I know exactly what is needed in the job. Their idea of lesson plans and long term planning isn't a problem. And I have to do no thinking about what is needed long term because she does it all.

Random selection.
Truly.
As I said, these are private emails, and it is bad form to reprint in such a way, I utterly acknowledge that. None of these correspondents dreamt their opinions would be made public, or reflect the image they would wish to present of their schools.

That said, I think a theme is apparent. One that if there were any justice, should upset a few apple carts, wake the dusty palaces of the department for education up. Uncensored reports from the horror that is spring term in teaching.

2006-04-09T15:32:00.000Z

Two of my favourite British education bloggers:
A new beginning in the online anatomy of Mister Grey.

And, Bloom has captured perfectly what it is to be an inner city teacher at the dog end of exams term:

I finished school yesterday afternoon. After a bite to eat and a couple of glasses of wine, I trudged up the stairs to bed at 8:30pm – even though My Name Is Earl was on later. I came back down this afternoon at around 2:30 pm. I don’t even have the mental capabilities to work out how many hours I actually slept.

[snip]

I now have two weeks of recuperation, rest and time with my wife and son. For the moment I want to celebrate in the void: the teacher’s paradise – silent moments lost in non-thought. I want to pour myself into this paradise of idleness, drift within the oceans of indolence, bath in the pleasure of nothingness. For a day or two.

Brushing the school, the students, the work, the issues, the noise, from your consciousness is difficult. The Place seeps through your every pore. I think since I started teaching, my genetic make up has changed. Flecks of that incredible environment have altered me utterly. Indeed, as I slept last night and even today, every dream, every second thought concerned a student, a class, an essay, a poem, a play, a novel, a remark, an opportunity, an idea, a fleeting glance at inspiration; every other breath was full of expectation, frustration at a failure; every other breath contained the warm glow of pride at a success, of a job well done.

And I realise: this is not a job. This is a vocation.

Source

2006-03-04T05:56:00.000Z

Lectrice here. Reminiscing.

I'm sitting in a freezing goat shed covered in Newari blankets looking at the looming Himalaya, trying to spot Everest before the sun dips, and after 8 months away, my thoughts turned to home.

If I still lived in London, what would I be doing now?

It'd be the end of morning break on a Monday morning. I'd probably have all my remedial classes - the violent ones, because they always get timetabled for bricklaying in the afternoons (it's only officially that we don't subscribe to labelling theory), and the halfway smart 13 and 16 year olds, who don't learn anything after lunch, at least until Jamie Oliver revolutionises Crofton's neighbouring boroughs.

The 13 year olds would have mock SAT exams - probably this week or last, right after half term (SATs are at the start of May), and the 16 year olds will have started the long, unspoken 'shedding' process that cuts class sizes from 32 to 12-15 by Easter.

But this is generally the easiest term, as you've managed to frighten pavlovian routines into most children by this stage. The (entirely predictable) problems of this term would be organisational: organising two hour daily revision classes for the 16 year olds (you somehow never get any resources or payment for doing it, despite a plethora of promises) (which meant I would have to do them all - as there were 350 16 year olds, that was always a little knackering, making sure each kid got onto three extra classes in the subject and grade level they need, then writing and delivering the classes, which if you're any good at them, have approximately twenty more students than there are chairs).
The exam syllabus would have changed, so I would be trying to write and publish a cottage revision guide, which I'd usually try to delegate to student teachers (who are all at the jobseeking and loud complaints stage - I never thought to point out to them that the one who gives in and does the revision guide usually gets offered a job - I should warn athrawes this).

Ooh, and the coursework is a month away from examination, which means collating a folder of five 6000 word essays from each of 350 kids, then getting it marked 'blind' by between two and four unfamiliar staff, who have to then magically agree on the grades, and can't go home till it's done.
That's 42 million words read, if you're not sure.

Five kids will have cheated and require terrifying, which was my job, one will refuse to do it again; everyone adult would look worried and tentative, and I'd have to be the one who chumps up and fails him. (It's a him.)

One teacher will disappear, or fall downstairs, or have a nervous breakdown, and I'd inherit a third GCSE class (you're only supposed to have one, but I managed to inherit two others from burnout cases for the last four years on the trot, so I'd rank this as a predictable wastage), who will have just three weeks to do the three missing essays they'd never been taught. For which I would whisk out homemade cheat packs that enable you to get an 'A star' on Shakespeare or Romanticism without ever reading the original texts. (That I ended up writing these things is a clue as to how predictable.)

And the scariest kid in the school, the one with all the gang connections and the mother you never want to cross, and the father you truly pity, will pretend his or her teacher lost his courseork, and I'd back him up, to boost the school's figures.

No pregnancies or suicide attempts till late March / April, though.

Yes, I think I've reassured myself that aimlessness in a bamboo lean-to halfway up a mountain is a valid career choice.

2006-02-09T15:22:00.000Z

I have a day off!!! Hurrah!! Well, I call it a day off if it isn't either sitting in class all day learning about maths (PGCE could really put you off your favourite subject) or in school teaching or at home peeling tiles off the bathroom wall.

The bathroom project was meant to be the kitchen until we discovered that the plumbing for the bathroom protrudes into what was meant to be the new kitchen ceiling…so I now have a half destroyed kitchen AND a half destroyed bathroom – AND all my kitchen appliances arriving in a month…they will need to live in the conservatory (shed!) for the next six months until the bathroom gets done.

So far I spent this treasured moment, me free day, as follows:

a) doing the laundry...just keeps on mounting up, no matter how much you do, there is always more…I thought only people with kids were meant to have these problems

b) going into town for a coffee with my neglected husband and planning the layout for the aforementioned bathroom

c) coming into college to do a tutorial on Interactive Whiteboards for my fellow students. Some are going into schools next week and haven’t used this tool before. They think it’s the devils work, I think it’s the best thing since quadratics, so to save them I did a little teach-in. In contrast the school where I am going only has normal whiteboards, which I am dreading!! What do you do if you can’t “flip” back a page…can’t use lovely predesigned webmaterials…can’t draw a straight line!! All schools should have interactive boards in all classrooms. This is the 21st century, lets make use of it!

d) doing maths...this is a never ending task…cramming 2 A levels in the odd half hour here and there…never quite getting it. We are taught in college about instrumental and relational understanding – the difference between learning by rote/for exams and learning by understanding/doing/seeing. Well, if you did maths 20 years ago and are having to cram it all again, its pretty much by rote!! I’d love to have the time to really “get it” but as ever, time is a shortage commodity. At least I learnt yesterday what a dodecahedron is…that’s bound to stand me in good stead!

The less than ideal news is that I face a 3 hr daily round trip (1.5 hrs out, 1.5 hrs back) to get to my new school placement. Sucks. I am feeling very negative about this next placement because I know that with that amount of traveling time (not to mention the cost – uncovered by anyone but me) I won’t be able to spend as long planning lessons. Or doing any extracurricular stuff. I can’t leave school at 5.30, get home at 7pm and then do another 3 hrs planning/marking AND cook, eat, launder, exercise and sleep…the scales don’t balance. Not being able to plan as much as I like means that my lessons won’t be so good and I won’t get good evaluations. Bit disheartened. College say it isn’t their fault because the local schools don’t want so many students this year.

All in all…no jobs for us round here, no schools want students…why IS there such a massive “be a teacher campaign?”

2006-01-24T19:08:00.000Z

Back to college. Learning about misconceptions, funnelling, scaffolding and diversity.

The diversity lecture raised some interesting discussions. For the village where I live the local census shows one person of non-UK white origin and my road jams up every Saturday night with Christians flocking for miles around to attend chapel. (yes, Saturday...I don't know why either...we don't have the same congestion issues on Sunday's...go figure). I know that diversity is more than race and skin colour and religion but where we are is so incredibly mono-cultural...the kids don't have chance to be intolerant of other races, there aren't any. The discussion decended into the pros and cons/evils of positive discrimination for Welsh speakers/women maths teachers/male nursery teachers.

Lots of essays, presentations and maths – lots and lots of maths. Everyone else on my course either just finished a maths degree or only finished their own A levels three years ago so can remember it all. I on the other hand am the thick kid in class - “I don’t geddit!” Stuff that I remember being OK at school is now a total mystery. Maybe it was a mystery at the time and I just learnt by rote and followed the steps but now am more discerning and want to understand why…I’d sure hate to teach a mini-me. Maybe I need to join the posh kids from round here and get a tutor?

I am also applying for my first job. There isn’t a hope in a chocolatey teapottey hell of me getting it – for a start there are three teachers in the school already, on short term contracts, who do want it. Why are they advertising – are the ones that are there rubbish? Anyway, filling in the form and composing my supporting statement are meant to be good practise. If I get an interview I will consider it a success. Unfortunately I’ve left it too late to get a proper adult to read over my application so am sending it off blind. It looks terribly earnest…all about encouragement and expectations and ethos and assessment. If they want a goodey two shoes then on paper at least I’m their girl.

2005-12-21T20:57:00.000Z

I smiled so much my face hurt. You’d think that it’d just be primary nativities that would get you all emotional but this was just great. It was so nice to see the kids in a different light – not that the really truly awful ones were there anyway, but it was great to see the child that doesn’t really excel in your class standing up on stage doing a beautiful solo performance was wonderful, or the girl who can barely add and spends the whole class fidgeting and interrupting and disrupting patiently counting the beats until her turn in the orchestra. The odd boy in Y10 who proudly showed me his shaven legs and announced how he was dressing in his (girl) mates clothes to go clubbing Monday…he sang angelically (and manfully…).

I was the kid that was rubbish at music at school – rubbish at music and PE - so didn’t get this chance to perform and have a crowded hall all stand and cheer – but then again, I didn’t have the daily grind of being mediocre at academic subjects.

At the beginning the head master asked the parents and teachers to get their waving over with at the start and I waved at my Y7 kids and they waved back – they know me!!! They don’t hate me, it feels like a miracle.

I was looking up at a stage full of children and thinking how much I would love to stay with the school and see the little Y7’s grow up and develop and be with them during that.

The rest of school this week has been ordinary, nothing bad, nothing good – the usual people failing to turn up to detention, calls to parents, marking books at the end of term (boy!, do you feel grubby after you’ve handled a class full of books!) – but you know what, I LIKE getting up in the morning and doing this job!

2005-12-15T21:12:00.000Z

Last week was been all highs and lows.

The week started with a mother who accused me of “grabbing” the arm of her year seven daughter and of “picking on her”; the staff all told me not to worry, that the family have history, but of course one does. Whilst I could see the source of the “picking on” accusation – she is a persistently disruptive, disobedient back-chatty little girl – I was very afraid of the arm grabbing accusation and could see no basis for such. Witness statements were taken and despite the reassurances of my colleagues I was very afraid that my barely born career was about to end on the false accusations of a naughty child. Anyway, the mother came in and chats were had with the head and the whole thing is now blown over. I still have to deal with the daily contact with said child and the inability to remonstrate with her poor behaviour for fear of parental accusations.

In the middle of the week we had the first of our formal assessments of our lessons and progress from college – an ordinary lesson which becomes in your mind the make or break of a yet barely born career. I’d only met the class twice so was rather nervous – but of course it went fine – the kids were attentive and chatty and I had chance to show planning, improvisation and a developing relationship.

My year 10 classes are getting wearing – they are all large and lively. Individually good kids but on mass hard to handle. I’d love to be that approachable respected teacher but am having to err on the side of disciplinarian

We’ve a week and a bit to go until Christmas. End of term tests for all years and GCSE mocks for Y11 to mark. Then another school – it’s taken this long to get confident and aware in this school – I so don’t want to go somewhere else!

2005-11-27T17:18:00.000Z

Fire alarm on Thursday. My year 7 looking a mixture of excited and afraid – they can see from the teachers, and the fact that it is raining, that this isn’t a drill – so maybe it is real and that’s a bit scary. They ask me how long they will be there – stood in the rain in the yard – and I can’t tell them, which worries them, but do tell them to wrap up warm. The tiny little boys in year seven look very cold – please, please wrap your kid up warm when you send them to school.

We have a problem with some year 7 girls – it’s hard to really tell what is going on, who is right or wrong or whether indeed there is a right and wrong – but one little girl approached me after registration to tell me that her mate was staying off school because another year 7 girl was picking on her. I reassured the wee lass that she had done well to talk to me – she’s a nice girl – and felt like a proper pastoral carer not just a subject teacher. The school take this sort of thing very seriously and the head of year had chatted to all concerned before the end of first period. It’s easy for me to label the least pleasant of the girls concerned as the troublemakers…but I have to remember that there are two sides and the importance of not labelling a kid at year 7 for the rest of their time in the school.

Snowed out on Friday. The school is open but half the teachers can’t make it in, what with living in lovely remote middle class villages. I was stuck in my village surrounded on all sides by either 45 degree hills or impassable narrow roads (which are oddly surrounded by fields higher than the road, causing run off which freezes…) – freed by lunchtime but I had no lessons so stayed home and marked GCSE test-run papers.

First formal lesson evaluation went well – until now my mentor has been helpfully pointing out my shortcomings so it was nice to have the good bits acknowledged.

My mission for this week is a) to try and get a plenary fitted into my lessons, and b) to work on my IT skills – trying to use the Interactive Whiteboard more interestingly.

That is so long as a plague of locusts don’t descend…after all, we’ve had flood, fire, snow – what’s next?

2005-11-25T13:11:00.000Z

"if you're not willing to be changed by a place, there's no point in going."

Interruption in service: I apologise to athrawes, I should be away, travelling, silent, not interrupting, but there's something urgent that I need to ask of the good readers of Blackboard Jungle.

You see I'm in Vietnam, doing a sponsored bike ride for Vietnamese street kids. The Eighty Kilometre Bike Ride of Death, I call it.
[mais monsieur! even crossing ze street in Hanoi, c'est plus dangerouse!]

Right now it's less than 24 hours until the KOTO sponsored bike ride.

An eighty kilometre bicycle ride through the still green lakes and hills of Vietnam, to raise money for a worthy cause: the education and training of street children of Ha Noi, by an aussie charity here.

I'm all hyped up. Pumped, as Arnie says. I'm ready to kill myself doing this.

And kill myself doing this is extremely likely.

Did I mention that I'm not really outdoorsy?
That despite posturing underwater in the previous four months, back on dry land, I remain the world's biggest seven stone weakling?
Did I mention that I haven't ridden a bicycle in fifteen years?
Did I mention that I haven't done any physical exercise at all since some rowing in Singapore four weeks ago?
I did mention that just those two hours left me crippled for two days, didn't I?
Did I point out what eighty kilometres is in imperial measurements? It's FIFTY MILES. When I wrote to everyone in my address book asking for sponsorship, I didn't realise this. To a Brit, every metrical measurement appears tiny. I assumed this would be something simple, like a foot or so. 80 metres. 80 centimetres. Perhaps 80 millimetres. You know, something possible?
I ever mention to you that even in the gym in days of yore, the stationary bike machines were the one thing I couldn't cope with?
That my thigh muscles are such flaccid dead fish of a human sinew that they usually appeared to split at the seams after just 75 repetitions of pressing down an unweighted wheel to get nowhere?
Many of my good sponsors have communicated an earnest hope that I have been in training since I foolishly agreed to murder myself by two wheeled means. This is not so. My training regime has been a peculiar one. It involves food poisoning, a full week laid prone in bed, running to the toilet every hour, and eating one bowl of rice and boiled broccoli a day. I look skinnier, yeah, but fitter? Think 'The Pianist'.
Have I mentioned that Ha Noi's road traffic doesn't follow any rules whatsoever? That simply crossing a road intact was a Vietnamese challenge sent me by one reader?
The streets are infested with speeding mopeds, ridden to be seen, not to get from A to B, and therefore populated with the type of motorist whose mirrors are angled to check their hair is straight rather than to stay alive.
The rules of the road are: the bigger the vehicle, the faster you have to move out of the way. Horns are a deafening everpresent scrum. A horn beeping replaces the indicator lights, replaces the use of brakes, alerts people to the oncoming road accident, and tells everyone that you're rich enough to have a moped. Horns beep day and night in an orchestral cacophony. Horns beeping will not save me from harm.
Did I tell you that the reason I never cycled in London was because I'm not roadworthy? I was the only kid in my primary school class who didn't pass the Cycling Proficiency Test.
Did I tell you that the last time I cycled anywhere, in the nineteen eighties, I had to ask a friend to cycle just in front of me, so I could steal the signals from her without looking behind me? Because if I look over my shoulder, I wobble ten feet to the left, then fall off the bike?
That I've never yet managed to stay on a bike on a mild incline?
That I have a serious problem navigating Ha Noi's streets, and have only once managed to leave my hotel without getting lost within six paces?
That one of the KOTO bike ride's central problems is people with an actual sense of direction get lost year after year?
Are you feeling quite how bloody foolish this bike ride will be for me yet?

Nevertheless I will do this.

I will do this because KOTO is a really really worthwhile cause. I will do this because I promised my friends if they sponsored me, I would photograph my agony and embarrassment.

I will do this because having read this promise, my sodding bloody over-generous friends committed more than $800USD in just 48 hours, if I kill myself on Saturday.

Every mile I ride, every muscle I tear, every ragged gasp I breathe, every pained tear I shed, every tendon I split will be recorded for their delectation.

And it will kill me.

If you're willing to add to the sum raised by my death, and are titillated by the thought that KOTO will sell you pictures of it, please send your email and your sponsorship promises to me at this address.

I'm asking you for the price of a pizza.

Roll call of esteemed sponsors:
Russell Braterman, Germany, Eroica from Frogstar World, NZ, Looby from Gay Nazi Sex Vicar ..., UK, Francesca from End Message, UK, Vikki Tomlinson, UK, Martin from Web Frog, UK, Tess from Bored and Broke, Northern Ireland, Duch, UK, my mum and dad, UK, Margret Smith, Spain, Ruth Gilburt, UK, jatb, UK, Will of Moving Forward, Mexico, Tim Worstall, UK, Karen from Secret Walk, Phillippines, Robin Brzakalik, UK, my sister, UK, Paul from Noxturne, USA, Paula Newark, UK, Fishboy from Effing the Ineffable, Australia, Pete Connolly, UK, Yidaho from kitchensunk, UK, Bloom from Tales from the Chalkface, UK, Madeleine Minson, Sweden, Emma from Etcher: A Print Maker's Diary, UK, my mum's boss at work, UK, Terry of More Coffee, Less Dukkha, UK, Mike of Troubled Diva, UK, Nicole Hammond, UK.

Killers, all of them.

2005-11-23T20:31:00.000Z

Sorry for not writing for a while – it’s been…well, not hell exactly, fun but exhausting.

Last week I started my first full hour teaching all by myself. The first couple of lessons went as well as could be expected – even better maybe – the kids behaved and whilst I didn’t make it all the way to the end of my lesson plans, they did at least learn something.

The third lesson was a disaster – I took everything that an good, well behaved year 10 maths class knew about Trigonometry and mangled it out of all recognition. They left doubting the last three years of their schooling. My mentor said that she would have cried had she given a lesson as bad as that. I realise that makes her sound horrid, she isn’t at all – she then spent ages going through with me how to do it right and today I shall try again. She’s incredibly supportive and I am really not sure what she is getting out of having to mollycoddle students.

This week I have repeated the mangling job on a year 8 class – this time how to teach the subtraction of negative numbers. See, when we were in school we just learnt the rules – learn, apply, get a tick. I instead have this silly liberal notion that the children should know WHY two negatives make a positive – making a rod for my own back many would say. The reality is – it’s bloody hard to explain without getting into concepts of buying back debt and international trade financing and reinsurance! Poor loves – they were so confused. A class of angels disintegrated into babble and gossip and getting up and walking around just because they weren’t remotely engaged in what their rubbish maths teacher was trying to tell them. This time I did cry (not in front of the kids).

The other time I struggled to fight back the tears was at the Remembrance Assembly where Y11 read out poems written by soldiers little older than themselves and a boy played a heart rending last post…

So, today as well as redoing the trig lesson I need to redo the negative numbers lesson. I am not looking forward to either. It feels like last chance. Do or die. I so want to be a good teacher, I care, I just never thought it would be this hard.

Two days later...

Well, the negative numbers thing worked. Holes. That's the answer - that a hole makes a negative and filling in a hole makes a positive...hey, it works for maths teachers!

Today I gave my first detention! One of them didn't turn up - it was only meant to be 10 minutes at lunchtime too, so she'll be in tomorrow for half an hour, and if she doesn't turn up then it'll be half an hour after school...escalation...the power!!

2005-11-13T18:49:00.000Z

Disaster. Chaos!

Well, to be fair to the head and teachers - very and admirably so, controlled chaos.

The school flooded. Within half and hour the water had progressed from being an interesting puddle that meant people might get their shoes wet on the way to their cars - to a full school invading flood a foot or more deep in places.

Ok, so no-one was going to die by drowning but it did mean that for two hours we needed to cointain the entire school population within the upper floor - 850 wet, wriggly over excited teenagers, away from their normal routine, all needing to be kept in the nearest room. Any room - just NOT in the wet and slippery corridor and certainly not leaning out of window leching at the firemen (year 10 girls!). All in all this did pose a potential for child death by overwraught teacher.

Most of the school population are bused in from up to 10 miles away. This means that the buses that were due to arrive at 15.30 needed to be called upon to arrive earlier - soon - God help us all - now - please just take them away!?

The management team have been amazing. As a student teacher I am aware that teachers don't always like to offer any recognition of value of management. The head was out in the rain up to his shins in muddy water directing the crisis all afternoon - maybe that wasn't the best place for him to be, but hell, at least he looked involved and bothered! A day off and we have year 11 back - the school is being dried out and new floors, carpets and curtains all on order. Work is being set on the school website for years 7-10. I'm impressed.

I would like some year 7's and 8's to teach though...i spent all last week preparing lesson plans and have no children to teach!! Five weeks till Xmas and I need to get practise gfacing the crowds before my next school placement in February (when I will be expected to be up to speed and proficient!).

Fingers crossed that the local council did good work over the weekend and we have the little darlings back on Monday.

2005-11-07T22:05:00.000Z

After two weeks back in college we are now back in school attempting to practise what the University has preached.

I have prepared my absurdely detailed lesson plans and will try and remember the lessons learnt last week in a practise session in college - when I deviated from the best laid plan, waffled, went off track and totally lost the plot!

This afternoon I thought that I was doing OK, giving out the answers to a homework, getting the children to "hands up!" with their suggested answers and working out the hard ones with them on the board - however, it turns out, that I am over friendly and a victim in waiting! All bubbly and enthusiastic - which is good - and totally unaware that they are just waiting to walk all over me.

I must be more firm, distant and authoritarian, hold back that friendly edge until I have the ability to terrify them, until they know that when I'm nice, I'm very nice but when they're bad I'm terrible!

It was good advice from my mentor who could obviously see a pit potentially opening up iun front of me; it is hard not to mimic her casual and friendly approach with a class she knows well - but important to remember that she has already been through the stage of establishing her authority.

