Carry On Teaching

'I've just had my lunch.'
Carly looks at me, nods, 'uh-huh,' she grunts.
'So I don't want to hear any more descriptions of, or discussions about, your sex life; not while you're in my room. It upsets my stomach.'
She flashes a cheeky smile, 'Sorry Mr. Ken.'
I nod, step aside, and she enters my classroom, 101.

Carly Carver was back in school the day following her 'smoking incident' with Ken Tyler, and totally unrepentant, as I expected, and sober, which was more of a surprise.

But after half an hour I threw her out of my classroom for insisting on describing her oral sex techniques, in loud and graphic details, to the rest of the class. I wasn't angry with her or anything, there'd be no point in that, I just had to let her know she couldn't talk like that in my class.

Anyway, Friday arrived and she was at my door again, feigning embarrassment and apologising with what I thought was almost a touch of sincerity. And at least she was sober. And she wasn't smoking. So I let her back in.

11Z4 don't have much hope, but they don't have many lessons left either, so I 'm not cracking the whip on them - of the twenty or so who started year ten, the half dozen remaining students will be leaving at the end of next week anyway.

Little Nicky was the latest to be given 'study leave' just over a month ago, and will not be returning to my classroom. Carly, I reckon, may make it to the end of next week. Then again, she may not.
Either way, she won't care.

I admire her absolute lack of concern about the consequences of her behaviour. I get the feeling that, if she'd been born two and a half centuries earlier, she'd be lying in the gutter, baby at her breast, drunk on gin. If she'd been born eight centuries earlier, she'd have been the Wife Of Bath.

It strikes me that the crude, bawdy hedonism displayed by a lot of our teenagers is part of our heritage.

Resistance is useless.

-------------------

NB:
The exam season is upon us, so I'm taking May and June off from blogging. Unless something really interesting happens of course.

See you in July.

Bean Counters

I see the latest wheeze from Government is that Ofsted are going to start measuring schools on things like whether or not our students take illegal drugs, get pregnant before they're 16, and other such stuff.


Couple of thoughts on this...

1. First of all. Wha?


2. I might be going out on a limb here but isn't it the jobs of parents to look after their children?


3. Drugs. Yeah, right.

Because schools are definitely going to own up to having a drug problem. Especially if it screws up their Ofsted inspection.

And as for kids taking drugs after school (or even before school, on occasion!!) I can't see how the average Geography lesson, no matter how well delivered, is really going to impact on the drug use of the typical unsocialised fifteen year old chav.

Alternatively, see point 2.
Or call the police.



So, finally, a plea.

To whoever is in charge of Education in this country.
Just let us teach.

It'd be a start.

Welcome to the Jungle

'Put out that cigarette!'
Carly inhales deeply, then blows smoke through nose, says, 'No.'
'Do what you're told.'
She stares into the distance, repeats, 'No.'
'Do you know who I am?'
Carly pauses to think, takes another drag, then says, 'I don't care who you are.'
'I'm Mr. Tyler, the new Head of Key Stage Three! You're a pupil!'
Maintaining her pose of complete disinterest, Carly turns about three degrees toward Mr Tyler and asks, 'So?'
'So you'll do what you're told.'
Wearing a faint smile and speaking in a tone you'd use to a particularly stupid puppy, she tells him sweetly, 'No. No, I won't.'

At this point, seeing that the situation is about to deteriorate, I walk a few paces closer; Ken Tyler is running out of ideas, while attempting to maintain some semblance of authority.

In my experience, these are mutually exclusive concepts.


Ken Tyler is the new Head of Key Stage Three, and Yard Duty isn't supposed to be like this.
I slot smoothly into 'Wing-Man' position.


But I don't crowd the situation, neither wishing to undermine the new staff member's authority, nor force Carly into some sort of precipitous act. I simply stand nearby, providing some sort of back-up.

