It has been a long time away. I ran my own private language school in the third world. I got cancer & emigrated to the UK. I started work at a massive (& superb) academy.
And times changed. Whistleblower style blogging, personal style blogging - are on their way out. It's no longer acceptable to write publicly in the same style as I was once wont to do, here.
(I do, however, (she spliced), note that the Grauniad, which once reviewed my blog as negative and burnt out, now does a weekly blog column called Secret Teacher that is far more bilious and chippy than anything I ever wrote. Plus ça change...

Updates : rare. But alive.

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."

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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."

"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?"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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."

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.