The hardest thing is getting used to being around teenagers. I am just not used to them. What is that noise coming out of their mobile phone (turns out it is highly valued downloaded music!). What are the rules about them eating their lunch in the form room (seems reasonable to me - but then again, they aren't adults...) and can I trust them when they say that "Miss" lets them?
I have a year 7 form group to share care for until Xmas and so can practise on the pre-teens before moving onto deciphering the proto-adults.

2005-10-24T08:14:00.000Z

My school’s computers won’t let me blog…so sorry for the delay.

I gave my first lesson today (well, that was last week)!! A very well behaved mixed ability year 7 class – and I loved it. I enjoyed the drama and performance side of trying to make what is rather a dull subject – area and perimeter – sound a bit more fun than just length x width. The teachers in my school are so supportive – guiding rather than leading, gently making suggestions and bolstering our egos and confidence all the way. After half term I have four lessons to prepare for my first week for classes ranging from year 8 to 11; the older ones will certainly tax me in that I will need to really know the subject well, I can’t hope to flannel my way through their GCSE’s!

It has been surprising to me what the children DON’T know by say, age 11 or 12 – things that I am sure we were doing when I was in primary – but maybe what is happening is that they do, say, fractions in primary and then again in secondary over and over until the message sticks…perhaps what happened with us was that if we didn’t get it the first time that was our first and last chance?

Anyway, The children are saying hello in the corridor, the teachers haven’t eaten us in the staff room, we have a couple of weeks more of college and then back here again. None of the three student teachers want to go back to college, we all want to stay here and carry on with the children.

Last day of the two week session was an INSET day. Outsiders “those who do not teach” are only aware of these if a) they have children and in ensuing child care hassles or b) they are drivers surprised by the sudden and joyous lack of traffic! It was quite an eye opener – lots of teacher moaning about how boring the lectures were, how they didn’t understand the task, talking about what they were going to do at half term…a familiar pattern?

Back in college today I find that not everyone has had such a well supportive first session in school. I am shocked to hear that some teachers see having the students there as an opportunity to offload the work. In contrast my own mentor is only further overworked by having to molly coddle me! She will no doubt be glad of the break.

2005-10-14T17:00:00.000Z

Wow! I managed to tell a child off today! I did have to go and hide in the staff room afterwards though to recover and will not be able to carry out the promise to inform the form tutor of the miscreants flaws - what with being blank minded from power shock!

The week started with a flood of red jerseys - so many little people and so many who are actually bigger than me - and all of them know where they are going, where their form room is and what they are doing next period - and I don't!!

We have observed a range of ages and abilities across a variety of subjects and for the most part have been privileged to see some truely inspiring teaching. The ability of some teachers to control a class by creating interesting and engaging lessons has been awe inspiring. An outsider (oh yeah, that's me!) would be left with the impression that these are angelic, well fed children from good, caring and resourceful families - their behaviour being so entirely govered by the skills of their teachers. The reality is that the catchment is extremely varied and includes some areas of quite abject deprivation. I have ongoing and enormous self doubt that i will ever be as good at classroom management as these people. I suspect that it is in large part an act - giving the impression of self belief that you ARE the boss, that they WILL be quiet.

High points - one to one with a child who tells you he "can't DO them" and working with him to show him that sure he can. And him believing it.

Not spending as much time with each child as one does in primary means that it has been hard in just a week to form strong attachments to any individual child. Also, they seem to have more of a pack mentality than they do in primary - there are good ones and attentive ones and sullen ones but they seem to be more interested in each other and less interested in the teacher than they were as baby kids in juniors.

Anyway, next week my first lesson.

2005-10-06T13:05:00.000Z

It is the end of our college weeks - next week we go to school for the first time. People are anxious about start times, what to wear and where they will get lunch. Imagine how it must be for a 11 year old moving up from juniors.

I had always had a mental picture of myself as a teacher - the whole, Miss, standing up, teaching, snotty noses, hormonal teenagers, even the pastoral side and the interminable paperwork- but somehow I had never questioned whether I actually had anything to teach. That is, whether I have within my head, education and experience, anything worth passing on.

That is my biggest fear now - that my ability to control a classroom will be limited not by my high pitched squeeky voice or my diminutative size but instead by the fact that I have nothing to say that will interest them. I can control this to some extent by preparing lessons but I am afraid that when they say "But Miss, what's the POINT!" that I may crumble and confess yes, that they are right, they will never find a use for quadratic equations/logarithms/3D trigonometry.

2005-10-04T07:53:00.000Z

Important observation on teaching no. 17

See the thing with "normal" jobs is, that if you pop round to your new neighbours for a glass of wine that turns into a couple of bottles and wake up feeling decidely second-hand, then you can spend the next morning - after you have turned up to work two hours late because of the "late running trains" - hiding at your desk clearing out your old mail until you feel able to face the world. In many jobs, just once in a while, you could actually have a little sleep at your desk and people would be polite enough not to mention it.

I have this feeling of doom, having dragged myself out of bed for an early lecture this morning, that hangovers and year 9 lowest set maths don't mix.

2005-09-30T13:44:00.000Z

It's been a while since my last post and the world of learning how to be a teacher is hectic, full and whirling. Just as we all think we are getting on top of the work and can stop, relax and have a coffee, more comes along! It's just like having a real job without the cash, nice clothes or respect of your peers.

This week we have all (well, most of us anyway, apart from the super confident model-esque looking child geniuses amongst us who WILL get their comeuppance or will become Superheads and burn out at 35) been panicking that we don't know much at all about our chosen specialisation. How does one hypnotise and entrance a group of recalcitrant 13 year olds to the joys of quadratics? These doubts have been compounded by the airing on C4 of The Unteachables which has driven us into the very ponds of despair that we will never, not in a month of INSET days be able to control such demons. Our early aspirations to be calm, caring and knowledgable have downsized to a mere desire to escape the classroom with our dignity intact - replace "our dignity" with "our lives" by the time we actually get into school.

Our school placements have all been handed out and we all know whether we are spending the first term in the Welsh equivalent of educational bedlam or the Grange Hill of our youth. My own placement is in a smallish Welsh town that could only be desired as Uninspirationalville. The good news is that I am looking forward to it enormously!

2005-09-22T16:18:00.000Z

How much reading do we have to do!!

Also, although I did a full time engineering degree the first time around I seemed to have more free time than I do here - I never spent this much time in the library (guess that's why i got a rubbish degree then).

First time around somehow the daily mundanities like washing and making sure Him Indoors has something for his tea and finding time to tax the car and go to the dentist didn't seem to intrude - I guess I was just smellier and cared less about the maintenance of my rented student squalor than I do now as an adult with a mortage to maintain. I don't understand how people with children cope (that's a general statement too...how do they cope full stop, let alone with studying or a job on top!).

Another thing. The government entice you onto the course with the promise of a £6 or £7K bursary - it's not a lot, but it will pay the aforementioned mortgage. The course start in the middle of September - but the first cheque doesn't come until the end of October! What's that all about! How are we meant to live in the meantime? Consider this - the simultaneous growth of the banking sector in the UK at the same time as the government are trying to encourage student numbers in HE - a link I think...someone has to fuel the debt.

2005-09-20T16:33:00.000Z

Oh my word!!! What have I done? This is a mistake. Everyone is 10 years younger than me and has just finished a maths degree - I by contrast have killed most of my brain cells during the past 15 years of hard working (well, OK, so you work hard you play hard - it kills the cells!) and have forgotten anything I ever knew about maths.

The men and women are all nubile young gods and goddesses, bright eyed and shiney haired with new cars (how IS that, they have never worked and they have a new Clio and I have a beaten up old Golf...do I detect good degrees and the beneficence of Daddy and is it too late to tap my own parents?).

I am not so worried about the classroom management side as the technical. The younger ones seems bit more afraid of facing the children - I am afraid, but basically think they can't be MUCH worse than a pile of miltant railway workers...can they? By contrast, I am petrified by my lack of knowledge. Today we had to start an "audit" which will help us identify our subject weaknesses...anyone who has worked knows that an audit is a TEST and that you can FAIL. Most of the subjects I can't even remember to be able to say whether I know them or not - they all sound new! Maths is meant to be an ancient subject, beloved of the Greek et al., so how can they have invented new topics in the past 15 years!!

2005-09-17T21:18:00.000Z

So, end of my first full week in school; what have I learnt and seen?

Little boys fight and I am a button waiting to be pressed by a naughty child - I need to learn more about not taking the bait. I find that - with some relief given the path I have chosen for this year - that I actually like to teach - I have so enjoyed seeing a child grasp an idea and I love seeing their face glow with pride as I am able to say "Well done!". I want every child to go home at the end of the day with a sense of achievement and pride - the danger is of watering down the effect of my praise by handing it out so freely.

At the end of the week we took the entire class on a full day combined local history/nature trip - about an 8 mile round trip across heathland, up an airport control tower, through the woods and back along a busy country road. Trying to keep the children in their two-by-two line and away from the speeding traffic, running up and down the crocodile like a loony cajoling the slow ones at the back, the lumpen twins to whom walking more than 200 yards was a novelty, the two little girls in the world of their own who announced that they were "on a mission", starting a song to keep the spirits up (poor kids, they must have thought i was mad!) and the tiny and brave little ones that by the end of the day I though I would have to carry. I have already grown attached and want to know how they get on.

How does a single teacher manage to address the needs of a mixed ability mixed age class (two years age difference between the youngest year 5's and the oldest year 6's)?

Anyway, next week I start to find out how to teach their older brothers and sisters.

2005-09-13T16:50:00.000Z

First impressions of my primary school placement so far - I am spending the week in a class of 30 mixed year 5 and year 6 children.

The size variation! Some year 5's are huge and some year 6's are so tiny I doubt that they can grow big enough in the next year not to be eaten alive when they get to "big school".

So much is packed into the day - maths, reading, handwriting, a smattering of geography and history also thrown in, a language lesson and in the middle of the day a swimming lesson! I have the names of about half the class now, although it doesn't help that too many have the same name and I am afraid that the ones that have stuck are those of the incredibly cute kids or the troublesome or troubled ones - the ordinary, trouble free ones sort of pass by unnoticed...

As a potential maths teacher I am glad to see that they haven't developed a dislike of the subject. Lots of adults seem to think that the way to get children interested in maths is to make it "relevant" so I am glad to see that these ones at least are enjoying the subject for its own sake without asking why they need to bother knowing about, for example, square numbers. They appear, to my so far naive eyes, to enjoy the competition and the praise for success and improvement.

Today I taught C swimming - a tiny 10 year old, red haired and massively ginger freckled, grinning trustingly at her enthusiastically encouraging teacher as she kicked her backstroke and slowly sank below the waves. It's a shame that I won't be there next week to see her improve - I have already grown attached to this class.

2005-09-08T10:00:00.000Z

So, I went swimming training last night (none of us really know why we do this, it has become more of a social event than a fitness one, none of us is getting thinner or fitter but this may be because, since we are all 30-40+ the exercise is merely serving to hold back an inevitable gravitationally induced decline...3500m later, exhausted we weigh ourselves and see no change from the week before...anyway I digress) and spoke withe my friend S who is a primary school teacher.

It turns out that in this part of the UK there is a glut of primary school teachers, all newly trained and yet we have declining birth rates and schools competing not to be the ones to close. Having spent two years on supply teaching (stay in, call the Local Authority, see who needs you that day, make no plans, never really bond with the kids) S has now secured TWO jobs. Two half time jobs to cover teacher preparation time. She now spends her lunchtime travelling between sites and at each school spends no more than a morning with each class per week. Sounds tough to me. S loves to teach but was warning me about the immense amounts of paperwork that I would face.

Seems like teaching is one of the few professional jobs I know where the people in that profession try and warn you not to join it.

2005-09-07T13:24:00.000Z

Hello...

I have finally relented to the pressures applied by my good friend Lectrice and agreed to adopt-a-blog on the Blackboard Jungle site. I hope that you will be gentle with me as I am new to the blogging palaver and am somewhat nervous that I may bring the reputation of the esteemed Jungle into disrepute, or worse still...boredom and falling readership!

There she is swanning around the world leaving me to start my PGCE in Secondary Mathematics in just four days time. I start the course with a week long primary placement in a really lovely little Welsh village school. After that I have about a month in college before being let loose in school. We spend most, 80% at least, of the PGCE year in schools - which seems to be a technique designed to sort the wheat from the chaff from the very outset - bail out now while you still can - but is one which fills me, and I am sure all my fellow students, with dread and horror; "who me, out there...with them! Now!". I can't imagine what we will be taught in that first month in college - basic riot crowd control techniques and first aid maybe? That I haven't studied Maths for the best part of 20 years doesn't seem to concern me nearly as much as the wide eyed rabbit in a headlight terror of facing 30+ 15 year olds. Maths - pshaw, there's a book for that...but kids...! As a 35 year old with no kids and a fairly successful career in engineering behind me I know that if I don't know the answer i can always look it up...but children, in front of me, all their eager and doubting acne filled little faces looking up at me...hell, what was I thinking!!

In the meantime, for the next four days I shall try and cram in a summer's worth of spare room DIY and family visits. I'll give this site an update next week once I have met the wee poppets in my primary. Wish me luck.

2005-09-01T05:34:00.000Z

A brief codicil to end the holiday period, for which I'm still drawing a wage.
Over the summer I was drawn back to memories of my last occupation in three ways.

Firstly, in being offered a position in every single country I visited. There is a teacher shortage worldwide, it seems.

More interestingly, my old life resurfaced in the form of trainee teachers. One good, one bad.

Pamela was a young Scot fresh from teaching in Guatemala. Her introduction to teaching had come in the form of a voluntary programme - one of those new sorts of "eco-tourism" whose ridiculously steep 'mandatory donations' / fees translate as a cheaper, slightly more purposeful form of a package holiday. For the snip of one and a half thousand GBP ($2500), she was dumped in a classroom of 33 children of all ages from 8 to 15, and told to 'teach them something'.

Teach what? she'd asked.
Oh, Geography, History, Maths, that sort of thing.
Is there a curriculum? A syllabus?
No. And you have to teach in Spanish.

Pamela didn't speak a word of Spanish.

None of the volunteers at the programme did.

Eyes wide, Pamela describes to me how she'd, without a scrap of experience in teaching or child care, bought textbooks from her pocket money, tried to devise comprehension quizzes for the students, to find they could read but not retain or locate information.

I think, but stop myself from commenting: Yes, it's called Level 3 of the National Curriculum in Reading. It's one of the difficult leaps in cognitive development for children who missed it the first time around; I recall failing at it myself.
I used to refer to it as Not Understanding What the Teacher Wants You to Do, quite frankly.
In fact, I don't know what to say to Pamela. 31 students all at the same level are too many for most experienced single subject teachers to handle. All at different ages and abilities? All attending part time when not needed in the fields?
The set up is a mockery. An insult to the people it pretends to help. The 'volunteer programme', as described, leaves me fuming to the degree that it's better to say nothing.

Instead, I ask Pamela about her own education history. Expensive Scottish private school, top ranking Highers, pressure to attend Oxbridge colleges, her family's pride in her good degree. She flushes with pleasure at the memory.
She doesn't at first make the connection.

I want to ask her how many of the students of her Guatemalan school ever go to Oxbridge. How many graduate. How many can read to a level we would regard as literacy in this country. Does she know that the skills she describes even are considered illiterate in Britain. Whether the statistics show that children keep on attending the school, long term. What they go on to become.
I bite my tongue.

Over a sashimi lunch at a luxury resort in Rarotonga, servile and pompadoured staff scraping to earn their anticipated handsome tip, we talk of other things.

Eventually the wires connect and fuse.
"I guess we weren't doing the students much good, were we?"
Eventually, the experience redefines itself for her as part of someone else's life; a malleable factor in a spectrum of lost, discarded opportunities to do something. Not just a worthy sounding holiday.

The food suddenly tastes sour.

Having worked for eleven years in some of the highest turnover schools in London, you develop a sixth sense about new teachers: you need to. If they're not going to make it, you need to work out why, if it's salvageable, how soon to prioritise the students' progress above the teacher's learning curve regarding their own skills.

One of my duties had been to comfort the crying kiwi / aussie teachers when they couldn't take the english system any more.

I was generally ordered to make them stay at any cost; lie to them if necessary. With Australasians faced with a system where a student's word is sometimes taken at face value against a teacher's, as if confrontation were some sort of power transaction, I generally found it paid more dividends to be honest about the problems they were going to face.
"You can't hit them. And you can't swear at them. Yes they can swear at you. And they will. They can probably hit you too, if they're cunning enough about it. But you can't react."

I met Cal on Atiu, a five by seven kilometre, remote, rural Cook Island. With his wife and three year old child, he had undertaken to do his teaching practical placement thousands of miles afar from his home town of Wellington.
He chose Atiu island's only village school, and listening to him speak about it while exploring ancient makatea coral caves, I had that same feeling of instinctive appraisal.
It was nice to see, from a country who appear to train their teachers to higher standards than we do, the heart and spirit that mark a good teacher just beaming out from this guy.

Later, I tried to work out what it was that had resonated so clearly that this was a keeper, the sort of guy you want on your staff.
And it was simple. So very simple.
He had talked - and talked, and talked, and talked; with honest, bubbling enthusiasm - about the students, not himself.

The next author to write at the Blackboard Jungle has finally agreed to blog intermittently during her trainee year learning to teach mathematics in Wales. I wish her every bit of luck, love and success.
And that writing about teaching helps her in the process of doing something worthwhile as much as it did me.

2005-07-15T07:02:00.000Z

And that, I'm afraid, is that.

Armed with seven scraps of paper containing the numberless illegible addresses of children who would like postcards ("from the other side of the world"), I'm off to the USA, where as the UK finishes its academic year, the new year's first term is about to begin.

I've attempted to persuade a friend who is beginning her post graduate teacher training to blog here in my absence. Otherwise, The Blackboard Jungle goes dark, now, until the point, hopefully two years hence, when I take up residence on a VSO teaching placement.

Until then, adieu. I shall be once again a learner in the school of reality. Less the teacher.

2005-07-14T13:15:00.000Z

Extracts from a 1998 school leaver's book I found:

Dear Miss L
We have had quite a good teacher-student relationship for the past two years, but I'm very happy that all that has to stop.
Love Darren

Darren was gutted that his ultimate role model, Shakespeare's Mercutio, had been played as a drag queen in the Baz Lurhmann version of Romeo and Juliet. He had been near to tears watching his hero don a short white skirt and shake his thang.
I recall having to take him outside and try to explain that it was an artistic decision that reflected the director's desire to place Mercutio at the extremes of society, on the edge of things, the runaway royal. Darren sniffed heavily,sighed, and went back into the classroom, with a visibly heavy heart. Darren and Mercutio both got an A at GCSE.

Miss L
Thank you for teaching me for the last four years, for all the help you have given me, the oppourtunities [sic] you have presented to me and for trying to make Shakespeare interesting. (although Leonardo Di Caprio was more successful than you!!)
Tracey

Tracey's dad worked as a photographer at the Daily Mirror, and fed us a constant stream of under the counter supplies for the unofficial, unregulated, award winning, school newspaper I tortured the governors with for four long years. Tracey didn't escape me or my obsession with Hollywood rewrites of classic texts, and suffered the full six years of the Lectrice educational method, in class and in the after hours school newspaper club, until she went to university.
To do journalism.

Miss L
I remmeber the first lesson I had with you and it was funny you've put up with me while Ive been upset and dissobedient and Sometimes very annoying, i've enjoyed being taught by you and wont forget the great english lesson which I So look Forward to each week. ok then i spose this is good bye THANX
luv
Sarah
PS I wont write See Ya around cause i aint comin back to the 6th form OK bye!!!

Sarah made it through school despite her mum dying when she was fourteen, leaving her to cope with seven younger siblings, all of whom I also taught.
Sometimes, you see life throw something like that at an individual, and without even frontal lobe thought, you automatically forgive that child 90% more of their future wrongs. Sarah was one such case. She got her pass grade C at GCSE.

To Miss L
The most enthusiastic teacher I know.
from Cecilia.

Cecilia repays that enthusiasm in droves every day I see her walking her toddler home from daycare after she's finished the day's studies and she rushes up to excitedly tell me how well she's doing in her law course. Cecilia got, and earned every single part of, her grade B at GCSE.

There are more. Many more.

What strikes me, re-reading, is that I can tell you a little story about every one of them.

2005-07-13T06:33:00.000Z

It's with a little surprise that I realise how a slow slide into jaded has crept into my tone on The Blackboard Jungle.

Bitter, penetrating disaffection.

I used to love this job. It's an easy job to do well, if you put some effort into it. Though rarely intellectually challenging, (and too frequently physically challenging), it's never ever bored me.

I don't sit at a desk. I don't file reports. I don't waste my employer's time surfing the net listlessly.

And there's something rather addictive about a job that has real value. That makes a solid difference in the world.

So I apologise for the subliminal tone of regret that's insinuated itself into the Jungle. I'm not entirely certain where it has come from.

2005-07-12T06:38:00.000Z

Role reversal.

I ran into Joe, aged twenty, on the long walk home from school.

As I greet him, his handwriting floats into memory. For four years, Joe had seemed functionally illiterate, adopting the pose of classroom joker, of kid on the brink of terminal stupidity, wise cracking his way to the juvenile detention centre.

Seeing the ingenuity with which he dodged work, dodged lessons, sent teachers to an early nut house, I'd tried to convince him otherwise. Learnt that there was an active, questioning brain in that head, though dampened by a family background that allowed too much freedom, too few boundaries, that actively promoted the casual drug use that could kill his future.

I recalled many meetings where I'd sat him down to explain why he'd got a grade G every time: his handwriting was awful. An examiner would not read it. Write less, massively less. Let his brain shine through. Spend two thirds of the exam re-reading, checking, mitigating his own terrible handwriting, disguising the thing that was screaming 'G' at the unknown exam marker.

Joe isn't stupid. The honesty worked. He followed the prescribed plan of attack. And miracle of all miracles, did pretty well, in the end.

A glance at his eyes reveals he's still smoking too much weed, but a glance at his tattered and plaster spattered clothing reveals he's in gainful employment.
The slow spiralling ocular refocus means he takes a moment or two to recognise me. Could be the genuine tiredness of a difficult day's graft, could be the grey fug of soul-sating marijuana that clouds every council block in enervating under achievement by five o'clock every day round here.

"Miss L, you're not still bloody working at that place, are you?" Joe jerks his head uphill towards the massive sixties block of the school against the afternoon sun.

"Ain't it time you got out, yet? I mean, you could go somewhere else. You can actually teach, y'know."

2005-07-11T12:29:00.000Z

I once set a group of children this homework: find out who is in your family tree by asking two people in your family.

Kelly brought in a note instead of her homework.

"Kelly don't know who her dad is.

And I don't want her asking no questions."

2005-07-08T10:44:00.001Z

"Fazio, why are you walking so slowly? I'm an old lady, and even I can walk faster than you. You're thirteen, the peak of your youth, the world is there for you to run to it. And yet you walk so slow."

Fazio is from Sao Paolo. His voice forms a langorous, rolling Coelho drawl.

"Miss L, have you ever considered that it is not I who walk slowly, but you who walks too fast?"

2005-07-07T16:24:00.000Z

Updates on the London Bombing

Staff were calm. Resolutely unpanicked. Radios were on everywhere, amidst clusters of quiet adults, listening. One guy was reprimanded hotly in the staffroom for joking that perhaps the french had done it.
Soon, the problem becomes not communication with loved ones, but transport.

We waited for the big boys at head office to tell us what to do with the children.

By lunchtime, they all knew, and the thirteen year old girls were attempting hysteria.

With some reason - a huge number of our students have family who work in central London. Just three parents rang the school to order their children home, against all government advice.

Final period, thirteen year old boys, bottom set, low comprehension of what had happened, and there was no way we could get on with that essay we'd planned. We pulled up the BBC news onscreen, and I answered their questions in a slow calm voice, having first established who in the room had relatives in the bombed areas, who had contacted their relatives, who still felt worried.

Experience teaches you to take things carefully and take their concerns seriously. Children very easily take one misunderstood detail and run off with the impression that world war three has started.

We checked what transport lines were affected, read the statement from the weird sub Al Quaeda organisation who had claimed responsibility. Thought about what a 'crusader nation' might mean.

Lenny said "it's weird, 'cause none of us live up London [that's what children south of the river call central London] but all of us know someone who's up there."

John said "we'll never get bombed down here, because we're not economically ... er ... valuable."

Thali said "will we have to stay at school all night?"

John said "as soon as I get home I'm going to change into my army gear, get my water bottle, and go down to the TA centre and offer to help."

Fazio, new to the country, said "How am I going to get to north London now?"

To take their minds off it, after a while, I gave them a choice of videos. We watched a Hitchcock disaster film from the past (The Birds).
Chatted quietly about the possibility of international disaster if all the ants joined together to attack humans.

Ten minutes till hometime, and a tannoy crackles into aged life.

None of the trains in London are running. There might be buses. Go straight home, and walk if you can. If your phone won't work, come downstairs and use ours to check if your parents are picking you up.
If you can't get home by walking, stay here, and we will look after you.
If you go home and your family don't get in contact, come back to school. We will still be open. We will look after you.

The children are calm, their eyes are wide, the thing is still, as yet, an adventure. I repeat the key points for them.

The school will stay open. If you need help, come here.

We will look after you.

2005-07-07T12:03:00.000Z

Updates on the London Bombing

Today's bomb blasts in London appear to be linked to al-Qaueda, and inevitably cause thoughts to fall back to the blasts in Madrid, and years ago, to events on 9/11 in New York.

Currently, most of London is closed, in the sense that all transport is down, mobile networks are not functioning, and only slowly is internet access to news sites being restored.
The news this morning was dire: many blasts, all in central banking areas / transport hubs / tourist and student areas ... but as with any terrorist event, it takes a while for news to calm down to report reality, as opposed to hearsay.

There was an olde worlde, WWII feel to the news at first, as staff huddled in rooms trying to raise news on old fashioned radio sets, or compared notes on how to get through to friends and family working in the affected areas, most of whom had been confined to their offices all morning. We stood in silent circle to hear the prime minister's speech at noon.

Only later do we tell the children that something has happened. The government has advised that parents do not pick up children, that they do not travel, that children stay in schools as long as is practical.

We're safe here, on the south side of the river, but cheap housing and fast transport links into the city mean that many of our 1700 students have parents who work in the affected areas.

I was trying to get LBC radio to route through the electronic whiteboard when a student receptionist wandered in, saw what was on the screen and panicked. His mum works in Trafalgar Square, travels in from London Bridge. It's important to take worries seriously, while still playing down the possibility of disasters. The nearest blast to London Bridge was north of the station, I reassured him, whereas his mum would have to have travelled west. She's probably okay, but best not to ring her yet, while the network is down. Best to wait for her to contact you to tell you she's safe.

State of uncertainty.

None of us quite sure how to teach today, but all of us knowing that we need to keep the safety jacket of routine solid.

Just in case.

2005-07-07T10:12:00.000Z

Updates on the London Bombing

The unfolding of events, the media tenterhooks, though events themselves are thankfully much less serious in scale, are reminding me of September 11th.

The best thing about blogging for any long period of time is that one's memories are easily indexed.

Who needs to remember? Google can remind you.

So here's an extract from an earlier blog of mine, written a year after 9/11, explaining what hearing the news about 9/11 was like at a north London school:

I didn't know anyone in the building or in New York, and I didn't lose any friends or family. It seems slightly odd that something a continent away had so much effect on us in Europe, but it was massive. Everyone was astounded by it ... like watching an accident that you can do nothing to stop.

I was teaching in North London. I finished the last class of the afternoon at around 4pm, and was packing away my stuff to get upstairs to afternoon registration, when Panayiotis, a generally hysterical greek drama teacher in his fifties, burst into the room sweating and all wild eyes. He burst out with "Pakistan have bombed New York City! Everybody is dead! Look on the news - this time tomorrow Pakistan won't exist any more. The Americans will wipe them out!"
I couldn't really understand what he was trying to tell me, but as a child of the eighties I'd hidden behind the sofa during 'Threads' and'When the Wind Blows', so a huge chill went down my spine at the words 'Pakistan won't exist any more'.
I went upstairs where I usually registered a sixth form class in a computer room, and asked them to log onto CNN to find out what was happening. That was the second scary moment - when we realised that CNN was down.
Nobody could raise any news. We all agreed to go home and listen out for what was happening. Some kids decided if America had been bombed, there'd be a war, so they wouldn't have to do their exam projects or come in tomorrow. I wandered in to the empty staffroom, and scoffed at the latest rubbish that Panni had come out with, and one or two stragglers interrupted to tell me it was true.
I decided to go home and find out. It was a two hour drive, and I heard the real story on Radio 4 as I sat in various traffic jams. I'd been up the WTC the year before, and was thinking about the photographs of us all standing and waving on the viewing platform. Later on, when the buildings fell, I thought more about the pictures of us in the malls deep below.
I'll never forget the moment when they interviewed a bystander who was describing the scene before her, the confusion - then she screamed and screamed as people first began to jump. I had to pull over then. It was too horrible - a situation where people were alive, but had so little chance of escape that they would choose this.
They replayed that sound clip again and again, on into the next day, and the next. It's the sort of thing that sticks with you way beyond the sell-by date.

It wasn't till I got home that I saw the images on the news. Most people I know recall it as a visual thing, and certainly, when the second plane crashed, it was as chilling as watching the first smart bombs explode onscreen in the first Gulf War. But, it was radio that told me about it first, and that really humanised it, because it was all ordinary people, standing in the street, just like Londoners do when there's yet another bomb scare, and chatting about what might be going on.
When the second building went down it was horrific. There's a beauty and majesty in watching buildings being demolished at any time, and in a horrible sense that fascination was mixed in with the realisation that this building was full of innocent people. The scale, the occupants, the symbolism of it all - it was really tangibly a 'big' moment, and I remember stuffing my hands into my mouth in horror.

That was the start of a really really hard year at that school. The anger felt by everybody at what had happened was palpable. For us that was a problem, because the majority of our students were immigrants, recent immigrants, many of them from Afghanistan. They hadn't bombed America, and it became a matter of urgency to avoid a religious war happening at the school. Fearing a riot, we took care to hold our two minutes silence for the victims of the four plane hijacks, the people killed, and for victims of terrorism everywhere.
The next day, the personal attacks on the children travelling to school began. The school was situated in an opulent, middle class area, and the students were by and large bussed in from areas like Haringay, further into London. My 17 year old female students often stopped coming in - if they wore a headscarf in public, they would be spat at by fellow bus passengers, and told that the deaths were their fault. Young girls, told that they'd killed thousands of people because of a piece of cloth that represents piety and religious faith. It was incredible, really.
For the next six months, the whole school had a bomb threat almost every week. At one point we'd be stood shivering on the sports field every other day. Because there were Afghani refugee children at the school. One particular afternoon, the police who by now regularly patrolled the place deemed the threat real, and we were all told to leave the site and go home, as it would take six hours to secure the building from any threat. It was raining, October, kids had no coats on, no money, and lived ten miles away. The teachers had no money to give them to get home, either - all our cars were trapped in the car park, and our car keys stuck inside the school. There was nothing for it, but to ask children to look after younger siblings, and to walk home in pairs and threes; make sure they weren't in public alone. I recall that time sitting down in the playing field to wait the six hours, unable to walk the 16 miles home, watching these little kids shivering as they set off. Because some of them were Afghani. Incredible how some people's minds work.

This year, I tried not to memorialise it at work, although I had last year. Today I chatted to one student with learning difficulties who had been in NYC at the time - his memory of 9/11 is of being grounded for no reason, being unable to fly home for an extra week, and being stuck with a family who didn't dare to let him out of their sight for an instant. His feeling about 9/11 is simply that he hates America, because he got grounded. It's sad and kind of innocent, at the same time.

This morning I started to wonder about the reasons that it had felt so shocking, given that we in Europe were so far away.
(treat as a given that it felt shocking because it was shocking - yet it's not the only such carnage in living history - look at the entry titled 'Have You Forgotten' on 3rd September on here for a reminder of times when we were the terrorists.)

I think obviously the increase in global media meant we witnessed a visual record of tragedy as it happened in a way that had never happened before.
But it wasn't just that - it was the sense that this was not a media event. If anything, it was the first truly unmediated media event. You could see that the picture behind the newsreader wasn't meant to be doing that. You could see that the newsreader was as stunned as you were; he just didn't know what to say.
And you could also see too much. I never want to see the pictures of those people jumping ever again.

Each year I have to give seminars contrasting American and European cultural attitudes. This year was the first I had to specify we were discussing a time and a culture that was 'pre-9/11' - to an outsider, American attitudes to themselves and the world seem to have changed irrevocably since then.

2005-07-05T11:25:00.000Z

What a difference a day makes.

Summertime, and the behaviour is plummeting ... yesterday I felt tired, overheated, worn out and demotivated. Huseyin had spent earlyMonday morning following me to school chanting 'lesbian' alternately with 'what? It wasn't me! You didn't see me say it, so you can't prove it', then looked more than alarmed when I insisted on walking with him the rest of the way.
Chezney talked all through my lesson, Charlie and Charlie threw pens, and when Huseyin deliberately hit me in the face with a pen, I'd simply had enough.

I walked out, instructing Chezney to follow me, walked to the calm, cool, and above all silent office to collect my thoughts.

Nobody should be standing there being hit by missiles while trying to teach, but at that precise moment, I knew I didn't have the wherewithal to react calmly. If I lose my temper, I lose the game. I needed space to respond.

A new idea: drop the teacher act. Speak as one tired over wrought person to a human who is capable of understanding.

I explained to Chezney that I was upset ("for real, Miss?"), that he'd been making things hard for me, and then something had happened that had upset me even more. I spoke to him in an adult tone, and suddenly there was rational response in his eyes, instead of the sing song defiance that characterises the London classroom.
I asked him to go back in the classroom and tell people to pack up in time for the bell for me.

"Was it me, Miss L? Was it me who upset you?"
No. It wasn't you.

Cue ten minutes solid of thirteen year old boys worried they'd gone too far.
A small thing, but at least one wrinkle in the sheeting shower of disillusionment.

One day later, and I'm ready for the fight to resume.

Chezney talks all lesson - I tell him he sounds like a subtitle track, and set him a minimum requirement of written work. He makes it. I make time to tick the work of kids who are actually doing what's been set, and pass out ceritificates to those who've done their utmost in the last week.

Huseyin starts throwing things, and he's out of the door clutching a pre-written letter home within four minutes. Charlie and Charlie throw pens around the room before, during and after being reprimanded for doing exactly that, so I write home about them, too. Consequently, the other students ignore the disruption, are careful not to add to the noise.

"Yeah, so what, you always do that! You always write home about me. See if I care."

And there it is. I always do that. I always provide consequences for poor behaviour. The one energising detail that tells me what I'm doing will work, some time, some lesson, some day.

Fight the good fight. I didn't win one battle, but I'm still fighting the war.

2005-07-04T23:30:00.000Z

Here at The Blackboard Jungle, we're big fans of ex-pat american blogger Colin Gregory Palmer. One of the most talented British bloggers (though adopted from rough colonial soils, we took him to our hearts as native talent; hell we don't need the likes of Palmer as competition), he gained an extra special place in the pantheon when he began a year of teacher training in a London school.

Damn, not even tourists are that silly.

After a year of off-blog slog, Palmer's back, and as prolific as ever. (Now with extra added Londonist swearing, too. Bless. It's like he belongs over here.)

Don't miss him.

While watching over an experiment in class, I noticed one of my year nines wearing a band I had not seen before which read: 'stand up and be heard'.

"What's that one for?" I asked.

"It's against racism, Sir. I think it's a bit vague, though. 'Stand up and be heard' could mean anything."

"Well," I said, always trying to encourage my students to think, "what would you have it say to make it more clear?"

He paused a long while before saying: "I'd have it say 'don't be such a fucking racist'. That's much more to the point."

Source

2005-07-01T08:17:00.000Z

Blessed release.

Once a week, I have to do a break duty; I stand outside the kids' toilets at playtime, and deny them entry. It's a more efficient lock-down than a prison. Of course, it doesn't make any logical sense, and the hour after the nineteen screaming arguments tends to be somewhat unproductive, but this is the way Everyone Else In The School voted it should be, so who am I to point out that there's no need for it?

Today, 308 fifteen year olds had to stand by the toilets gearing up for a practice examination. And forty twelve year olds stood in a row selling their angel cakes for charity.

My function - saying NO - was invalidated.

Armed with seven butterfly cakes, I retreated back to the kettle to recoup.

The twelve year olds showed an unerring instinct for the british sales technique as they took my sixty pence. "You're greedy."

2005-06-30T12:21:00.000Z

Are you married. Miss?

No, Chezney, I'm not.

Why not, Miss? Do you have children?

No, Chezney, I don't.

Why not?

Well, partly because I don't like children.

[Tommy recoils in shock]

Whaaat? How can you not like children? You mean you don't like us?

That's not what I said, Tommy. You guys are teenagers, you have some personality, a bit of individuality to you, I can hold a conversation with you because you've got brains and gumption and some original ideas. You're not children, you're young adults.
The ones I don't like are the little children. I wouldn't work in a primary school, because I can't stand the cute ones.

Can't stand the cute ones?! [He shakes his head in disbelief] The cute ones. [Utter disbelief] I mean!

2005-06-29T12:14:00.000Z

I walk into my bottom set of eleven year olds, and they file quietly into class, sit in silence to do a test that they can barely even read, quietly and politelly raising their hands for help when they get really stuck.

I walk into a top set of thirteen year olds, to cover their absent French teacher, and they ignore me, concentrating instead on racing each to give action lifts so they can smash the ceiling lights in the corridor. It's twenty minutes till they enter the room, despite my exhortations, and the threats of another teacher passing. Once in, they scream swear words at each other, play fight, and race in and out of the room for another twenty minutes. Eventually I get them calm enough to remain seated, and three students do some work. The rest taunt each other, kick chairs, try to secretly listen to ipods or look distinctly depressed by life, as they draw obscene valentine's messages to each other.

I know one of these classes, they're used to my rules and regulations, and know for certain that I will follow through any insurgency.
In the other class only five students have been taught by me before. They know I will follow up infractions of rules, however tedious the process becomes, but still respond absolutely differently to their demeanour when in my room, or following my lesson.

I surely can't have lost all ability to teach in the short walk from my room to the French block.

sure feels like it, though.

2005-06-28T13:03:00.000Z

That'll teach me. In a fit of sleepless toothache induced fury, I repeated myself rather loudly at the Avenging Angel who allocates all the cover for absent teachers yesterday.
Bang. As many hours of silent still invigilation as she can put onto my timetable.

One hour at a time of standing motionless, idly focussing on bowed head after bowed head - it's not pleasant. It's somewhat better than having to prepare, teach, interact, but your legs and brain suffer somewhat for it.
Invigilating leaves your mind weirdly blank. Strangely filled with calm images of dusty floors unswept, of clawed grooves on the boards of a stage rimed with forty years of kit bags and grubby hands.

I watch the other teachers. I don't associate with them, mostly - it's a fairly firm belief of mine that most teachers who entered the profession in the seventies, eighties and early nineties did so to pursue a life of showing off. Of achieving the social success they couldn't manage to pull off in an adult environment.
Mister S swaggers past, heels clicking noisily on the floor, keys attached to a clanking carabiner at his hips as he walks. His ostentation as he slams the door, clatters down stage right, self importantly rustles his blank papers or hitches up his expensively tailored trousers all scream self-regard.

I know he didn't start out in the job like this. He's become the job, the keys, the walk, the surety that he is observed, that his movements matter. As if teachers don't grow more or less wiser with age, they just become more and more Important.

I shift from one leg to the other, stifle a yawn. Wonder if he knows.

I leave the hall at the bell in a trance like state - my fourteen year olds, desperate to know their examination results can't bring me out of it, can't rile me with disappearances, truculence or secret mp3 players, so relax, bored byme, into the work I've set.

I wonder, too, if the intense levels of interaction of inner city teaching are contagious, not just debilitating?
I wonder if they're addictive, if ten weeks after I leave here, I'll be looking for troublesome teeens on streetcorners in the south pacific, wanting some trouble, wanting to relax myself by solving things, by being important.

2005-06-27T07:52:00.000Z

Excuse the short break in postings there - I was - the whole school was - forced to abandon teaching for two days to complete compulsory professional training.

This consisted largely of sorting pieces of paper about the movement of objects in a science experiment around into a diamond shape.

Followed by a discussion about using drugs, where I and three senior managers had to place our opinions on an imaginary line which stretched from 'agree' to 'disagree'.

After this, I had to formulate three arguments on the concept of national service. The three arguments had to fit the categories of, firstly, 'plus' (hold on, it gets even more thrillingly specific in a moment), 'minus', and ... wait for it ... 'interesting'.

These techniques are part of a squillion pound national strategy intended to train me to raise students' achievement from level 3a (can indentify what a text is about) to a level 4c (can identify what a text is about, and point to it).

I'm summarising rather ruthlessly, of course.

I see no reason why the post should take up two days, simply because the ruddy training did.

It seems to have passed the bureaucracy boys by that the 200 strong staff of my school have postgraduate qualifications from respectable universities, professional diplomas, and years of experience in the roughest schools around. They don't think merely handing us a sheet of A5 explaining these painfully moronic activities is sufficient.

No no no.

The only way we professionally qualified, over educated, experienced morons can understand a simple task, evidently, is to do it ourselves.

For two days.

Meanwhile, all our level 3a students get two days off to run, skip, jump, sleep in, shoot up, drop out, and use a magnifying glass to explode a snail into black gunge.

And the social services unit down the road, cannot fund mentors who can help homeless teenagers coming out of juvenile detention centres and into hostels. These are people at high risk of reoffending, and who will be placed in care homes if they do so.
A word about the children I've taught who live in care. Their lives are feral to a degree the moral panic majority could not imagine. If they fight, it's with knives. If they own something, they have to carry it with them, or one walk to the shops means they don't own it any more. Care is something *all* teenagers need to avoid.

Ex-offenders on their first release tend to be over-optimistic about how easily they will handle life outside, without any family to protect or shelter them. A mentor is a lifeline for these kids.

But no money. According to government, there *is* no money.
Meanwhile, down the road at my school, an outside speaker from central government is paid over £80 an hour to ask 200 fully paid adults to shuffle bits of paper. Tell each other where on the opinion line we stand over trivialised, dissociated issues of abuse or of power or of forces beyond our control.
We get croissants for breakfast, a slap up lunch, and we watch a powerpoint display of naughty boys with their hands eagerly waving, answers aloft in a well scrubbed classroom optimistically labelled 'Hackney'.

Bollocks. That's what teacher training days are. Pure and simple.

2005-06-22T14:18:00.000Z

Reading about the 'Broken Windows' theory that was used to defeat casual crime in 90s New York, and about Zimbardo's 'Stanford prison experiment', I'm thinking hard about how context and situation are responsible for negative or confrontational student responses. Having been shoved, bruised or thumped four more times in the last two days, it behooves me, as the adult in all these interchanges, to analyse whether my own behaviour contributed positively or negatively to each situation.

Situation 1: Strange kid at door signals to Huseyin, Huseyin throws fizzy drink about the room, gets removed, strange kid - Robert - forcibly pushes me out of the way, twice, to retrieve Huseyin's things.
Context: Huseyin knew that, according to the broken windows theory, I try to ensure absolutely predictable responses to small infringements of rules. Three strikes and you're out, one action against property or person and you're out. He devised a way of utilising that to his own benefit.
Situtation: Lack of follow up on serious incidents when they involve children the management perceive as illiterate or unteachable. My own tractability - if a kid gets past me on the way in, I'm stupid to try to stop him on the way out. But also: my prime concern became immediately the classroom full of other fourteen year olds. I asked them to stand back, so that these boys weren't encouraged by their closeness to do anything to get themselves into worse trouble, and they complied quietly, didn't use the excuse of chaos Huseyin had offered them.

Situation 2: Strange Robert, as he shall henceforth be known, is accompanied by a stern looking anger management specialist to my room, and apologises. I don't know the kid. I accept his apology.
Later, he returns with Huseyin, who attempts to apologise, but can't resist insulting me and protesting his innocence simultaneously. He begins hectoring me about why I reported his behaviour. When it becomes clear that he isn't listening to any replies, and that he has pals outside the door, I leave the room, walk slowly to an office where I know there will be more adult witnesses if any further attacks should occur. Stand in the doorway repeating in low tones that I don't wish to discuss it with him right now. Huseyin screams repeatedly at me, though now it's witnessed by eight other adults. One of them takes advantage of my perceived guilt in setting Huseyin up, and his comparative innocence, to escort him off the premises. Huseyin ignores him.
Context: Removing the isolation of an empty classroom after school removed Huseyin's power to intimidate me. The knowledge that incidents are reported routinely to other staff created consequence and the need to at least nominally apologise.
Situation: Adding extra adults added gravitas to the situation. However it showed that adults don't have authority over Huseyin. They do over Robert.
Also, I made it clear that I was the person who decided if an apology was acceptable or not. Small victory.

Situation 3: While covering a music class (work set "they all know what to do." Cheers for that, Mister S--), a bunch of about twenty fourteen year olds decide to run in and out of all the classes in the building, piling in as a group, starting a fight with the first kid they recognise, and then piling out again, fast and en masse.
Three girls from my class pile out with them.
Without really recognising the kids in my music cover lesson, I have to decide quickly if they were in part responsible, or victims of what happened. Almost all of these kids (my school is huge) were strangers to me. It would be easy to go over the top.
I try to memorise body language, stance, numbers. I think my lot are innocent. The beleaguered deputy head arrives. I explain events, then defend this lot - they weren't a party to it, and they didn't encourage it. I call a register again, to determine who the three girls who've left are - there's no question that any of these kids will be brave enough to name them.
When they reappear, I refuse to let them in. The head of Music can't help, I can see him physically restraining Huseyin and - surprise surprise - Robert next door, so when another teacher relieves me of cover duty, I tear a strip off the three girls and take them away with me to write letters of apology. Doing so, I insist on accuracy, rather than elaborate self-defence statements. It works. They apologise.
Context: A school where children can apparently get away with this 'rushing' and harming of individuals is pretty much on the brink of losing control.
The rapid appearance of a deputy head signalled to other children that matters would be dealt with, but more public response is needed if children are not to think that these invasions are normal, are an everyday possibility.
I see kids' eyes on the corridors when they approach louder or older kids. My presence as an adult doesn't inhibit the fear reflected as they swerve and weave away. The perception here is that kids aren't so safe from each other.
More worryingly, that adults can't protect them.
We need to change that context. Desperately.
Situation: Cover teachers have so much less control than staff who know students' names. I managed this one, I think, although only just - by not expecting students to 'grass', but identifying the culprits and providing real consequences anyway. It would have been easy not to take responsibility - walk away, this is a cover lesson, it's the music department's responsibility, it's the deputy's responsibility. Instead I gave up my time to make it clear to those three kids that anyone at this school will make it their business to see that consequences will be explicit, and inevitable.
Without the context, however, this is railing against a tide.

At another school, we used to have a name for this. We used to name it repeatedly, explicity, as often as we could, and define it around ten times daily. We used to do that because we had to. The name?

Minimum standards.

Something you can only achieve by working together on.

2005-06-21T09:46:00.000Z

"Don't underestimate the time it will take you to get your classroom organised before you leave," warns the new boss, "I know from experience, there's always more stuff to tidy away and file properly than you think."

Tidy?

Organise?

I'm leaving teaching, not this particular job. Why would I want that stuff?

I'd thought I could perhaps bring in a few rolls of bin bags the day before my flight.
Uh-oh.

2005-06-20T10:41:00.000Z

Burdened with a one hour drama cover lesson (we don't buy in staff to cover teachers who are sick, we simply lose our marking and preparation periods to do it ourselves), and given the ludicrously inappropriate task of asking thirty one twelve year olds to spend an entire hour creating a scene from irreverent comedy show 'Little Britain', I watch seven little girls re-enact a classroom, featuring "yeah but no but" character Vicky Pollard.

I watch with interest to see how these girls represent a teacher faced with insouciant defiance and logicless destructive force.

Calmly. Quietly. Politely.

The girl playing teacher coolly repeats her instructions until the errant Vicky character complies. Refuses to raise her voice, to respond in kind, or to allow herself to be distracted by persistent attempts to raise the interaction to a level where violence could be induced.

Interesting. I wonder if this is learned, imagined or observed behaviour? If this is how these girls see their own teachers behave as they deal with four or five Vicky Pollards in each class?

An hour later, marking a far too easy exam in a prep room, I overhear through open windows on a muggy day - a head of year is dealing with a class of older students, a floor below. Screaming, yelling, ridiculing and bullying his students. Sarcasm, abruptness, interruptions and dissent are the order of the day.

I realise that perhaps - just perhaps - those girls were not copying, but modelling for us.

Some days, actions speak way, way, way louder than words.

2005-06-17T16:13:00.000Z

Icelandic system [iys - lan' - deik sys' - tum] n.
(also teen circulation plan)

A practice, supposedly based on childrearing methods in medieval Iceland, of sending teenagers to live with other families, in order to learn adult skills and behavior from grownups they have not yet learned to manipulate and despise. A version of the Icelandic system, the foreign student exchange, had long been employed by frustrated parents, but the practice went native and exploded in popularity with the publication in 2023 of Britney-Penelope Leach's bestselling advice manual, A Fresh Start: Why Other Parents Can Raise Your Impossible Teen -- And Why You Should Let Them. Leach noted that away from their parents adolescents were typically friendly, polite, curious and altruistic; it was only at home they became resentful and histrionic "typical teenagers." She proposed placing teens with new families to give them a less cathected but still affectionate and protective adult-child relationship focussed on the gradual assumption of adulthood. The federally funded Domestic Yourh Exchange now enrolls approximately 50% of high-school juniors and seniors and is credited with significatnly lowering juvenile crime, drug use, pregnancy, depression, rudeness, and TV-watching.

Katha Pollitt, The Future Dictionary of America.

2005-06-16T12:27:00.000Z

Isn't it great -- no, really, isn't it just plain peachy -- when you've been off sick for a week with flu, with the side effects of typhoid jabs, and having major dental surgery, to be greeted as you re-enter the building by a member of the administrative staff screaming at you and calling you a liar?

And we're supposed to be the adults.

Honestly. If you can't cope with the demands of a job, then leave it. Not rocket science.

Life in public service; everybody's whipping boy.

More upbeat posts tomorrow. When I've forgotten what it's like to be a walking stereotype.

2005-06-09T12:24:00.000Z

I thought I would write about Jason at thirteen, hitting the peer group wall of puberty with a smack so hard you can almost see his teeth rattle.

I thought I would write about the jadedness of the colleague who sees only the barbed wire barriers she wants to see (and on the morning after I've slept four hours after a family party) comments - mistakenly - that since I've resigned I look "ten years younger."

I thought I would write about touring all the sixteen year old's english classes, noting a binary division between teachers who focus placidly on the work, the children, the task at hand; versus those who suck all the limelight out of the ether, who - by dint of larger-than-life grandstanding - force their students into dependency upon teacher.
And how I shamefacedly recognised my own teaching style in the latter group. Too late.

I thought I would write about the stubborn, dogged loyalty of thirteen year old Rebecca staunchly defending my mistakes to Blair, based only on the fact that sometime last year she dubbed me her favourite teacher, despite thirty two weeks of nitpicking and railing against her mistakes ever since.

I thought I would write about the difficulties our eleven year olds, products of the english 'literacy hour', had with tasks that demand anything of their imagination.
"How will I know what my character's name is, though?"
"Sweetheart, you have to make it up."

However one of the children has donated to me a dreadful throat infection, so you must just flesh all those tales out in your own minds, own hearts, own classrooms.

Welcome to The Blackboard Jungle: where one needs no comment box to be truly interactive.

Back when I've recovered.

2005-06-08T07:00:00.000Z

There are a few fifteen year olds deputised to create an artwork on the theme of Bram Stoker's Dracula up on the miniature rooftop corridor. They have intermittent brief bursts of time out of class to do this, and they're nice kids. It's an odd thing, though, to run up to check a stock cupboard, and turn a corner into boomboxes, kids in death metal t shirts, acting the studious artist, fingers smudged in the purple-greys of the Count's slowly forming eyes.
"Hello Miss L."
~ Hello.
"Hello Miss L."
"Hiya Miss."
"Hello Miss L."
"Hello."

I check out the artwork, and continue past.

"It must get really annoying to walk down a corridor and have everyone on it say hello to you." A typical left of field comment from an ex student of mine, Will.
~ No, sometimes it's rather nice.
"Do you remember me Miss L?" I don't. I remember the recognition of me in her eyes, but not her name, not the key to the dialogue.
"You were my teacher in year eight."
"You taught me in year seven. I learnt a lot in your lessons."
~ What about you, then? I recall your face - when did I teach you?
"Not sure, Miss L. Maybe year nine?"
"You taught me English in year nine, Miss."

Did I really teach so many of them? Will chips in, brandishing three brushes at once.
"You were the only teacher who taught me English."

Pardon? Typically, Will, as he always used to, stops me in my tracks. He's out of uniform, but then, he's painting. Could he really not have been timetabled to study English for the other three years he's meant to have been here?

"It's true," he continues, with the offhanded blinding logic of the mildly autistic, mildly ADHD kid, "you were the only teacher to teach me any English."

Ah. He's being sarcastic. Not wanting to hear any diatribe about his relationship with the current teacher, the one who's done him the favour of arranging for him to be here creating ghoulish artworks around Transylvanian maps, I hurry forward again.

"Do you know what grades I was getting before you taught me, Miss?"

I turn as I tread on, intrigued yet again. Bright boy, scatty as anything, handwriting utterly illegible, prone to more than the normal distraction, more than the normal balance of ruthless logic.

"I was getting all grade Fs." I'm surprised. Not shocked, but surprised. He'd always been fairly clever, to my estimation.

"Then I had you for one year, and you taught me [insert random exam-passing acronym], and now I get Bs."

For a second time, I'm halted in my tracks.

"That's right, Miss L," chimes Gemma, one time eleven year old schoolrefuser, "I was on level 3 when I first had you, and now I get Bs and As."

Genuinely shocked.

"And I love reading now."

Solemnly, I make them put down their paintbrushes and jamjars of murky bloodstained water, and shake their hands. They just gave me something very precious, you see.

2005-06-07T16:09:00.000Z

New boss at work.

Sounding us all out. Carefully. Letting details slip that we grab and clutch at, collate them in corners to fashion a collage of just how much of a disaster this new boss could be.

She asks why I'm leaving, what my new school is like, and I tell her: I'm leaving the career, not the job.
She sounds shocked, asks why. Part of her interview for the job was conducted in the back of one of my lessons: her job was to observe a difficult, 'borderline' class of sixteen year olds in their final term, then share her judgement of my lesson with the other observers cogently enough to persuade she can manage people.
"But you're such a good teacher," she says. Casual, but watching me.
I'm not unhappy at the school, nor am I unhappy with the rewards of the job - which are considerable. But, I explain, if you're good at stretching the minds of brighter children (without torture implements), and effective in dealing with the behavioural challenges of disaffected or illiterate children, then that's what you are asked to do. That becomes who you are. Damage limitation teacher.
"Because you're competent," she agrees. Her eyes look shrewd.
"Yes." My role moves closer to firefighting, and that itself becomes, over time, draining. Drained and washed out isn't good enough.

I point out there that if I become disgruntled with my job and do it badly, there are real life consequences for the children I'm responsible for. That isn't good enough. Half hearted will never be good enough in this job. I play one crystal-teensy part in shaping human identities here; my job is not to be moving units of money.

She agrees. Superficially, she has to agree. The vocational codes that teachers sue to browbeat each other into doing more than is necessary or remunerated sit atop the undercurrents of this conversation, where we size each other up, work out if the next seven weeks will be of help or of hindrance.
Underneath the social gloss of politeness and flattery, I think we've made our real meanings clear to each other. I begin to know who she is. She begins to see who I am not.

2005-06-06T10:35:00.000Z

Ten minutes into the first lesson of the first day back after half term, and Tony has outlived his own patience, is sent out for yelling, ripping up books and backchatting the teacher. He runs away, and the deputy head on child-catcher duty is informed. Tony returns to stand in the doorway shouting at me, and I quietly conduct the rest of the lesson from the doorway, to keep a physical and verbal barrier between him and the other children. The head teacher arrives, takes Tony off my hands, and demonstrates by example that there are consequences to the rest of the class. Tony buts and what ifs and stumbles on his interruptions as he pours out his take of how Miss Lectrice Did him Wrong. The head raises a flat palm, and silences him with an "ah!"

I close the door and leave them to it, resume the rounds of checking homework spellings have been copied correctly.
"Miss," whispers Joanne, as I write her three times checked 'apperience' out again for her, "Why is she like that?"

"Like what? Do you mean the head teacher?" I keep my voice low. "She's removing a naughty child so that the rest of us can work well."

"Like a queen. Why does she have to be like that?"

I lean in and whisper. "Because she's the boss. One day you'll grow up and be the boss, and then it's right and proper that you'll be the queen of everybody and boss them all about when they need bossing about."

"No I won't!" She shakes her head furiously. "I'll never behave like the queen."

2005-05-27T17:58:00.000Z

It was with some surprise that I noticed my teaching union's headquarters are in Covent Garden Marketplace.
That must cost a pretty penny in rentals. One of the most expensive spots of retail property on earth, to be accurate.

Still, at £130* a year in fees from myself alone, I'm sure they can afford it.

(* $236 USD, factfans)

It seems the teaching unions can afford much much more than this. Last week I received a letter from the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers, informing me on glossy colour print that this week, they would send me a survey, if I'd be so kind as to fill it in.

A letter sent in order to warn me that they would send me a letter? Someone has WAY too many subscriptions to play with.

When the survey itself arrives, it's catchily entitled 'Census'.

Census? Surely they're asking me to vote in their annual AGM? Or seeking a referendum decision upon exclusion rates for violent teenagers? Questioning me about my experiences of workplace bullying? Asking for my support in tackling the sudden increase in short term contracts? Looking to find insight into local issues as the local education department closes down and reopen with private finance the worst schools in the catchment area, handily shifting their more usual dispossessed students into my school as theirs is rebranded as 'desirable'?
These are the issues I pay hard cash every year for them to work towards.

But a census? A census is that pointless ten yearly scrap of paper that you try not to allow yourself to be marked down as 'jedi religion' on, stifling the yawns in the name of social progress.

cen·sus (noun)
1. An official, usually periodic enumeration of a population, often including the collection of related demographic information.
2. In ancient Rome, a count of the citizens and an evaluation of their property for taxation purposes.

After all, they deduct my subscription at source, from my wages - they must know who I am.

Turns out they do know who I am. The glossy blue A3 leaflet they want returned (postage already paid, naturally) has the first three pages filled in for me, through their funky database software.
I simply have to ratify that which they already know, sign it, return it, and congratulate myself on one hundred and thirty pounds a year well spent.

But wait! There is more.
I do have a part to play in this lavishly typed democracy.
They want to know what colour I am.

No, seriously.

More than that, they want to know my sexual orientation.

That's all, folks. Nothing more personal than my ethnic grouping and who, what or how I choose to engage in sexual congress.

No indication of how this is relevant to my classroom experience. They need it for their records, you know.

One letter unsubscribing from the Covent Garden based wankers' fatcat beano of an excuse for a trade union was duly sent.

[A brief hiatus will ensue as it's the half term holiday.

You may find me in Covent Garden Marketplace, throwing sharp objects at steering committees.]

2005-05-26T12:59:00.000Z

Prompt line, possibly unrelated. Rebecca's flat statement, as she divides poems whose 'representation of memory is fallible', in poetry from the first world war: "Big Brother begins tonight."

"I can't believe I'm eighteen now. it doesn't feel any different." Denise sits back down after showing us all her new tattoo, and the fifteenth body piercing, standing high and swollen above an angry looking welt, a stark contrast to the other, more organic looking belly ring.

"Oh, I enjoyed voting, though," Sarah disagrees. "I didn't know who to vote for, but I took it seriously. I read what they stand for. I thought, it's my first vote, I don't want to get it wrong."

"Yeah, s'pose. It means I don't have to use my fake ID to get into nightclubs any more. I can use my actual passport!"
Denise's tattoo was an eagle, spreading its wings across most of her lower back, gross feathers dumped in indigo along the pelvic bone.

"It takes longer to become an adult these days, and passage into adulthood is more ambiguous and complicated than in the past.

[...]

The "big five" traditional markers of adulthood [...] --leaving home, finishing school, starting a job, getting married and having children. In prior generations, these transitions were completed by the mid-20s. Today, this set of transitions is often not completed until well into the 30s, even the late 30s, for many people. And what we might think about as a neat "three-box model" of life--with education up front, work in the middle, and retirement or leisure at the end--is crumbling.

[...]

Young people now seem very aware of how difficult it is to become 'independent' or 'autonomous' against current economic and social conditions, and they seem hesitant to make commitments they cannot honor or that they think may fail"

Source, On the Frontier of Adulthood, from Case Western Reserve University, found via PsyBlog.

"Miss, is Philo entered for the exams?" Alex doesn't speak to Philo any more, not after she 'chose' her boyfriend 'over' Alex, but retains vestigial friendly concern. "She hasn't been in for six weeks now."

I assume so. The worst thing about Philo is that she's good at the subject. If she'd been useless at it, or not had a natural talent for critical analysis, she'd not still be gaining A's for work submitted at the last moment.
Would perhaps have shocked herself through failure into seeing the need to commit or not commit to her courses.

"That's not true, though, Miss," interjects Jon, "if something's good enough, why should you knock yourself out trying to make it better?"

That's one way of looking at it. Another is that the old truism that all the things worth doing in life are difficult to achieve.

"No way," replies Denise. "If it's hard, I ain't gonna waste my time."

So you never want to climb Everest? Never want to breakfast with howler monkeys in the jungle? Never want to feed a puffin a morsel from your fingers?

"Oh, yeah. Of course. I want to do things. I decided. I'm never going to limit myself. No restrictions. Ever. That's me."

That's eighteen. Deeply held beliefs, without meaning. As long as they sound catchy, they're real.

Is the prompt line unrelated?
Is meaninglessness our latest faith, our guiding principle?

2005-05-25T17:33:00.000Z

Pauline is small, scrawny, unkempt, underfed. She gets bullied a lot. She invites it. She loads a story about her cat onto the screen at hometime, then stands by the projector, moving from foot to foot, saying nothing.

She wants some attention.

As I tidy the room, I ask her to read her story out loud. It's about a cat who meets an angel one day, and is surprised at the encounter.

I sit closer, by the keyboard, and read the dialogue out, asking her to listen to my voice to hear the punctuation. Award a reason for this time-filling, a reason above and beyong the need for company, for reassurance and reward.

I ask her to listen to me 'live' the voices. If my voice rises, it's a question mark. If it shouts in surprise, an exclamation.
"Excavation" she mumbles, and asks me to point it out, hovering over the '1'.
If my voice is flat, it's a ...
"Dot!"
Yes. A dot. Quietly I teach her the phrase 'full stop', and wait for her to edit her piece.

We add in some pictures, and she finds a kitten photographed inside a breakfast cereal carton. She's delighted, but I tell her to shut down, now, it's time to go home.

"Would you like a lift, Pauline?" I ask.

"Oh yes please, Miss L." Now I have to find a topic of conversation for the journey home as far as "past Woolworth's."
No matter. I should restrain my end of term temper long enough to allow one little girl a spot of company.

We talk about cats. It's a topic she becomes animated over, telling me their names, their patterns, their habits, their secret loves.

At the traffic lights, I notice two street wardens - support police officers, suited in neon jackets and mounted on state owned mountain bikes. Distracted, I tell Pauline that my dad does that job.

Pauline continues the story of the salmon that made the cat throw up.

Noticing the group of teenage boys the officers are speaking to are known to me, I crane forward, blurring the audio distraction of the cat who hates fresh fish.

Hassan is there, gesticulating crossly. Another boy shifts, and I identify Mev. A car hoots at me, indicating I should reverse to allow them to pass, and Pauline's words float into the foreground again. Betsy will only ever allow Spuds near her kittens, he's the only one.

"Which cat is the dominant one, Pauline?" I ask, as I try to figure out the body language of the boys at the junction in front of me. Are they being questioned? Or are they just chatting? Should I get out of the car?
"I mean, the cat who's in charge. Not the bully, but the boss."

She thinks carefully, biting her lip. "Mister Poshpaws. I think. They don't hate him though."

"When you feed them, Pauline," the boys begin to move away, and the officers remain static, watching them as I watch them being watched. "When you feed them, who gets to the food bowl first?" It's then that I notice all the boys before me are turkish. Did they think of them as a gang? I check the officers' faces. Both black. That's got to cause comment in our neighbourhood. Perhaps the boys invited the dialogue - merely asked them why they were police, or why they rode bicycles? Perhaps it was innocent.

"Mister Poshpaws!" Pauline crows in delight at the vindication of her first conclusion. "They leave the food when he comes in the room, and let him eat first."

"Then that's what we call the dominant animal, Pauline. The one who leads them. It's not a horrible thing. It's just how animals work: they need to know who's in control. They play the same games every day they're alive."

The boys turn the corner, relaxed strides, easy joyful arm punches, rolling gait. The officers lean into the sun and pedal forward. No tension. It's all okay.

2005-05-24T15:37:00.000Z

I feel so positive about our results this year.

Tom races in, hair akimbo, full of sixteen year old social drama, asks me to step outside to ask for a lift home.
Bullies, miss, the six foot part time boxer tells me. I don't ask questions, set him to work on my filing, then drive the boy home.

Nah, miss, not home. My mates' house. I'm going out tonight.

You know you've a GCSE exam tomorrow, Tom? I leave it casual, to hang in the air with the unspoken trailing hint about revising.

Yeah yeahyeah, miss!

What is it in, mate?

Errrr. Of Mice and Men.

Correct. What else?

Ummmmmmmmm. Er. Um. (&c. Standard get-me-out-of-this / take-pity-on-me / i'm-doing-my-best-to-make-this-sound-really-painful pause noises)

It's a book, Tom. Which book have you been studying all year?

Shakespeare?

There are no exams in Shakespeare. You did that a year ago for coursework.

You're kidding, miss!

Tell me you didn't sit and revise Shakespeare.

He's getting into role now, the good kid gone scatty, but even he can't maintain the front.

Nah, s'alright miss, I ain't revised it.

What then?

Frankenstein?

Cutting a long story short, I had to remind him of a thick orange covered book full of poems the whole year group have studied for two years solid.

Oh yeah, miss, the And-something, wunnit?

The Anthology. Who's in it? [... delete long painful pause from recollection of dialogue ...] What did Simon Armitage write? Hitcher?

Oh yeah yeahyeah.

Kid? About Batman and Robin?

Oh yeah! Yeah yeahyeah.

About as convincing as a fluffy dolly dress superimposed onto Tom's unconcerned frame.

What did Carol Ann Duffy write, then?

She wrote about that old biddy, yeah - you know, the one who bit off that guy's* --

-- okay, Tom, yes, I get the idea. No need to go further. And Salome and Anne Hathaway. She took silent female voices from historical details about the famous men they were involved with, and pretended to give them a voice. Got that?

Yeah. Yeahyeah.

Memorise it, Tom. She took real people, gave their womenfolk a voice. Pretended their stories got told.

Yeah. Right.

Say it.

Yeah. [...] Look, miss, my phone's going. Can I go outside and take this?

I feel so positive about our results this year.

* - Carol Ann Duffy's feminist retelling of Dickens: if you don't know what Havisham bites off, then I'm sure I'm not going to encourage the more perverse frequenters of google by telling you.

2005-05-23T15:35:00.000Z

To the eleventh hour unfortunate who arrived here desperately seeking:

AQA English literature A paper of wednesday 25 may 05 answers

... you're out of luck. Try doing the test based on what you know.

2005-05-20T10:35:00.000Z

Clearing out old folders and the work of students who've left, nevermore to be seen (three ashen faced, knuckle sweating examinations apart), and hidden between the folds of leathery tan A4 wallets from two years back, I find a full half packet of chocolate chip cookies.

Yes of course I ate them. Eating them right now.

Tested one on Jake (aged eleven, favourite food kit kat) first, though.

2005-05-19T15:03:00.000Z

Sorting through drawers and old papers, I discovered a photocopied document squirreled away sometime in 2000, that outlined the incident which five years ago made me leave the school I later returned to:

I was working alone in [fourth floor rooftop portakabin classroom] at lunchtime. As [portakabin] was vandalised every day last year, and as no staff man [other rooftop portakabin, which functioned as school repository for emotionally disturbed / unmanageable children at risk of expulsion], I work there each lunchtime so that students know a teacher is around in case of trouble.

At 1.10pm a large, four inch keyring flew through the door and hit me on the back. Ryan, Alex and another boy were in the doorway. It didn't look to me as though Alex had thrown the object.

Alex asked for his keyring back. I picked it up and told him he could have it back at the end of the day. He walked up to my desk. He proceeded to shout "can I have my keyring / hand back?" at me for the next fifteen minutes, about fifty or sixty times, throughout the rest of the incident.

Alex walked over to the fire escape [read: unlocked door opening straight onto the roof], and Ryan followed. The other boy stayed outside. Ryan (or Alex, possibly) said "I'm going to throw myself off the roof."
They opened the door to the roof and Ryan put one foot outside.

I got up and walked fast to the door, warning them that if they stepped outside, I would work hard to see they were excluded [temporary expulsion; usually one to five days].
I moved behind Ryan and put my arm across the door, trying to get between him and the exit. I was worried that they really were going to endanger themselves on roof, as I know they're [school repository for emotionally disturbed / unmanageable children] regulars. Ryan kept hold of the door, so I pulled him away from it. He started shouting "don't push me." I continued to put my hand on his shoulder - I didn't do anything more than apply gentle pressure.

Ryan continued to yell "don't push me," but when it became clear I wasn't going to move away from the door, he backed away.

My [sixteen year old] students had left a stick of glue and some scissors on a desk at the back of the room. Alex moved away, laughing, but Ryan headed for the scissors. I continually asked them to leave the room every minute. I followed Ryan, intending to shepherd them out of the door.
Ryan turned in the aisle in front of me, held the scissors towards me at stomach height and said "I'm going to fucking stab you."

I think I replied along the lines of "don't be silly." I was unsure about whether he was going to do it or not - it certainly wasn't an empty threat. After a few seconds, he laughed and turned towards the door. He carried the scissors with him. I think he placed them on my desk as he passed it.

Both boys were still shouting at me "give me back my hand / key ring" or "don't push me" / "don't fucking push me."
Ryan started shouting to the other two to witness that I had "pushed" him at intervals, too. I escorted them out of the room, and to the top of the stairs, with some difficulty, as they kept turning and shouting "no."

Alex stood at the top of the stairs, shouting and Ryan stood in the landing alcove shouting. The third boy stood halfway down the stairs, laughing, throughout. He didn't enter [portakabin] at any point or behave aggressively other than this. Miss H came up the stairs to see what the noise was, and obviously recognised the two boys. I asked her if she would come up to the top landing, as I was seriously worried about the boys attacking me.

Miss H reasoned with Alex, who shouted less often, but continued to shout. He then moved to the next landing. Ryan stood with his face buried in his arms on the bannister. He refused to move for either of us and continued to shout "you shouldn't push me!" and swear. He also said "I'll do a deal. You go back in your room and then I'll go." I told him I would not do any deals.

I stood between him and the wall and asked him to move. I again put my hand on his shoulder in the same way. He calmed a little, but would not move. As he was not displaying aggression towards Miss H, I asked her to stay there with im while I phoned for assistance. The other two boys were on the stairs shouting "bastards."

When I got to [the nearest phone, two floors down], I could get no response on [the emergency number]. While I was ringing the main reception, I asked Miss B to go upstairs, so that Miss H was not alone, then asked reception to get the deputy head on duty urgently to [rooftop portakabin].

Miss H came down at 2.20ish. She had succeeded in persuading Ryan to move - however all three boys had gone to the first floor and continued shouting.

I had spoken calmly to the boys throughout the incident, but now was so shocked by it that I could not phone reception again. Mrs S phoned for me, and asked again for a deputy head to come urgently to the room. She said it was to do with "a boy stabbing Miss Lectrice with scissors."

I asked Miss B to send a pupil to the pastoral head , to cover my registration group, as I was too scared to return to [rooftop protakabin]. No one arrived.

By 2.35pm, Miss H accompanied me up to [rooftop portakabin], as still no assistance had arrived, and I was too scared to collect my things alone. She then accompanied me down to the deputy head on duty, who knew nothing of the incident.

And there is the story of the first and last time a student levelled a formal accusation of assault at me. I recall my response at the time was 'yes, I did push him. I'd push him again. I'd push any child who was threatening to kill himself, away from the roof.'

I'd forgotten the key detail, though. The rooftop shared with a unit for emotionally damaged children. The doors with no locks, serving as 'fire escape'. The isolation from the rest of the school. The fear that a child would harm himself in front of me. The sheer shock of seeing a cherubic face snarl and brandish a weapon.

Most of all, the one detail that made me leave.
The receptionist who, when erroneously told I'd been stabbed by a pupil, did nothing.

2005-05-18T12:35:00.000Z

The impulse to escape is an adolescent one. Remains so, as does our desire for urgency in doing so.
While letting casually slip news of impending exit to fourteen year old tearaways, they asked what I would be doing with my time once I leave. Explaining that I was going to travel the world for a time, do some VSO, reach for some further horizons, their reaction was as simple, honest and directly logical as we ever expect from pre-adolescents.

"Why would you do that? Isn't that a waste of money, Miss?" asked Tommy.
Chezney was unperturbed, eager to avoid any writing, "No way, if I had the money, I'd go to Kingston, Jamaica again. Everything is really small there. They have chickens."
"But if you think about it, Miss," persisted Tommy, doodling a cartoon of King Krull on his 'missing persons' poster, "that's going to be a waste when you get back. Where are you going to live? I would spend the money on finding a house."

I explain that I'm likely to be away for quite a time, that I haven't the money to do both things - buy a house in the property hot house that is London, and travel.

Thali's ears prick up, and he invents a question to make me move across and exlain to him where I'll be going. "So you're just going to waste time, Miss?" His eyes widen in near outrage.

I think about it. Yes, I suppose so. I suppose it is.
Somehow a life without hourly bells, sugar highs and tannoy announcements looks rosy with this new label.

I try to pacify Thali by explaining how I'm going to visit his home country.
He shifts excitedly in his seat, tells me a story of how he's been too scared to go back since a time when he was five, seeing a snake entwine itself round his mother's ankle and grip.
"Don't go there, Miss, it's horrible." Big eyes. "They have snakes!"

I agree that spiders and snakes are to be feared, and jungle expeditions frowned upon. South East London possesses no such dangers. The predators here, and the web they weave to snare these boys are of quite a different order.

"But if you think about it, Miss, that's a really really long time to waste. Just to waste it."
One final try.
"You see, Thali, time is different when you get to my age. For you, a year is a long time. It's a whole year! It's forever. If it's just before the holidays, a week takes forever, doesn't it?"
He nods, pen raised and forgotten above the poster.
"When you're an old old lady like me, you'll find that you've lived a very very long time, and it makes things seem different. For me, a year goes by just like that." I blink, snap my fingers. "In an instant. Was that a year? I didn't notice."

"For people who are very very old, like me, five years is nothing. When you're old, when you're a grandpa, and all your grandchildren are gathered round your knee, you'll blink, snap your fingers, and they'll be older. Just like that. And you'll say 'my, haven't you grown tall?' Because five years has passed and you didn't notice. Didn't notice at all."

Thali's eyes light up, middle distance, at the little grandchildren soon to be clustered around his knee.
My eyes light up at the idea I'll be wasting my time.

We both smile. Just a little.

2005-05-17T15:22:00.000Z

I often despised colleagues - skilful colleagues - who would waltz into inner city schools, turn everything upside down in a dire, short sighted attempt to look good to management, then deplore the behaviour, the work rate, the children, the staff, the managerial inadequacies. Invariably, they would declare themselves too good for the place, and leave within two years flat.

As far as I can judge children at inner city schools need stability and continuity more than any single other factor in their lives.

There is precious little of it in their home areas, and the rapid staff turnover at inner city schools proves little of the 'worth' of those vainglorious overdramatic short term teachers who are simply 'too good' to put up with conditions in the quagmire.

When it comes to adults whom you believe really know or trust you, four years is not very long in the life of a child.

In the face of the severe temptation toward elastic band flickery, there's nothing like the frowning disappointment of a teacher who knows you, your four brothers, your cousin, your mum and last week had tea and shared raucous anecdotes with your uncle.

Two years? Figures as just another person who walked out on you.

This is one of the key anchors which kept me in inner city schools for eleven years - providing I can keep the energy levels topped up, then the longer I stay, the more effective my presence becomes for students.

However, I'm somewhat of a hypocrite, for I'm leaving.

Leaving the school, the job, and the profession, and so I should keep my filial collegiate scorn to myself.

This is my last summer of teaching: previous experience has taught me to keep news of my impending departure low key.

My last school was what we term a 'failing' school - the average length of internment for any staff was two years, three was considered long service, and there remained one staunch, wonderful deputy head who'd weathered seven. The news of any staff member leaving was greeted with grim stoicism - as though children were expecting you to leave anyway.

One sensed that the only trigger for their surprise would be the teacher who put their money where their preachable principles are, and stays.
The recognition I detected in their eyes as I told them was terribly sad: all adults disappoint; all adults leave.

I've left my current school before; in a performing arts school full of drama queens and gossip it can be tricky to navigate students' sense of panic or betrayal at a sudden departure - not least because it allows students to find an excuse for failure in your wake.
Last time I left this place, I took care to stage the scene. Stopped the lesson to make an announcment. I wanted to explain what was going to happen, why, how and when to my most dependent classes. In doing so, I unwittingly accorded higher importance to the news than it merited.

Drama.

I recall walking out of that room feeling as though I'd stabbed someone. Several someones. My announcement was confronted with a wall of rebellion: slammed books, walkouts, angry cries of "thanks a lot, that's all our exams failed, then" - which helped or sustained neither student nor teacher, nor the hapless woman left to take over.

This time, I've learnt from my mistakes - let the news seep out early, through offhand remarks. Surprised "didn't you know?" dialogues in corridors, dropped conversations with older siblings at the school gates.

The response has been calm. Interested. Relaxed. A sense of growth towards an ending that's inevitable, not asserted as if in revenge.
It does help that I usually at some point come back.

So what have I learnt? Finally, I learn to model the behaviour I want students to display.

2005-05-16T08:39:00.000Z

"Rick isn't a bad kid. He just takes against a teacher, sometimes, if he thinks they don't like him."

Late Friday afternoon on a stress-bloated busy bastard of a week, and my pleadings have worked. Rick is receiving the kid glove treatment over The Notorious Accusation of the Balloon Filled With Water.

He's sat working on the lumpy blue couch in the office, listening to the head of department rail volubly at the exam board's telephonists. As the boss replaces the recevier and looks up, Rick's face changes - scowl, foot up on seat, headphone placed into ear.

"Rick. Take the headphone out. You need to listen to this. We need to talk about what just happened in class."

He takes the earpiece out, adjusts his mp3 player, puts the other ear piece straight back in. "I don't fucking care."

"Now Rick. Stop it! You're only getting yourself into worse trouble. Try to calm your temper down. We need to talk properly about what has happened."

"What's 'appened is that fucking teacher is a fucking dickhead.I ain't talking about it, and I ain't staying behind." He's putting the class warrior act on, to mask his pure fury at the accusation that still rankles.

"Be sensible Rick. I have always spoken to you calmly and with respect, haven't I?" Reluctant nod. Rolled eyes. "well then if we're going to talk about what happened, I demand that you show me back some of that same respect, by not being rude to me, and not swearing."

Heavy sigh. Lips moving in a silent "don't care" retort. But unspoken.

"So before we start, is there anything you need to say to me about what's just happened? Rick? I think there's something you need to say." Boss is getting irritated, I can tell. 3 o'clock on Friday - not the most empathetic of moments to try to identify with a teenager's tortured sense of a world of injustice and indignity.

"Yeah." Shrug. The insolent, grumpy, pessimistic Rick I used to deal with a year ago returns - washes across his ashen features like a mask.

"Yes what, Rick?"

"Yes ... sir." His eyes deaden, and I'm reminded of the times I used to drag him out of class before he did damage to the perceived perpetrator of perceived wrongs, only to discover a boy who felt no hope or optimism about his future, who felt hotly determined that a teacher who does not 'like' him is a teacher who has limited his options, has thrown his potential away.

"Go ahead then, Rick, and then you can go talk to Miss Lectrice about what we do next. I'm waiting. What do you have to say?"

beat

"You're a fucking wanker."

"Sir."

They gladden my heart, I tell you, these boys. Read into that whatever you will.

2005-05-13T06:19:00.000Z

An english language examination question asks sixteen year old students to imagine they are writing a letter of application for a summer job fruit picking. The answers reveal a startling lack of understanding of power structures at play in the world of jobseeking. The vast majority of students believe the process to be thus:

Find a job that pays "well" (many remarked upon how generous the minimum wage seemed from the vantage point of a world inhabited by twin forces of pocket money and illegal underage skivvy jobs)

Arrange an interview by picking up the phone

Go along to the interview but do not be scared - this is where you should closely look at the job - see if you like the look of the place you will be working

If you are satisfied that the place is good, and they will not make you wear a uniform, then the job is for you

Once this decision has been made, collect and fill out an application form for the job

The job is now yours

So: what have we taught them?

Luke has been driven into apoplectic fury yet again by the demands of his english teacher. Miss N has high standards, and will not allow students to bend them into underachievement. She's a skilful teacher, and a stickler for careful manners and consideration. Luke is facing real difficulty in meeting such standards,in a world where, previously, alternating wild uncontrollable rages with high test scores has stood him in good stead. Miss N speaks to me at the end of the week, suggesting that perhaps the teacher pupil relationship here has degenerated to the point where it becomes irretrievable.I agree to switch Luke's english class within the next week.

Luke's mother telephones the school first thing Monday morning. Her voices screams inthroaty roar from the handset.
~ Where's that bitch Miss N? I want to speak to her!
I explain carefully, in modulated tones, that Miss N is teaching and cannot leave thirty students to come to the phone.
~ That's not fucking good enough! I want to talk to the head of department! NOW.
My voice oozes deeper, sicklier honey, the more abusive she becomes. The head of department isn't in today. I'm afraid she'll have to take her complaint to another member of the senior staff. Everybody here is busy. Teaching.
She misses the sarcasm but takes the hint. Slams the handset after a few choice insults about whose job she's going to 'destroy'.

So: what have we taught Luke?

The Blackboard Jungle has been bordering upon the preachy of late. I do apologise. Diatribes have always been intended to be very much secondary to the stories formed by real life.

Yet one post I've read has crystallised many ideas at once. I must just take one slow Friday out of the tales of teens inspected to note what has been said.

I've been reading the words of Edward Hyde for two years now. A recent post both chimes and grates against some ideas I've kicked about lately, on how we really teach those in our care about our responsibilities in the world.

A woman came into the bookstore today looking for a book greater than 500 pages in length, and the audio version (preferably abridged) of the same book. The contents of the book did not matter -- fiction, non-fiction, genre, topic, all irrelevant. The sole criteria was over 500 pages, and an abridged version on CD or tape.

The reason for this was because her teenage daughter was assigned to read and write a report on a book at least 500 pages in length. This report is due tomorrow. Child kept putting it off, and putting it off, and putting it off. If the child does not turn in a report tomorrow, child will get a failing grade. So mom took time off of work to go to the bookstore to get something the kid could listen to tonight and pound out a report on, and the book to show the teacher.

Note that there is nothing wrong with this child. There was no family emergency, no vacation or time away from school. Kid. Just. Didn't. Do it.

Now, if this were my child, she'd ~~take~~ eat the failing grade. She would be grounded for so long she'd forget there was a world outside of school and home. She'd forget what a TV looked like, what telephones looked like, what the internet was, what video games were. She'd certain know what books were, what homework was, and what household chores were. She'd be subjected to daily, sometimes hourly, lectures on the importance of education, personal responsibility, time management, and, oh, any other topic I could make relevant.

Under NO circumstances would I drop everything to help the child cheat. I would not be teaching the child that listening to a book on tape is the same thing as reading a book, that taking shortcuts is an acceptable alternative to doing actual work, and that if you screw up it's okay because someone else will bail you out and immediately and unquestioningly pick up your damned mess.

We as adults rarely look critically at ourselves when we truly believe we are already setting a good example. No doubt this bookshop customer truly believed that by insisting her daughter meet the deadline, she was taking responsibility.

Edward Hyde sees it differently, and when phrased in such terms, I have to agree. Time and again children show us that we teach them by our actions, not by words or by crumpled principles. They do not listen to what we say. Children unfailingly look: at what we do.

If we swing life by the seat of our pants, we teach them not that it can be done, but that we clearly believe this is how it should be done.

In fairness, I recognise fully how often do we all do this: assume some of the responsibility, and cease questioning ourselves about the rest.

I can't honestly say I haven't been in this bookshop customer's shoes and reacted similarly. I can't honestly say I'd have spent too long questioning myself about the moral framework of what I believed at that moment to be a 'good' action.

But the process of reflection, or self criticism is crucial. Self knowledge is the automatic by-product of neither action nor intention.
If we stop asking ourselves what it is that we already model to the youngsters in our care, then we no longer control the aspects of the world that we want them to revere.

In an email conversation with James, I suggested that although generic workblogs have previously been somewhat complaining and venting in nature - a sea change could occur.
Blogging is a medium through which a process of critical reflection could act as necessary future tool for workers in professions and in public service. Particularly the latter: in public health, the army, policing, teaching, and social work, a target-driven top-down culture combines awkwardly with frontline service - situations characterised by real, unavoidable outcomes for the people you work with.

These cultures do not lend themselves to occupational or professional reflection - time is a high pressure commodity, as is energy, when crisis control is your daily bread. The majority of teachers I know spend their evenings and weekends simply attempting to recharge frazzled nerves, rather than musing upon what makes children read, meet deadlines, challenge authority?

Yet these are the very cultures which most need critical reflection to take place, continually threatened by the push and pull of the general public's hour of need, balanced on a knife edge of governmental under-funding and over-targeting.

If we don't reflect, pause, and take a moment to see ourselves in a self-critical light in these public service professions, then we, like Edward Hyde's bookshop customer will inevitably fall guilty of preaching but not teaching. We are judged by what we do. We must therefore assume less about what we do - open our eyes, look, judge, reflect - to see perhaps what damaging roles we too are playing in shaping young people's sense of the world.

2005-05-12T15:02:00.000Z

Recently the british press has been full of headteachers' complaints about poor standards of parenting.

Horror stories abound of children who are sent to school with no idea of what the word 'no' means, no idea of how to read, even of how to feed themselves.
The national mania for the 'makeover' show demands the government apply a quick fix: parenting classes! Mandatory! Punish the chavs! Middle class values rool.

The single voice of reason I've encountered belonged to Michael MacMahon, author of an essay in the Sunday Times (I can find no direct link on the site).
He describes a class of first years, patiently waiting for instruction at the start of a lesson. MacMahon sets out the task clearly and in stages. Explains what to do if things go wrong. Children sit waiting.

He asks if there are questions, and fifteen hands go up immediately.
Each child wants to know what it is that Sir wants them to do today.

These children are not being naughty, wicked, wilful, or disruptive. They simply have no perception of themselves as part of a group. They wait patiently for the moment when the teacher will come over and explain to them personally what it is they have to do.
This sense of individualism resonates strongly with the students in my classrooms.
The rights of the individual are well known in our society.
The duty of the individual to act as part of a group is unexpected.

It has to be carefully, clearly spelled out, again and again and again. It's such a new concept to these kids that it tends to takes fourteen weeks of constant repetition to help them see that they are part of a larger unit.

This, then, is what I wish parenting classes - should there ever be such a thing - could tackle.

Case in point. The students' graduation evening last night was gloriously well behaved, formal, organised.

We expect them to wear full formal evening dress, with corsages, and hold long rehearsals to ensure they understand exactly how to treat their peers with sufficient respect to impress upon everyone present: this is no one person's moment to any greater degree than any other.

In rehearsal, we explain that if a student receives a whoop or a cheer as they receive their presentation folder, it makes it harder for the next student to listen to the lack of cheers.

If we applaud every person, rather than waiting till a full class has 'graduated', at some point our hands will get sore and tired, and those waiting to receive their words from the visiting dignitary will find it harder to endure if the applause is failing.

If we laugh and cheer at a peer who's passing our seat, we think we're boosting their confidence, but actually we're increasing the pressure on a heart that is already pounding.

We spell it out very very clearly to these sixteen year olds.

It is the last day of their formal compulsory schooling - attendance at any day henceforth is voluntary. We enunciate the words with great clarity - they deserve the dignity of a formal finish.

But we forgot to educate the parents.

It was interesting, to witness real schadenfreude on the students' faces as they trooped up to receive their presentation documents (make eye contact, big smile, stick hand out to be shaken, kids!), dressed in evening gown or DJ, shoes polished, faces scrubbed, manners turned up to 11.

Because their families had no idea how to behave.

No idea that screaming, leaping and whooping when Junior walks onstage might make it harder for Jordan to follow.

No idea that laughing uproariously when Haddon trips over his shoelace might terrify the wits out of Hayley waiting her turn in the wings.

No idea that when their blasted toddler begins to scream with boredom, they have the option of taking it outside so that others don't have to suffer the aural indignities of a baby being sworn at, being cuffed loudly.

Ali turned toward me, waiting for his name on the PA system, whispered, "why are they applauding? Don't they know how rude that is? I thought Sir said they'd all wait till the class is finished."
Suddenly the difference between the students onstage and the working class estate families that had raised them became clear.

As requested, a guest speaker lays it on thick to parents - we expect YOU to get YOUR child out of bed tomorrow morning, we expect YOU to remove televisions from bedrooms right now, we expect YOU to tell YOUR child they are not going out at night until June's exams are over.
YOU are the person who needs to take responsibility now. YOU cannot abdicate that responsibility then later admonish YOUR child.

With those words, the difference between our sixteen year old students and the homes they come from became startling.

We haven't simply taught these children lessons. W
e've educated them. Because we've allowed them to see they have choices over how to behave.

I shan't forget the looks in their eyes as these children watched their families fail to understand how to play fair, how to support each other, how to lose one scrap of self-importance in order to gain a wealth of shared dignity.

The light of their realisation of the difference between where they come from and where they can go to was truly illuminating.

2005-05-11T14:49:00.000Z

At graduation evening, I bump into my students' retired pastoral manager, three years on from his dignified exit.

He's working with the school again - for the past year, he's taken "on-site pastoral responsibility" for "students on vocational programmes".
Or, in plain English: "the kids we bump off down the building site because they're not bright enough to do GCSEs" get a "supportive ear" from him when they're "caught shoplifting".

It suits him. It suits his caring, rigorous style. He looks good on it.

Actually, he looks about ten years younger.

"Christ," he says, "a lot of people have said that. Makes me wonder just how bloody knackered I used to look."

Chatting about the change, he says the real difference is no longer having to feel as if Everything is Your Fault.
If a child is wayward, if a child underachieves - sure, you play a part in the process, but without the dragon stench of government targets breathing down your collar, you don't go home feeling you've let the world down, that the child's poor track record translates as yours.

To some minds that makes a bad teacher.

To my mind, if a teacher is no longer crippled by the Orwellian notion of 'vocation' that allows government mandarins to load curriculum change after curriculum change, directive after strategy after role adaptation after target after inspection after charter after rebranding on the profession - if a teacher is allowed to simply use their years of experience and get on with the job of teaching and do some damn good in the world ... they generally do.

2005-05-10T14:28:00.000Z

Posts are a little hazy along the production lines at present.

There's a standard habit in UK state comprehensives. It recurs with any teacher who is leaving at the end of the term, when management assumes they're slipping and backsliding on their basic duties, as final term cabin fever sets in. I guess said manager figures that they themselves would have their own sights set elsewhere, so why wouldn't everyone else be operating in a walking dreamworld of abdicated responsibility?

Hmm. Not my style. But I digress.

The standard response is to get your money's worth out of said exiting malingerers by another route - by increasing the number of substitute teaching they're awarded in the average week.
If they're just going to function as another warm body in the room, why not put them somewhere this figures as a job apex, right?

I see the logic.

Except, I'm trying very hard not to lose focus or to disappoint my students by enacting half-arsed rubbish lessons on their batttered brains. I'm trying to maintain the same high standards I expect of them at any other time of year.

But still I'm caught in the assumption of abdicated weight - the tectonic gap of teaching: three hours' extra substitute teaching a week.

I still have to write longhand reports, process 350 folders of coursework, give speeches at graduation evenings, organise and plan inventive lessons, and plan, administrate, staff and deliver a revision school the size of a small primary ... but now I have to do it in three hour's less time.

Four hours if you count the time spent writing incident reports for little Arron, who locks the strange supply teacher out of the classroom, or Antoine, who throws a mouldy banana at the whiteboard, or Patrice, who decides to try to bite Gemma's wrist till her teeth draw blood in their midweek French ~~zoological experience~~ lesson.

All of which makes my admin record look slapdash, means I'm missing report deadlines, turning up late to graduation, submitting coursework at the final moments before deadline; to my managers' eyes I appear to be doing exactly what they assumed - cutting corners. Leaving in spirit, long before I leave in body.

And that annoys me.

I have a mountain of dogsbody work to catch up on.

Blogging - that reflective externalisation of internal processes - can be awkward on top of the rush season. At the moment, it comes last on the list.

My apologies. Normal service will be rushed, hasty, and often delivered a day or two overdue.

And will resume; as soon as I've given these damn overworking naysaying unbelievers what for. I'm going to teach them a lesson.

2005-05-09T05:42:00.000Z

Something I hadn't ever noticed in teenage culture before: the boys are taking longer to fuss and stye their hair just so than the girls are.

Suddenly all those illfitting tousled chop cuts in the assembly hall look a little too perfectly tousled; the same shock of over-gelled mess falls at the same angle over the same half eyebrow as yesterday and the day before - and I realise these haircuts are premeditated, artful, constructed, intentional.

The girls' hairstyles are messy, hastily brushed, run at most into twin pigtail plaits. No product. No elaborate mullet, hoxton fin, up do, braids, foofy headband, teased afros or razor cut mohican.

Young men in every previous generation have taken at most two minutes' pride in their barenet fair: floppy public schoolboy fringe, or burberry-shaven bonce.
Is this our first generation of truly metrosexual young men?

Remarking upon this to Tom, age sixteen - too much wet-look gel, casual 'mussed' look - he agrees, enthusiastically. "Too right, Miss! It takes me twenty minutes every morning to get my hair right."

2005-05-06T12:45:00.000Z

Finishing up your contract at a job involves much going through of old papers, sorting out what's useful for other staff to be left behind, and what's just junk that's cluttered your desk for a decade or more.

I found a leather bound expensive notebook. Habitat, handmade paper, decorative and rich. I wondered if it might contain an old journal, or perhaps was a child's very realistic interpretation of documents to be included in a fictional police case file?

Turning the first leaf, I saw printed very neatly in large, round hand, the following words:

Ms Lectrice has completely lost her voice

Turning another few leaves I find blue biro instructions for a series of classes, and a series of hastily elected monitors to read out.

Sixth form: We have some folders that we need to complete this lesson.
Year 10: We need to get the text books from Miss M.
Year 11: It's your final debate! Comfort's group will go first.

I think back to Hipteacher's silent protest lesson a few weeks ago, and feel a warm reassurance that it is possible to teach without shouting or raising your voice. Without even speaking at all. A golden memory of how children can rise to a challenge, of how real human compassion is not beyond their grasp.

Until the rounded letters suddenly change. A sharp black jagged scrawl interrupts the simple blue instructions.

Terry: get OFF the table.

Lucy: STOP chewing.

SIT DOWN: Jessica, Meltem, Melissa, Stephanie.

TERRY! Sit down or be sent out.

I will ask Ms ScaryPrincipal to deal with you if you do not work

And in a neon green haphazard child's scrawl, beneath:

~~rubbish~~

The rosy glow of memorialising myself ... fades.

2005-05-05T13:08:00.000Z

They're fourteen years old.

How does Macbeth's language show his fear and desperation to cling onto power?

If they get this wrong, they go into the next year group with a governmental label of functionally illiterate.

How does my language, here, express impotent fury at a system mired in dread futility for a fourteen year old still unable to write in sentences?

2005-05-04T12:43:00.000Z

Fourteen year olds sit disconsolate in a fast emptying hall to do the 'SAT' verbal arithmetic exam.

The level of this exam is 'levels 3-5' - that's the lowest level.
The English Language exams only measure level 4 and above. In English, by age eleven, anything below level four is considered sub-literate.

Innumerate. I think of the word and look around the hall. Spot so many of my own students in there.

"Look at the spot marked A on the map, and write down its co-ordinates."

Surrounded by the completed papers of those who've scored higher, and been able to leave earlier, fourteen year olds listen to warm honey newsreader tones of a recorded verbal delivery. They have fifteen seconds to answer before the subsequent question is signalled along the ageing PA system with loud van-reversi beep.

Innumerate children sit, twist, fidget, stare, try to count on fingers and run out of time, try to remember through physical movement the points on a compass, tap toes, drop pens again and again, sigh.

"What time is it four hours after ten thirty in the morning? Say whether your answer is AM or PM."

Pen dropping boy manages four times in one minute. I pick his pen up and sternly reprimand. "Don't do that again."
"It wasn't my fault!" Stage whisper, indignation.
He spends the next four minutes lying in an S shape, bent backwards over the desk behind, arms outstretched and supplicant to the mildewed lights of the hall ceiling.

"If I face west, then turn ninety degrees to the right, twice, what direction am I facing?"

Foot tapping girl reaches a crescendo of rhythm. taptaptap
taptaptaptap
taptaptaptaptap
taptaptaptaptaptaptaptap
I and a colleague stare hard at her, throw her The Look.
"What are you looking at me for?" Incredulous stage hiss.

Both children determined that although they have just broken the rules of a state exam, they are innocent.
The evidence before my eyes is wrong. The obvious response to being caught is innocence, and retort.

The examinations officer ignores it. Nothing else happens.

These are the innumerate kids. The illiterate kids, too, mostly. These are all the problems in microcosm of the inner city school.

But not just that. Of their inner city lives.

"What is 83 taken away from 100?"

Today is a microcosm of the future for these ne'er-do-wells.

taptaptap

2005-05-03T16:54:00.000Z

Like a fool, I decided that my thirteen year olds' two week, simple, snappy Media project should be something a little more adventurous than any other teacher has managed.
Something to show people that although leaving I haven't switched off. I haven't given in to that de-mob happy sense of Obligations Discarded that other staff who leave the job indulge in.

So we're analysing the openings of media productions of Othello.

Sigh.

"What are they saying?"

"That's not English!"

"Thee thou thee thee thou."

"But we voted for Romeo and Juliet."

"Couldn't we do Hamlet? Or Texas Chainsaw Massacre, at least?"

"Ewwwwwwwwwwww! There's sex in it! That's disgusting!"

"Do they all die at the end? Then what's the point of watching if we know they all die at the end?"

"So, he's a world famous actor, yeah, and he's got boot polish on his face to look black? And that was normal? That's so gay."

"Who is he? Which one's Iago? Is Roderigo the bad guy? So who's Desperado then? This is boring, I tell you."

The only word they've learnt is 'motive'; now they spend day in day out camply whining ... "What's MY motivation?"

2005-05-02T16:52:00.000Z

The glorious gloriableness of a gloriful Bank Holiday in the sunshine listening to a frog chorus prevented there appearing any Monday post here at the Blackboard Jungle.

Apart from this one, obviously.

2005-04-29T14:02:00.000Z

Take something simple. Something easy to organise, like revision workshops.

Then faff enough to mess it up. Class sizes of fifty plus. With no designated room to deliver it in.

Take away basic resources like a screen or a whiteboard.

Add some vagueness over what the class is actually teaching. Silliness should determine that your key workers need to do all the legwork, and your basic team should stand around under employed. That will ensure that mountain of Key Worker Paperwork in triplicate gets sorted, and quicker, too.

Manglement types should have a health warning. A lapel badge.

"Let me overcomplicate that for you."

2005-04-28T14:48:00.000Z

Typical. My house is spotless in the way that truly, only a house belonging to someone with thirty longhand graduation reports to write could ever manage.

2005-04-27T15:06:00.000Z

Cheap trick.

Although there was one gem in the whole overblown nonsense of a circus huckster's game of illusion - one teacher pointed out that many younger parents are not on our side.

They still see any formal authority as on the side of the bad, something to be fought against, something to be challenged, angrily.

That part I recognised: not from parents, but from their miniaturised pre-teen mouthpieces in the classroom.

Simon turns up for the first time in twelve weeks, and is indignant that he hasn't had information that he couldn't be bothered to show face at class to collect. Growling and rebarbative, despite my softly-softly approach, he tosses over his shoulder as he walks straight out again: "My mum could ruin this school. She could write to the paper about what you lot are like."

Simon hasn't lived with mum until very recently. Rather lamely, I offer up an opinion about how working to bolster the reputation of the school you choose to attend may have a domino effect on the value of your qualifications. Lamely because if he hasn't yet acquired the maturity to take responsibility for the consequences of his non-attendance, he's unlikely to recognise the deliberately palliative logic of my words.

Simultaneously, I wonder about the maturity of the mum whose words he's repeating. The mum who patently needs Simon to think it's him and her against the whole world right now. Somewhat less than long term thinking.
Supportive parent, that one.

2005-04-26T15:04:00.000Z

Nobody wants to be Bugsy.

Nobody wants to be Blousy.

They all want to be Fat Sam, Fizzy, Dandy Dan, Tallulah.

Limelight stealers.

2005-04-25T10:25:00.000Z

How can the bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?

Inspired by ideas detailed on Bloom's blog, on Friday I took my sixth formers' lesson outside. We sat beneath a tree heavy with blossom, near another that showered us with white petals as we discussed poetry on damp grass.

We analysed Blake's The Schoolboy, and then looked at the sense of Englishness filtered through landscape in Edward Thomas' war poetry.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds

It was gorgeous, and gorgeously fitting as a context. A real Miss Jean Brodie of a moment.

Until, that is, a drunken schoolkeeper turned up to take dodgy photos of the horrifed blossom-snowed seventeen year olds.

Poetry. Cuh. Damn place is closer to Shakespeare than poetry.

2005-04-22T08:48:00.000Z

Parent interviews for the cute-as-buttons, yet slightly feral eleven year olds I teach, and I while away the evening explaining that we're going to be studying the playscript of 'Bugsy Malone' this term, possibly even putting it on as a proper show.

Cue a whole succession of grinning dads of embarrassed podgy white boys, insisting that their son be considered only for the parts of Fat Sam or Tallulah.

Honestly, you could feel the kids squirm.

2005-04-21T08:24:00.000Z

I'm pleased to report that, at least once before I give up teaching, I've experienced the students stage a mass walk-out.

My Media class have been filming footage to create a horror film cinema trailer.
In clunky, unwieldy groups of eight kids. They had five hours to film all the footage they needed.
This concept passed a few individuals by, and after waiting two months for Sarcastic Media Guy to put the film onto CD, another month for Sarcastic Network Guy to transfer the mpeg files onto a network drive, and another month beyond that to book the only room in which there's a video editing suite, Hasan's group were horrified to discover they're forced to make a horror film out of a dodgy wobbly thirty minute clip of a house in the distance.

Of course, it would count as a ridiculously high expectation for their teacher to be trained on the video editing software, or even to have access to a handbook or instructional manual, so we're learning on the job.

We have four hours in which to create trailers, the first was spent simply playing with the software, trying to discover what it can do.
Sounds logical - in fact that's how most people learn to use any software - but most people end up fiddling, tweaking and playing for far more than four hours.

Fifty five minutes into the first period Cash worked out how to open the files we wanted to edit.
Thirty minutes into the second period before Cory managed to uncover the trick of trimming any clips.

It can quite respectably be called one of the greatest shambles of my teaching career.

And Sarcastic Network Guy has lost the best group's work. All of it.

He didn't keep a copy - threw the disc away.

When we plead with him to try to open up the corrupted files he's messed up, he snorts and says it's 'your problem'.

There were tears. Recriminations. More tears.

This is 20% of their Media GCSE.

Two lessons of despair and tears. Eventually, I asked them to consider the worst case scenario. Every approach to Sarcastic Network Guy had been rebuffed. I'd gone through the appropriate ~~bullying channels~~ hierarchy of comaplaints and requests for assistance.

Nobody really understood what I was saying as soon as I hit those magic words 'mpeg file'. Eyes glaze, and polite memos are duly issued.

Sarcastic Network Guy made sarcastic promises, and each day the promises fail to materialise into something workable. Worst case scenario: this group - the one with the most detailed footage - would have to use someone else's clips in their video.

Uproar.

Cardinal rule of education: things must be made fair. This patently is not fair.

Although the victimisation could at best be called randomly pointless, it certainly is not fair.

Rick's shoulders slumped, but he started trying to get on with it, checking the tawdry ill judged footage saved by the other groups. Jessica cried, again, head down on the keyboard.
Amy rolled her eyes, and argued.

But Leo just stopped. "I'm not doing it."

The others' ears pricked up.

"I'm not having it. It isn't fair, and I'm not doing it.

"I'm not staying here another second. I'm going and I'm going now."

They downed tools, their expressions betraying that they almost didn't believe their own actions even as they took them, and stood.

Seeing the determination on their faces, understanding that all normal channels had failed, I asked them - if they were determined to do this - to bear one thing in mind: go to the top.
If you're going to strike and walk out, do it via the head's office. Put that argumentative eloquence to some use.

Grim nods all around. And with that they walked out and disappeared.

One working day later, the files appear.

People power.

2005-04-20T08:44:00.000Z

So much for my 'greatest teacher you'll ever have' speech.

Looking back over Charlie's data in the previous year, I notice she'd entered my classroom at level 5, a level higher than her peers.

By October I'd reduced her grade to level 4. Somehow, attendance at my lessons had reduced her scores from 'higher than average' to a flat coasting level of 'just about literate'.

Her January test showed further disintegration: level 3. This is what the government deems sub literate for an eleven year old.

April and another assessment. Charlie now scores level 2 - unable to write a recognisable sentence.

I'm actively destroying intelligence quotient here. By the minute.

2005-04-19T09:13:00.000Z

I've been mulling over a post about how teachers deal differently with the stresses of the job - the greatest stress of which is that the job is prone to bursts of seasonal rush, it seems, rather than evenly paced.

Commenting on anger management over at the ever brilliant Tales from the Chalkface reminded me of my vague intentions:

My most satisfying anger management strategy has been boxing. I'm not kidding when I say that it has done me, Jared and Joel a power of good that I spend three evenings a week imagining their sweet faces on a punchbag and kicking the crap out of them.

The next day I can cope that little bit more with their 'interesting' classroom personalities.

I'm not kidding. If you don't learn to achieve some balance in your career, then the tiniest infraction can send you loopy.

Teachers are doolally enough as it is. Think about how many mentallists you've seen in the staffroom muttering to themselves, or holding pointless conversations, or holding down a senior management post of some authority, or retiring with a gold clock in exchange for their sanity.

Think how many utter mentallists were at one point your own teachers.

There are a lot of little tricks to giving yourself more time in a day, and you have to use them all to even make a dent in the space you need.

For instance, reports, following up discipline referrals, register maintenance, and so forth - I find it easier on the soul to do those jobs during lunch time, eating on the move.
If you can possibly leave work before dark, or at least keep your evening to yourself, your productivity begins to climb surprisingly. The psychological benefit of clocking off during daylight hours far outweighs the stress of not sitting and relaxing halfway through the day.

Marking is a heavier workload in the humanities than in most other subjects. (Hey, don't bluster at the screen; I teach Media and RE, I know how light the workload is for those other guys, okay?)
If you can think ahead about why you're grading a piece of work, and what you're grading it for, you save literally tens of hours in marking work. Again, I try to do this in my free periods.

Mostly with papers, I try to think hard about assessment methods when I'm planning - there are many ways to assess work without taking home a sheaf of papers from every lesson - you can grade verbally delivered reports, you can ask students to use a rubric, you can do a round robin exericse, each child grading for a different feature as they pass work around, you can define in advance what single feature you are grading for, etc.
Was the point of the work that the child experienced the task? To get a formal grade? To obtain a short term target? To check comprehension of an abstract idea, or of logical expression? No essay is intended to hit every base, so don't mark for it. It's not like your students read anything but the number at the end. (Look up the literature. It's true. If there is any numerical mark, however nonsensical, it is the only thing a child recalls reading. Those delicately phrased supportive blandishments are wasted. Utterly. Stop doing them just to feel noble.)

Allowing yourself time to recharge isn't a luxury in this profession - it's a downright necessity. Spend all your time lesson planning, and you'll be about ready to kill the kid who casually wrecks that precious lesson for a laugh.
Plan the basics then head off for a pint with some friends, and they'll give you the breathing space to react differently. Perhaps even to head the recalcitrant lesson-bomber off at the pass before they can destroy your lesson plan of purest gold.

At one point in my career, I became addicted to asking to see other teachers' planners and diaries, to asking them what time they went to bed, whether they ever actually made it out of bed in the morning at the weekend, how long during the holidays it took for equilibrium to return.

My favourite discovery was the sociology teacher whose first task in September was to colour in all the holidays AND the weekends on his planner.

You think that's silly, huh?

Try it. It makes you feel happy to be alive.

Teachers get amazing holidays.

As for sleep: I go to bed at midnight or so. It's taken me years to get that down from two in the morning. I used to be up at six for the commute through London, leaving me with a serious sleep deficit that the weekends and holidays had to carry. When I averaged a year, my sleep patterns could find a mean normal total. Pity that isn't how sleep debts work for humans.

Moving nearer to work so that I no longer commuted made a huge difference. Setting an alarm clock for ten each night made a huge difference. Adopting regular exercise habits made a better difference.

I once wrote rather flippantly about the ease of the job, the lightness of the hours, the lazy length of the unfilled afternoons and twelve weeks of holidays, and received rather a lot of e-mail for it. I quote from a long conversation with another thoughtful and dedicated teacher of underprivileged kids, Fluxion:

Yes, I realise I was being somewhat unfair in my post, but wanted to dispel the image of overwork that we teachers, sometimes a little petulantly, cling to.

For any teacher beginning their career, the drain on personal time during the first three years is enormous. It isn't inevitable, however, and gradually, you learn to reduce it.

I wanted to give somewhat of an impression that it's highly reducible.
I think - and my experience here is of English schoools - that sometimes we set up a culture of pride in our overwork, as though it's a badge of honour.

Think about that. A badge of honour. That's rather than seeing it as unpaid, unfair, and in the long term insupportable (mental health *requires* that you vary your work patterns to relieve stress at some point in your life) or silly.

I'm rather in agreement with the TUC that reducing one's hours to thosethe job *should* take is a worthy aim. However, it's not an aim your administration will ever take up on your behalf. Neither is it an aim that students whose needs are insurmountable will recognise.

Only we as teachers can choose to make decent working habits a target for ourselves. As long as we get into bragging contests about who works longest, we deny our young teachers the space to realise their long hours culture is one they need to work to overcome.

Yet still, the issue is your attitude to the job - nobody can get all of the job done. In fact in my opinion, getting everything done is NOT the job.

The real job is juggling - no one person can meet all the demands of such a day. The trick is to never let any one thing fall short for too much of the time - rotate your failures, and try not to mind.

Writing this, I realise my possible future-post has become an over long over-tired post-parents' evening wild ramble.

So I'll say that again: rotate your failures, and try not to mind.

2005-04-18T06:06:00.000Z

We've decided to offer revision for sixteen year olds only through lessons and study-leave workshops this year.
Giving extra classes after school sixteen weeks a year was wearing out our best staff, and students were misbehaving in class in the belief that merely attending a 45 minute revision session would obviate their lack of learning during the day.

No more. If they want to pass, they have to turn up on time and pay attention.

It's seemed to work so far (results aren't out until August). Staff are in better spirits than last year, revision materials are devoured by students, punctuality and attendance at lessons is good.

Yet when two high flying students from other countries asked for extra help, I weakened. Agreed to run some extra informal poetry-analysis sessions for them in the remaining weeks.

Foolish. As if I'm any less prone to tiring my nerves out than the other staff.

The lesson before the extra class. Lawrence (star of many a previous tale here) commandeers the computer, is caught making obscene remarks on a chat site, is caught on a porn site, despite the filters, is caught playing a bowling game, begins throwing coins at other students, and the computer is switched off to much protest.
Lawrence slides under the desk, screaming imprecations, threatening the awful things he's going to do to "that stupid teacher". My favourite LSA, Angela, is in the room. She crouches beneath the desk to ask him why he's acting up for such a good teacher.
"She's not the best teacher! She's a rubbish teacher!"
He storms out, swearing, taking my purse with him, and slamming the door hard on Angela's arm as he leaves.
I shrug, rendered powerless by lack of available sanctions, and continue pleading with Joe (also famous) to cease spitting, and asking Wes to desist in screaming obscenities at Lisa.
At least today Matt hasn't thrown sweets at my eyes.

I'd rather force burning needles onto my retinas than teach an extra class after that.

Yet: I'd forgotten what it's like to teach the really bright students.
The ones who don't need to count the syllables to recognise an iamb. Who can see how Armitage obliquely references Blake, Whitman, Marx. Who can, for that matter, work out that a poet speaks through a persona, and objectively assess the tone and theme implied by this distance.

I ask them to read six poems, analyse them, and assess which they regarded as a true sonnet.

We're taught in the inner cities to make everything short burst chalk and talk; keep it fast paced, buzzy, interactive, model all writing tasks and then ask for little of it.
(Last week, I had looked at a college prospectus where lessons were 110 minutes long, wondered how our soundbite culture is meant to cope with such high expectations.)
This, today was ninety solid minutes of genuinely interesting work, without the need to stop halfway through for chocolate biscuits and horse play because they've never concentrated that long before.

This is my final term in teaching, and I want to enjoy the students' minds and imaginations perhaps a little more than exclusive focus upon examinations and results allows me.

I went home feeling like I'd learnt something. Wondering if this open communication between one mind and another is what teaching is meant to be. If perhaps the aggressive daily hostilities have blinded me to the possibility of real learning and development in my classroom. How it could be if I were to work with well-behaved kids, middle-class kids, kids who have more potential than the majority of my students.

Then I read Ms Hoff:

My relationship that first year had been largely antagonistic. I was the teacher; they were the students; they needed to learn what I had to teach and they'd better behave so I could do it. Losing my voice provided the perspective to realize that, as long as teaching was about me, I was going to fail. When I wasn't the most important person in the room, the students would indeed rise to my formerly misplaced expectations.

I wonder, did I realize all that at the time or is hindsight providing the gift of clarity? Perhaps a little of both. I know that my brief period of silence made a difference in my teaching; I talked less and listened more. And I know that I started looking at my students as individual people. Having no voice meant I had to communicate in other ways - smiles, nods and hand gestures took on great importance - and communicating with each individual student instead of a whole class meant I finally saw that student as a person, not a body in my classroom.

I recognised the inherent arrogance of that line, "as long as teaching was about me".

What I had once loved about inner city schools is there's no prerequisite on the children who enter your classrooms, and the sheer vertical progress you can make with them once you realise this. Once you cease to assume that, because these kids are not adult-friendly automatons who sit and absorb the wealth your mouth spins at them, they simply cannot evolve.

At that point, when you accept the limitations of your students, and start to work with them, rather than against them, you stop trying belligerently to teach, and focus on showing them how to learn.

Life skills are more important than poetry in the long run.

So finally, I did learn something today.

2005-04-15T12:36:00.000Z

Our staff have been trying to work out how we can change the culture of the school to limit pointless infraction, the low level, long term reactive disruption and rudeness that tires everyone out.
The head noted that students individually like their teachers, want to please them and want to 'do well' in general - but don't have any real respect for education as an activity by itself, respond badly to authority if it comes from a stranger.

We've been struggling for solutions: how to make the kids take pride in a culture of doing the right thing.

More rewards? More sanctions? Stronger punishments?
(We're not allowed to exclude children these days, and they well know it.)
Stress community spirit? Try to inculcate a bit of pride in who we are? In our roles?

It's a long term problem in society as a whole, this lack of pride, lack of collective responsibility, ignorance of consequences; we won't find any quick fix solutions.

I was dreading the end of day hour long silent sponsored read with my feral eleven year olds. I wrote rules on the electronic whiteboard, and rewards also. Set up plenty of things to avert fractiousness, made sure bribes were placed in a prominent spot.
And still dreading it.

Hordes of four foot students clustered at the door - each individually cute as a cloth puppet, each wanting an individually tailored look, word, or hug as they fussed and spat out randomly selected questions or disagreements.

The student teacher next door marched up. One of my class had snapped off the handle of an umbrella, opened her classroom door and hurled the lump of plastic at her. Another post-mortem incurred.
I already have to deliver an extended guilt autopsy for the fourteen brand new reading books they had thrown out of the window last lesson.

Pulling the door to, a crate of pens and pencils had been kicked across the place, scattering grubby stubs of colours everywhere. The students sat, angelic round faces, all sweetly shocked, disclaiming responsibility or knowledge of what's happened.

Carmella, spotted at the neighbouring classroom's door seconds after the pink plastic missile had hit the student teacher, angrily denied any knowledge or involvement. She must have witnessed who did throw the missile, I countered.
It was 'somebody'. Useful. My imprecations to name the culprit were resisted robustly and at length.

Artie, as usual, was shouting. We're so used to operating at a level below his constant whine and screech, that it occured to me none of us were even noticing the words. He could be bursting with questions, opinions and complaints about anything. He's the sonic equivalent of the boy who cried wolf.
Any minute now, Tony would trundle in, late, grinning, and Artie would rack it up a notch, compete with the wider vocabulary of fresh swear words on display.

I quiet the pint sized rabble and explain that if they witnessed a rule being broken, then failed to identify the person who did it to staff, they are breaking an equally serious rule themselves.

Plenty of students at my school believe you shouldn't 'grass' on a peer, but they don't understand that even a criminal code of loyalty carries more responsibility than they're prepared to bear.

I try to counter this by explaining what 'honour amongst thieves' really involves. If you're willing to take on your reprobate pal's punishment, you've been loyal.
If you're not ready to do so, you're not only disloyal and weak, but guilty - of obstructing the course of justice.

Report the crime, or do their time.

Noisy indignation. Not to put too fine a point on it: uproar. Tony trundled in, grinning. Shouting at us without even knowing it. Carmella burst into tears.

Amongst the uproar, the ancient peeling tannoy crackled into intrusive, jagged life. All eleven year olds report to the hall to see a performance by Skorpio, the human beatbox. Now.

Deliverance.

Except, by this point I was mad as hell, and I was not going to let them go.

The point of being an authority figure is that people need you to take on authority. Show them where the line is, and defend it.

Once they were quiet, ordered, had apologised, listened to the whys and wherefores of behaving differently toward their teachers and peers, out came four witness statements that exonerated the beleaguered Carmella, and identified the fourteen year old miscreant who bore real guilt.

The kids trooped out, late, dejected. Told off.

Except Tony and Artie. They didn't want to go see some boring poet. They wanted to get in trouble, please, Miss, so they could stay up here. T
hey'd rip something up if I wanted, if I needed a reason to stop them going to the hall. Eager to please.

"Don't you know what Skorpio is like?" I asked, closing my markbook. "He's a six foot six black musician with dreads up to here, who raps, who will teach you to beat box, and will make your life feel good."

I've totally confused him with Adisa. But it's enough, I used key words: Tall! Black! Man! Makes noises!
"Rah!" they squealed, suddenly bouncing, "I wanna see that!" Took off down the corridor at the speed of small hurtling things.

I wonder what it says about youth culture, the responses of these two small round underfed white boys. Sub-literate, nurtured by home circumstance into a culture of aggression, to the degree that few staff expect them to survive five years of state secondary school. The excitement and eagerness they display when offered time with a role model.

One thing Skorpio said to the children echoes in my memory: "I know you think your parents are aliens, and your teachers are from an even further away planet, but the minute you leave here, you'll change your minds. You'll see that they were the people who were trying to put you on the good path."

Put you on the good path. I like that.
I like not thinking of this day as one long reprimand.

2005-04-14T09:16:00.000Z

Very occasionally, I see search referrals which led here that make my heart twitch uneasily. This is exactly one such.

Having spent three hours earlier today simply trying to disentangle numbers, I may sound a tad more terse than usual on this subject.

Not achieving anything, but wasting three precious hours attempting to translate into workable figures a horrifically tortuous mathematical dying fly effect I had found on one colleague's assessment of her GCSE coursework folders (for US readers, this translates as 20% of the most important exam in their sixteen years), and I finished the day cursing the blind stupidity of humans.

That a grown adult, a professional could make numbers up at random, and through absolute confusion or fear (I know not which) could thus demote her students' final assessments by two grades without ever once asking me, her manager, how to do the thing properly - it distresses me. In many ways.

So, here's how you do it. Members of the general public and the laity, and most particularly mathematicians, look away now.

The Idiot's Guide to Marking AQA GCSE English Coursework

The AQA seem to have specifically designed this system in order to upset and confuse people. It will singlehandedly demote hundreds of overlooked grades in larger schools across the country. [But, meh, so will Ruth Kelly, given a loose leash.]

The language part of the coursework is divided into Reading and Writing. These are known as En2 (reading) and En 3(Writing). Don't ask me why. I can't think straight without a government acronym.

Take two En2 grades - Shakespeare and Pre 1914 Prose. These are grades out of 54. Average them. Now you have the En2 grade that goes into the sub total box.

Take four En3 grades. These are ultimately two grades out of 27 (which is half of 54), or four grades, out of 18, 9, 18 and 9, respectively. These are the writing grades for Media and for Original (aka creative) Writing.
You can get away with marking them on the old schema, out of 54, then halving it: but your students get higher grades if you do it properly, out of 18 and 9, then translate the same grade out of 27.

I haven't the wit or the patience to explain the mathematical reason for this, but it's true.

The mark out of 18 is for content, and the mark out of 9 for style. So stop knocking people down because they spelt 'their' and 'they're' wrongly. This is the twenty first century.

The form asks you to record the marks out of 18, out of 9, out of 27, twice, and then again a total out of 54. This is because bureacrats hate you.

The important thing to remember is: do not mark out of 54, and do not average them. Suddenly, the En 3 (Writing) total is acquired by adding the two marks out of 27, and not averaging them.

The overall Language grade, interestingly, nay, thrillingly, is out of 108.

You get it by adding En2 to En3. No, no, no, not by averaging them. Why would you think that?

So, in summary, the process for finding the Language grade: mark out of 54, 54, average, store, discard; 18, 9, transliterate same to 27, store, discard; 18, 9, transliterate this next to 27, then look for all assimilated 27s and add; add the averaged 54 to the sum of the 27s, to get the final 108.

You've now done one third of it. Excited?

The Literature part of the coursework comes from many of the same essays, but marked again, for different things, to different level descriptors.

(Level descriptors is what the AQA say instead of 'grades'. They do this because it sounds far more intelligent to say long words than short ones. Probably.)

It consists of an average Literature mark out of 54, plus a 'QWC' mark out of 3.

Even better, the Literature marks (for pre 1914 Drama - this is AQA Longwords for simply Shakespeare: but we thought you may not be confused enough at this juncture, and wanted to help our friends in the gin industry profit from you hitting the bottle that much harder after a few more hours of this)
... Sorry, I got lost. Literature consists of Shakespeare, Pre-1914 Prose, and Modern Drama - these marks are out of 54 (hoorah!) and are averaged. By three. Yes, I know the other one was by two.

And then there's QWC, which is a mark we make up for no known reason. Try to say the next sentence in one breath. It may prevent your forehead from hitting the keyboard.

If your student is stupid, it's 1, if they're average it's 2, if they're bright, it's 3, and if they'd race to keep up with plankton, have barely ever written a word of english, it's 0.

Add the Literature and QWC grades to get the overall Literature total. No, it's not confusing to call two separate figures 'literature'. Shush. The total is out of 57.
No, really, shush. Zip it. Or we'll make you study 35 poems for the exams.

En1 means 'how noisy are they'?
Sometimes it's referred to as Speaking and Listening, although the 'listening' part is fictional.

Very noisy is a C, unless your student is a tricky little bugger who has a way with words, which makes them a B.
The fast way to do this is to take the overall Language mark and add six. Nobody will ever question you. Unless you're teaching a fantastically famous elective mute. Whcih would be a terrific coincidence.

Even then you could probably blame someone else. The parents are a popular choice - unless there's an election coming.

So, to recap:
En1 - make it up.
En 2 - big marks. average by 2.
En 3 - little marks. add up. never average.
Language - add up En 2 and 3. Ultra big marks. Like 70 or so. (But not one hundred and something. That's wrong.)
Literature - average 3 big marks.
QWC - make it up. but play safe - don't top 3/3.
Literature - add up the other literature mark and the QWC.

it's probably time to drink some gin now.

It's important that when an older, more experienced English teacher flicks casually through a coursework folder and says "no, dear, I think this is a C", you do not cry visibly until ensconced in the toilets.

You belong to a more modern efficient age. You are not allowed to decide if a bunch of essays are mostly grade C like that.
Based on what? Based on solid, unchanging standards of how good they are? Ridiculous.

Stop crying.

Here endeth the "idiot guide to AQA GCSE English marking coursework". Remember: we do it this way because it's more efficient, and not because the government hates you.

Okay, other readers, you can open your eyes again now. The nasty lack of logic is leaving.

2005-04-13T17:35:00.000Z

Persistently magnificent blogger, Billy, has finally returned to teaching. Here's an extract from his first week back in the classroom:

...today I have hit just below rock bottom - looking back I can see how I managed to talk myself up to a height that meant the only way was down but I just didn't swoop towards the ground and then pull out at the last minute - nope, I kept on going down, ploughing through two foot of tarmac, burrowing through several feet of soil, tunneling under a couple of yards of bedrock...less than three days into the job I was pontificating about the lad on my right - I was explaining how, under the new scoring system he was a definite 4 if not a 5 in the communication category level 1...you see for two hours he had been typing away - in front of him was the third chapter in a condensed version of a christmas carol..I started to explain how he had scored above 1 because he'd been working alone, a 2 would mean that he knew what he was doing, 3 could answer questions on the topic, 4 could come up with an idea, 5 he fully understood the piece of work he was typing...I pointed out that without even talking to him I knew he was scoring above a two - hell, if the bloke just said the word ghost to me I'd toy with giving him a four...and then someone in my audience asked if I meant steven the bloke sitting next to me - of course I meant steven, look, he'd been typing for over two hours, hadn't asked for help, had produced three quarters of a page in word that had no red lines no green lines...in my book steven was a four maybe a five - I just had to ask him a question...

...that's when I hit the ground...steven can't read...he can convert symbols - he knows that a is A on a keyboard...he can *see* the symbols hello and then press the keys HELLO but he can't read the word hello...nope, you can't even start to imagine how small I felt :^(....

...today I soared amongst the stars...janice never speaks...it was explained to me that she utters one word a month to my assistant whom she has known for three years...her favourite day is when she does gardening, that's when she replies to the guy who runs the garden's question are you going to talk to me today with a no - he's known her four years and he gets one word a week...I met janice for the first time today...and true to expectations, even though I spent some time sat beside her in the morning chatting away, by lunch she had managed to even acknowledge my presence...after lunch I continued to teach sitting beside her, talking to other pupils, talking to janice...and sometime after two I got a:

yes

...twenty minutes later I got a:

yes

...and ten minutes after that I got a:

no

...three words...three fucking words...I'd like to say that it was the g-force as I was dragged out the ground, mayhap it was a bit of dirt lodged in my eye or maybe, just maybe I hit that perfect moment when you get through to someone who is untouchable...the good news is I managed to hold back the tears until I got home...

Sometimes, reading other teachers' blogs, I feel a certain deja vu. As if I'm trapped in a time loop of reading and re-reading Dave Pelzer. This stuff is real. Deeply deeply real.
If you're reading this because you have nothing much of importance to do at work, if you're currently stuck in a job where you feel you don't make a powerfully strong difference to the world, where you don't feel you're doing Something Good for humanity, try teaching.

Best job in the world.

Edit: I swear on year eights' short, collective lives that I wrote this before I read this ...

2005-04-12T12:34:00.000Z

Incidentally, the events which fuelled that post led directly to a resignation letter.

I think Seprah hit a much bruised nerve in her estimation of the after-effects:

Perspective is such a strange and fleeting thing. It's one of those things that seems so logical and right. Well, if I can see it this way, of course it must be true. When you begin to lose perspective, the loss is an insidious entity that happens so slowly that only someone inhumanly self-aware would notice the change. The shift still retains that sense of rightness to you, but not to anyone else.

The thing to remember though, is that it happens to everyone. Those what was I thinking moments can be constructive so that one can better see the slippery slope the next time. Anyone who answers "no, never" is either lying or a hermit.

The reason I'm bringing this up is that a certain teacher has noticed that her temper has gone downhill. I was a much worse teacher. I was not afraid to yell and make a scene if my students disrupted class or cheated or tried to burn their textbooks in class. I tore up cheaters' tests in the middle of lessons and threw students out because they just could not be quiet.

But I also loved them all very much. One of the reasons I won't teach is that I ended up caring too much.
[...]
But it's all perspective. From my vantage point, it just looks as if a tired, abused teacher has finally reached the point where she needs to get out and regain composure. From hers, it's that something has gone terribly wrong.

The following term's posts are intended to be the last here at The Blackboard Jungle. Hopefully, the freshly gained perspective of things / days / souls that are soon to be sorely missed will make me kinder.

2005-04-11T12:40:00.000Z

A new term! And the best: the summer term - riddled with examinations, study leave, block release days, work experience, the annual school summer camp down by the Moonies HQ, and - joy of joys - work experience! I can't wait.

Possibly the choicest, fruitiest discovery of the extended Easter break was realising I'd contracted worms from my delightful students.

Threadworms. Pinworms. Intestinal parasites.

Think about that.

At some quiet, unnoticed moment, these paragons of hygiene, this new model army of well-scrubbed cherubs have passed from their hands to my hands trace fecal matter, and I have gone on to ingest the stuff.

Ugh.

I need to say that again, just once. Ugh.

My first thought when I hear the horrifying diagnosis: Phillip.

1995, my second year of teaching, and little twelve year old bruiser Phillip is late to school.

Phillip 'doesn't' read, he 'can't' read, he 'hates' school (indeed he was thrown out forever at fifteen, after beating then robbing a pensioner outside the school gates, then firebombing the deputy head for dessert - and they say standards of behaviour are slipping).
He's the only person fulfilling any adult role in his house, so late starts could possibly be interpreted as forgiveable. With no adult interaction whatsoever, the boy gets himself up, gets together a uniform, after a fashion, and remembers his free school meals card.
To ask for punctuality or a pen on top of this is to keep a guttering light of wild optimism aflame.

Phillip's eyes are rimed from sleep, and his hair is frozen in a damp vertical shock from the cowlick all the way to the rear left of his skull. In the last year, he's admitted three things to me:
1. My lessons have not so far been boring.
2. He likes reading out loud - as long as I don't make him do it, because, as well I know, he 'can't' read.
3. He likes English nowadays.

I call on Phillip to read a passage from White Fang, delivering him the book open at his page in an attempt to settle him more quickly.
Judiciously used, I can give you an actual teaching tip: ask hesitant readers to read for way longer than anyone else.
They'll do a page in halting, purposely-stultifying monotone, in the hope you will register the pained annoyance on their peers' faces, and rescue them. Don't.

After a page and a half, they'll come to terms with the fact that they're reading the damn book forever because that damn teacher won't let up, and suddenly their throat relaxes, their hands stop shaking, and the reading become five degrees more melodious than before.

The best thing of all? Nobody will notice. They're too into the book.
He eagerly settles into it, rubbing his eyes awake, but when I suggest a writing task the usual fuss ensues. No pen. No book. No desk. No intention of doing it.

To my shock, after ten minutes, a smiling Phillip returns to me, brandishing a page of grubbily ripped paper containing a wild scrawl of which he and I are soon inordinately proud.
I ask for his pen to make one correction; he passes me a freshly chewed version of the fancy pen I'd had in my desk, lid glistening with intent spittle.
I ask for his hand to shake, a formal congratulation for completing more classwork than ever before.
Phillip grins from under the flop of dark fringe, and thrusts towards me his miniaturised hand. The nails are blackened, the knuckles are scabbed, and for one horrifying second I glimpse the white recently crusted scale between the fingers of his right hand, before flinching.

That's how I learnt never to be overly tactile with crusty little boys. This week I learnt the same lesson again.

2005-03-29T14:14:00.000Z

I trust that your Easter break has been fruitful, and involved chocolate?

Myself, I interrupt my holiday ennui to celebrate both my 100th post, and a year spent writing these weekday gems for The Blackboard Jungle.

I quote from my own generously endowed back catalogue: the second post at The Jungle. And there's swearing in it. Plus ca change.

Attempting to stem the tides of 'fuck', 'shit', and, inevitably, 'fuck this shit' in the classroom, without getting a rep for sending every bloody kid to stand in the hallway of shame, last year I developed the more nannyish admonishment: 'uh-uh, watch your language, it's Fudge or Sugar'.
Kids loved telling each other off, and giggling at someone in a total blue funk wanting to curse the heavens and bewail their outcast fate (okay, say 'shit') and being forced to interpolate the saccharinely inoffensive 'sugar' instead. But if someone really wants to piss you off, they're just going to go ahead and tell you to fuck off as normal.
So this year, in desperation, I invented a charity swear box. In absolute despair of ever getting five pee for the swear box, it was wholly fictional, but allowed me to tell kids off in a moral code they understood - cheating the charity of five pee is wrong - rather than one they didn't - that 'f' word your mum, dad, gran and dog all use constantly is wrong. The fictional swear box worked well in this respect, without ever actually collecting a penny.
Until, as ever, kids worked out the cracks in the process.
Crack 1: they asked what charity it was for. I had to admit that if I ever actually succeeded in getting five pee from anyone, we could have a vote and they could decide.
Crack 2: a kid actually gave me five pee. This meant we had to work out what charity it was for - the potty mouthers decided 'Cancer Research UK' was their charity of choice for the princely five pee they'd coughed up. Suited me - there's a Cancer Research charity shop on the way home, in eighty years time when I had a full pound, I could drop the moulah in without going out of my way.
Crack 3: now I had to find somewhere to put the damn money. I thought about a strongbox, and decided the wasteland that is my desk drawer would be fine.
Crack 4: a kid particularly blessed with Tourette's swelled the coffers mightily by insisting on paying in advance for his swearing for a number of weeks.
Crack 5: little Michael in year 7, a roughty toughty children's home kid whose worst habit is getting frustrated with not being able to write and deciding to help classroom discipline by punching anyone who disrupts my lesson in the face, found out about the swear box. Decides he feels sorry for those children whose mums have Cancer and are waiting for Research to be done. Insists on giving me his dinner money for the swear box. Won't take no for an answer.
Doesn't even want to swear for it.

If any teachers do read these words, I thoroughly - nay, actively recommend to you blogging as a reflective and productive means of reminding yourself of the real issues* of the job.
Of counting the ways in which you can make a difference.

[* That's children, by the way.]

2005-03-22T10:32:00.000Z

Many ideas continue to brew and rumble, based around a post below on bullying.

Firstly, an email, from Clarence Fisher (quoted with permission):

Lectrice;

I had to write after reading your post about bullying.

I cried.

I've been there as well. I was a kid challenged in school by bullies and I know exactly what you and your young student feel. Living in this small town, I struggled with it up into my mid 20's. Seeing the same people who had treated me so poorly years ago still living here, wandering the streets as working adults.

I know as well what you go through as a teacher. I rarely see it. It just doesn't seem to be a problem; but I know it is....

Now what to do about it.......?

BTW; I really have to tell you that I love your writing. From this small town to downtown London is a stretch, but you bring me across the ocean with your words; it is excellent.

Another email, from Emma Clark:

After I mailed you yesterday I read BBJ, and wanted to say what a fantastic entry that was - because for some reason it reminded me that I was bullied, and how it felt. Which is a very valuable thing to remember if you are teaching.

If there was stuff like this in the TES I might want to read it occasionally (is it me or is it the most DULL newspaper ever? I read the forums online nowadays but none of the content ever...) Do you write for publication? You should.

A thought: I was tempted to ask those who had experienced bullying if you'd tried speaking as an adult - in tones of disinterest, even if feigned - to those who had once been your bullies. One thing life has taught me in repeatedly corroborated detail is that we all bully - to some degree - beyond that which we may have intended.
We simply don't think about others very often, and so fail to realise quite what our words have done.

And then a recantation: I disregarded the idea. I assumed readers would not ever agree with me that we depend more closely on our fellow man than vengeance allows us. Reading Clarence's next mail, I found eloquent confirmation:

Have I confronted them; no. But it is interesting as I lead my reasonably successful life (happy marriage, 2 kids, university educated, economically reasonably sound life) and see those same people around me fight with alcohol and drugs, their spouses, and their children.They know and I know.

It may be crass, but who once said: "The best revenge is living well."

And yet: recantation dislodged, eventually, crumbled by this verse, from the wonderful blogger Oblivio:

Proof

Nothing is uglier than
they did it to me

This has nothing
to do with whether

they did it to you,
which I have to assume

they did
Still, whatever

they did, your life remains

yours

When you say they did it
to you

you give your life to them,
ruined

You say,
I'm damaged

and you're the reason
I'm damaged

The damage is your proof

It's Easter end of term break here in the UK. Back on the 11th April. Rest easy.

2005-03-21T08:48:00.000Z

Self-knowledge is a key shield when one is faced frequently with aggressive and challenging situations. We all recall a teacher who bullied, a teacher who loved his own swagger, a teacher who delighted in the sound of her own voice.

A friend opines that it's those who 'know' they are good at something who have often become worst at it, and those who deny any skill whatsoever who largely outperform the rest.

His words prompt an unexpected reflection. I think back over this idea, in the light of the recent upsurge in violent or disruptive behaviour in my classroom.

I recall a time last summer, when the head, full of determination to make us 'celebrate' our 'positive achievements' asked me to join a working group based upon my expertise in non-confrontational handling of disruptive students. She recommended only three teachers from the schoool. I was pleased and flattered. And began to believe that I was better than most.
She went on to recommend me to wider audiences for my collaborative approach to traumatised and wildly difficult teens.

Steadily, basking in the rosy, fleeting glow of being valued, my usually sweetly-bland admonishments and self-effacing entreaties to students began to take on a new timbre: a distinct, unfamiliar undertone of 'don't you know who I am?'

The head put me forward for the AST programme. I scoffed, politically unimpressed. She pointed out that I was one of only two possible candidates in the borough. Quite a different response. Sudden, quiet smile.
Those children, they're just naughty, I began to think, whenever a child refused to play the game I now felt myself so good at. They're unreachable. I'm not losing my touch. I'm better than anybody at this.

Steadily, the rot set in. The feral wise cracking gum chewing wall kicking shit slinging abandoned waifs and strays who rip up my books, tear down my posters, swear at me in the corridor: sensed, unerringly, that I was not on their side.
I was on, if anything, /my/ side.
They were mere tools for my greater glory, my slide into self congratulation. Materials, nothing more.

Last two weeks of term, and pressure in the school reaches bubbling point. Incident after incident shakes my calm sufficiency: after a sleepless night, I bawl out a child loudly in the corridor.

Why shouldn't I make a scene? He's making one. He's kicking and beating a door down, at age eleven, and screaming abuse at three adults. I call him a 'silly boy' and something inside of me gives way; thinks: 'stupid boy'. Not silly.
I tell him to 'shut up' - a heinous crime in a London school. I can tell a child to Be Quiet, to Go Away, to Stop Annoying Me - but never to Shut Up.

He bursts intears and hurls himself to the floor, drumming his fists at me.
"You can't say that to me," he screams, shocked out of his argument about a lost football.
"And you can't swear at teachers, break school property or hit me, but that doesn't seem to stop you." I'm impressed by my own logic, righteous in my rejection of an eleven year old boy.

Another teacher approaches, soft voiced, conciliatory. She brushes an elbow, quietly, with inviting familiarity suggests it's a good moment to exit the corridor, to go to a room and just calm down.
"You're not helping by reacting like that. Go sit down sometwhere quiet."
Eases with soft touch towards the furthest door.

She's talking to me.

Not him. Me.

Later, a student teacher I had mentored telephones to ask if I'm okay. She'd never seen me lose my temper before.

I rationalise. I hadn't lost my temper. What is she talking about? It was that other teacher who'd been unreasonable. I'd been perfectly in control. Standing over a child and scaring him into crying. Perfectly in control.

The shame of it is, it's not until Monday morning, that I realise who I am, now.

When I shame myself into realising the kind of teacher I've become.

Not until the moment I tell a sixteen year old boy to "get out of my fucking class" in front of twenty four other children, and don't bat an eyelid, that I realise I have terrible classroom management skills.
That, contrary to my esteemed reputation, I suddenly find it hard to step away from confrontation, much less do something actively good to inspire those children with behavioural disorders to fid other outlets for dealing with challenges.

It's those who 'know' they are good at something who have often become worst at it. Perhaps one day, with this self awareness, I can survive the seductive charm of the local reputation, and learn to admit my true lack of skill with difficult children.

Then, perhaps, I may have a chance, a crack, at outperforming. Outperforming myself.

2005-03-18T17:31:00.000Z

There's a small figure at my elbow, as I listen to eleven year old Jody haltingly read through her work.
He hovers, uncertain, a three and a half foot high shadow just out of peripheral view.

An age passes. I look up, and see old eyes in a tiny, young boy's body.
"Miss, can I tell you something?"
Is it about school, Michael? He can stray a little from the subject on occasion. I've learnt the dividends this question can offer.
Serious nod. Tears forming. Nervous lips ready to speak, but not wanting to say.
Is it something you want help with?
"Miss, I'm being bullied." The drama of the statement belied by the whispered delivery.

Okay, then wait while I listen to Jody read this, and I'll ask you to come back up.
"Yes Miss." Michael obediently sits back down and continues colouring his 'scary poem'.

Jody finishes the harder parts of her exercise (what is the personality of Tom like?) and goes back to her seat to write up the easier question we've also discussed (do you think you like Tom?), armed with useful suggestions on how to add a 'because clause' to her writing.

Okay, Michael, you can talk to me now. Is it a child at this school?
Silent nod.
Is it a child in this class?
Silent shake.
Is it a child who is older than you?
Shake. Eyes widening.
Do you know this child's name?
Nod. Tremble.

I'll cut the next fifteen minutes short for you: it was Joe. I'd moved him down a set from my literacy class of children with mild learning difficulties, three months ago. He'd been a sweet but very scatty boy, the sort you end up teaching sat next to, so you can place a swift restraining hand on their arm at the first sign of inveitable twitchiness. Joe's very boisterous, and very very bored by a curriculum he has not the slightest hope of being able to read or undertand. That's not the point.

Joe had walked past me at breaktime last week, and I'd been shocked at how tall he'd grown - the dizzy heights of four foot something, already, in one year. Not the point.
Michael had mentioned that Joe had hit him in an Art lesson last week. He had also recently scored abysmally low in a classroom test, and had asked me three different times if he were being moved down a set. Was I really thinking of moving him down? Really and truly could he stay in the same class? Day after day.
Harassed and hectored by the imminent end of term, I'd not noticed the conversational satellites he was sending out.
Watching the trust he was placing in me now, by saying this, knowing my impotence to help, I saw suddenly how many times he had tried to speak these words.

Michael had already told his tutor, his head of year - everyone knew that he was having problems with the now much taller, much more powerful Joe. I'd done a bullying conference between Michael and Kerry just last Friday, which had ended in amicable apologies and restored trust. The schools' anti-bullying strategies were all being utilised and juddering slowly into place. That's not the point.

I was bullied horribly at school. Several schools. I know how disfiguring it can be, how it affects liveliness, temper, grades, and attendance. I know how the victim plays a certain passively inviting role in the bullying, too - how we can make it worse by a certain response. Which is not the point.

I know how much longer than eleven years of compulsory schooling it takes to work off the effects. I was nineteen before I looked up every one of the kids who had bullied me, and turned up on their doorstep to talk, amicably, about it. In each case, not one bully was aware of what effect their words had dealt me. They had grown into reasonable, intelligent people. That's not the point.

Instead of allowing myself to carry bitterness forward through my life, I decided to listen fairly to them, and give credence to what they had to say, as, without exception, they also did for me, a virtual stranger from their past.
I believed them, their protestations of unknowing casual harm, and subsequently wondered who I had bullied without even knowing. That, too is not the point.

The point is that I don't see bullying.

Teachers never see bullying.

If there's one thing that is important for a bully to succeed - crucial to the task of bullying, in fact - it's to keep it out of the teacher's view.

As a child, I literally could not conceive of a world in which the adults around me could not see how swamped my world had become by violent, sustained attack. I used to wonder if they were testing me, judging my resilience, before they finally, eventually would intervene.

As an adult, and an adult with a responsibililty to stop bullying amongst 250 students a year, I see nothing.

Not a single whisper. Not a dirty look, or a shove.

No pencils taken, no books grabbed and ripped up, thrown away. No friends from outside of school roped in to spit or claw scratch. The poison in the apparently friendly question, the menace in the apparently lukewarm tone.

No stealing or name calling, or sexual aggression. I never hear the nasty nicknames. I never see the trippings up outside the classroom, the explicit notes scrawled across a bag, the smears of fetid substances left across the back of a uniform, the missiles lodged in the hair.

I can't confront the dehumanising of the victim, because I can't see where it happens.

I know that 95% of schoolchildren say that bullying - serious bullying - occurs in front of them in their schools.

I sit in the same rooms, and I don't see any of it.

It's one of the reasons I became a teacher, and it's the hardest thing to fail at.

I told Michael to keep a diary of the bullying - that teachers and families often don't realise that it's not the pencil he snapped, or the poke with the ruler, or the crude vigour of a nasty name that sticks in the memory and keeps you awake at night - it's the horrifying repetitiousness of knowing these minor infractions will continue every day.
A diary of events - no names, no glamourising, no showing off, just flatly recorded simple events - can show a disinterested adult in one swoop how long and how demeaning a bully's words and actions have become.
It's hard to argue when a child has documented that this is happening every day.

Can you get yourself a notepad, Michael, to write this in?

"Yes Miss."

Good boy. Now sit down, but let me know in two weeks how you feel about this.

"Miss?" Ten minutes later, another tug at my sleeves, and my heartstrings.

"I don't have a notepad." Barely audible whisper.

I'll get you one, Michael. I'll bring you it tomorrow. Is that okay? Have we done with this now, for the time being?

Silent nod. And I feel, rightly or wrongly, for this kid, for this incident, and for the kid who's been accused, just today: at least I tried.

Some bullying resources. Just in case.

2005-03-17T13:37:00.000Z

Extremely interesting post over at Remote Access about the lasting power of the narratives we weave:

"When I was working on my master's degree, I had a professor that made me crazy. She was into the type of qualitative research that is known as Narrative Inquiry. I called it story time. This very well respected, brilliant lady almost made me pull the little hair I had left, out. People in her classes that understood her and what she stood for laughed and cried together, knew each other for years, and seemed to be working together to get their degrees done.

I felt like an outsider.

But now I listen to stories. Now I wonder about the stories we tell about our classrooms, our schools, and our lives. The stories we tell, tell us a lot about what we believe. Our lives are filled with these stories about what we believe education should be. All of the stories we have internalized about what schools are "like" inform our practices deeply. Our students and their parents have these same stories. They are often framed as expectations, but they are stories. "Schools teach kids how to read, write, and do math" is a powerful story. "Kids sit in rows, are quiet, the teacher tells them what to learn and how to do it" is a story which shapes our classrooms.

We need to write new stories about education and about what we want it to be."

I'm minutes away from the smarting indignity of having just told off a girl who was barricading herself in a food technology practical space (= kitchen, people, kitchen). Her teacher was completing the last week of forty years of substitute teaching in the same school before his retirement next week. Leanne alternately ignored or screamed at him, and complied quietly with me. Meanwhile, in my classroom, a similarly aged boy did the opposite of everything I asked him to do. (question: "why are you eating, Lawrence?" reply: "I'm not, I just finished it. So there.")
My final words to Leanne: why do you think there's a problem with getting teachers to work in London schools, if that's how you treat people?

Remote Access' post makes me wonder just whose is the more powerful, most influential story here: Leanne and Lawrence's story that teachers are the enemy? My story: that teachers get burnt out and leave? My colleagues' story that society is changing, and with it, all attitudes to authority?
Or the sub's story, given after the lesson, as he came in to apologise, and to thank me for stepping in, that he has 'lost his touch'?
It doesn't actually matter which story is true. Which story influenced the day the most?

2005-03-16T17:15:00.000Z

Once a year, I get to oversee the collation and standardising of literary coursework submissions for the final examinations.

Today, and only this day, I am the Academy, and I give my awards.

Adding to the sheer disorientation of reading 1750 essays rapidly while mainlining instant coffee and choccie biccies, I was up till the small hours, drafting forms for my own 75 examination coursework folders and organising the mundane details of standardising of 350 others. I did mention it's a large school?

Onto the awards: the usual gems of shining wit and scintillating insight turned up:

Most Unwittingly Lascivious
"Mary Shelley thought the wilderness and glaciers were a beautiful physical example of wild loveliness, and Percy too."

Most Unexpected Topic
The media essay entitled "A Consideration Of Why Austria Is Afraid to Show The Sound Of Music." (Which got an A, you know.)

Most Culturally Confused [joint winners]
"The 1950s was a time of backstreet abortions of black babies and the Wind Rush",

... so it seems logical that ...

"gay black men, as well as homosexuals were frowned upon, just like other forms of sexism."

Most Dramatic Opening
My favourite short story, 'The Tooth Fairy' (which plagiarised Mo Haydar's 'Birdman' outrageously - do they think we teachers too cerebral to read modern horror?) contained the classic opening lines:

"The man who hacked up women and kept putting their teeth inbetween the treads of the tyres on his car pulled up next to a prostitute on a grimy street that night."

Flakiest Attempt at Cheating
When I announced to a (different) class that two boys had been suspected of copying each other's work, the entire class instantly named the boys in question, which pieces were copied, and stated the exact fee charged by Boy 1 for these services to the rather inept copyist Boy 2.
I'm afraid that the subsequent overdone air of righteous affront when I finally confronted said culprits lost just a little of its dramatic impact as a consequence.

Jason's folder won the prize for Most Tortuously Inexplicable. Each page had ten different marginalia, themselves accompanied by further footnotes. Added to a compulsion to get ideas down the absolute second they occurred - rather than, say, finishing the sentence you're on before your next outburst - produced the most marvellously contorted logic I've ever seen anywhere.

Trunchbull Award For Special Achievement
Not to be selfish with the satire, though: kudos also to Mrs L, whose summative comment on one essay reached the warm, nurturing heights of "AWFUL. Do it again!"

Most Promising Newcomer: Charles Dickens
Finally, a tip for coursework producing students: if you write badly, it's the worst idea to pepper your writing liberally with long quotations from Dickens. His writing is good and that only makes your writing look more bad.

2005-03-15T13:22:00.000Z

The siege of the doughnuts.

Dwain has had a bad day today.

Miss B has had a bad day today. She asked Dwain to stop selling doughnuts to other boys at a profit in her classroom when she wanted them to leave. She picked up the bag containing two doughnuts and held it, asking the boys in her room to vacate.

Miss H has had a bad day today. She stepped into Miss B's classroom to encourage the waiting crowd of fifteen year old onlookers to leave the room and wait for Dwain at the stairs a short walk away, and was sworn at for her patience. She was subjected to a torrent of doughnut-related abuse.

Miss J has had a bad day today. She stepped into Miss B's classroom when she heard the screaming and shouting of Dwain, who wanted his property back. She stepped inside at exactly the moment that Dwain decided that he really, really wanted those doughnuts.

Miss J, Miss H and Miss B were then physically held hostage in the room for twenty minutes; by Dwain, who refused their exit until he got his two mouldy doughnuts back.

Mister B is having a bad day today. He didn't bother to turn up when radioed to come calm down the situation in Miss B's room.
He didn't bother to turn up when informed of the siege situation that had then arisen.
He later didn't bother to turn up or to apprehend Dwain over this matter, so the teachers and the students are all full of red-eyed, victimised grumble about how it was dealt with, about what we say to our students when even good boys like Dwain are allowed to do as they wish to such a degree.
Mister B's name is now mud, and he will bear the brunt of the blame for the matter of the doughnuts.

In the spirit of initiative and free enterprise, meanwhile, Dwain got a half day in the choky, and his doughnuts given back.

The school positively encourages free enterprise and bartering of sweets for profit.
If only we could devise a way to allow them to convert good grades into immediate gratification, just as the doughnuts do. Imagine what they wouldn't do to get a good teacher, like Miss B, or Miss H, or Miss J, if that were to happen.

2005-03-14T08:27:00.000Z

Godwin decided to perform one of his 'specials' for me today: minutes after bouncing energetically into my final period class, he bounced energetically back towards the door again.
"I need to go .. get a .. hat ... yes, a hat ... from my sister! yes, a hat from my sister," he asked, just a tad unconvincingly.
Godwin's routine is an old one, and I tired of it sometime in late 2003. I raised a palm at chest height, left it wordless and flat in front of him, then added the Look of Death to my narrowed eyes.
"Okay!" he bounced, pinging up and down all the way back to his seat.

Two more fruitless tries at the hat story, and Godwin settled down into the lesson's main task of beating the luckless Jason about the head with his exercise book, and throwing small objects at girls.

It being the final lesson of the day, my general tactic is to try and get as many noisy children out of the room on errands as is humanly possible. This meant that at several points, the classroom door was left open to the corridor.

Big, fat, Godwin-sized mistake.
As I sat, thrashing aimlessly at the computerised register, a slight movement flickered in the corner of my eye. Looking up, I noticed Godwin's tiny behind wiggling across the floor.

He was slowly, silently, crawling out of the classroom.

Stunned, I watched until he reached the door.
As expected, he paused and turned to what he without the slightest shadow of a doubt perceives as his daily audience, waiting for recognition before his moment of exit.
Never mind the croaking, enfeebled husky voice: I leapt up and roared.

Brandishing the same clownishly broad grin he's waved merrily at me on - I calculate (regularly) - 560 different occasions since joining the school, Godwin leapt up high to beam at me a carefree, sing-song, "I'm sorry!"

"Get out. Get out now. You are banned from my sight. Banned from my classroom. Banned from my world!"

It's a mutual performance, you understand. I'm not really angry. He doesn't want out. We both know this. The twice daily matinee is entirely for the purpose of preventing others from mimicry. The pantomime crimes, and the grand guignol punishment. All for effect.
At a classroom near you, every few minutes. Thank you, ladeezngennulmen, and try the chicken.

After ten minutes, Godwin wanted in. I affirmed in serious voice that he must promise me something before he may be readmitted.

"I promise I'm sorry."

Wrong answer. Out you go. The ritual determines that the first three tries will all be the wrong answer, regardless of content. The object of the game, you see, is for him to pretend that he really does want back in.

Downcast and cursing, Godwin flounced out, and in five minutes tried again, radiating renewed bright optimism.

"I swear to you I want to come in and work."

No. Wrong answer.

A huge mock-affronted grin as he gets to flounce again.
The audience, working, relished their distance from the drama: "Worse luck, Godwin! You'll never get back in!"
Third time lucky?

He tried a different tack. This time, Godwin the consummate performer made his stage entrance on his knees. Raised the intended broad smiles from the front row.
"I swear to you on my soul that I will sit still, and be good, and do all my work."

Correct. You may enter. Godwin acted the conquering hero. He had beaten the odds, and returned to the land of milk and honey, the room where his audience sit. Waving his arms in a jubilant gesture of gladiatorial victory, he marched, ankles flicking high, to his seat at the back, seating himself down with authority, sure of his place.

"But, Godwin," I continued, in a quiet voice, "you do know what you've just promised me, don't you?"

"Yes miss!" Automatic teacher-deflecting yes-miss rays battered me into near-submission, ricocheted across the raised witheringlook shield, and were swallowed safely by my protective silver-space-suit of sarcasm.

"You do know that you promised on your - " pause to place hand over heart, " - eternal soul, don't you? That if you break your word after a promise like that, your soul will be lost for ever, and you'll suffer an afterlife lost in the fires of hell?"

Ours is a defiantly secular school. But a lie is a lie, and he'd just sworn to do some damn work for me.

"No! No, miss! I don't want to go to hell!" Rapid head shakes, accompanied by worried nod down at the open book, the raised pen, at all the clustered evidence that his eternal soul should be reprieved.

Disgusted, Toyo piped up. "You can't do that!" I kept my hand over my heart, and Godwin's hand unwittingly crept up to cover and protect his own, as he mugged fear, obediently projecting worriment.

"Teachers shouldn't be able to do that!"

Toyo was not going to let this one lie.
"You should give us detention," Toyo's voice resonated and rose as he continued in tones of the highest umbrage, "you should ring our parents, and write incident slips, but never, ever, ever should you get to damn our eternal souls. Teachers shouldn't be allowed to send our souls to the fire. That's just not right."

My head sank, defeated, to the still locked register, shoulders shaking in mystified, helpless laughter.
Laughing at the heavens-sweeping authority that children give us, without question, at the same time as the smalltime day to day banality of the authority they deny us.

Toyo spread his arms wide, looked expectantly to his audience.
Godwin didn't notice. Busily clutching his heart, he was doing his work as fast, as frenziedly as he can.

2005-03-11T16:28:00.000Z

It's Red Nose Day, and the children have been ordered not to participate.

No sponsored anything, no dressing up, no collection buckets, and most of all: no red noses allowed.

The 17-18 year olds were allowed to be exceptions to the rule; breaking the cardinal diktat of state schools: do what you like, to whom you like, when you like - but always be fair
They turned up to school in full fancy dress, and spent their breaktime waxing boy's legs for charity. (What fun, explaining to a local visiting dignitary why I had to go rescue little red riding hood and the mutant ninja turtle from the JCR to come do some work.)

The little ones, though, had no such rumpus permitted them. They had a day full of lessons as usual, uniform as usual, tedium as usual. And so they amused themselves by making a few large scale gang fights every breaktime.

What we'd forgotten to legislate for, though, was hair colour.

It was a reassuringly creative trademark of teenage rebellion to walk into assembly this morning and see a sea of spray painted hair, pillarbox red, matted, icky.

It wasn't for charity, it was just in the spirit of rebellion, the spirit of remembering that this, for our consumers, is childhood - and despite what the teachers think the priorities are, it's supposed to be about having a good time.