'What's your name?' Ken persists, glancing across at me for moral support.
She drops her cigarette butt and stubs it out. 'Don't know. What's yours?'
'Come with me!'
She looks down at her arm, where the new Head of Key Stage 3 has grasped her wrist, and she's wearing an expression like a pigeon has just shit on her sleeve.
'Gerrof! Rapist!' she says, quietly.

Ken drops her arm like it's poisonous, which it is, sort of. He looks round at me, as though to say, What now? and I shrug.
What indeed?

Carly sees that her control of the situation is fading, so uses the pause in proceedings to make good her escape. Ken turns back to see her legging it round the corner. His shoulders slump.


'She wouldn't even tell me her name!' he tells me as we walk toward the Head's office to report the incident.
'I doubt she could remember,' I reply.
He looks puzzled.
'Her name's Carly Carver,' I tell him, 'And she's probably pissed.'

I want to try and explain to him the reasons for my apparent lack of enthusiastic support, but that would take hours. I want to tell him not to pick fights he can't win, but only experience will teach him that lesson.
So instead I just give him a smile that tells him that what just occured was no big deal.

Then I add, 'And never, ever allow yourself to be alone in a classroom with Carly. She will make allegations.'

Dues

So you leave Uni and you do a one-year PGCE course to qualify as a teacher, which indebts you to the tune of four years University fees and four years University expenses. Unless you have rich parents, that's something approaching £25,000.

And you take a job as an NQT. Now you're earning around £22,000. Unless you live in London, when you'll get a bit more.

You begin teaching classes where the kids are practised in mayhem; experienced in the trench warfare of teacher-baiting. There are nice kids too, but you don't have time to focus on them because the nutters eat up all your time.

And there's the paperwork.
And the parents.
And SMT.
And let's face it, no-one really believes that you know what you're doing; no-one actually trusts your judgement or your skills.

You're lucky, you survive.
Let's be honest, it's not rocket science, and you're not a squaddie in Helmand, so you survive.

And six years later you're going through your 'threshold', you're at least 28 years old, you're an experienced, educated professional and you're earning almost £30 grand. Four years later it'll be up to about £34,000.

And that's it.
That's your whack.

Even if you go on to do the job for another 35 years, which will take you to the current age of retirement, you'll earn the equivalent of £34,000. No more, no less.
Unless of course, you climb aboard the Management ladder, which takes you further and further from the classroom, until eventually you're redundant in all but payslip.

There are currently about fourteen thousand unqualified people 'teaching' in UK schools. One of the main reasons we can't get enough qualified teachers, and can't keep the ones we've got, is that the wage is crap.


Me? I love the job.
But I don't do it for the money.

That would be stupid.

Welcome to the 4th world

Library Girl has a new assistant; a sweet, well-spoken former teacher from Zimbabwe.

When L-G asked her why she was working as an assistant in a library and not earning a lot more money as a teacher she replied to the effect that, in the 3rd World, children value education and families invest time, effort and money to have their kids educated.

In England, she said, it's different. The kids hate school, and they won't behave in class, most parents appear to be anti-education, everyone takes their opportunities for granted, and waste most of them.

On top of that, as a black African woman, she'd experienced a lot of racial abuse from locals, and didn't want to have to suffer anything similar in the classroom. 'I'm only staying here until the political situation back home sorts itself out,' she said. 'then I'll go back, and become a teacher again'.

Our loss, I'm guessing.

Strike!

Let's see, should I ...


a) Man the barricades

b) Storm the barricades

c) Have a lie in

d) Sit in the garden and drink wine


Fact is, the looming economic melt-down is going to render all pay awards pretty much worthless anyway, and most teachers I know would swap a decent pay rise for smaller classes/less paperwork/the right to permanently exclude the nutters.

But democracy is, as a wise man once said, the best worst system we have and, seeing as we all had the right to vote I'm not going to complain.

So instead, I'm going shopping.

CCTV

Hahahaha.

I read today that some organisation known as the Examination Officers' Association are calling for the introduction of CCTV in exam halls in order to combat cheating.

Don't they realise that in 99% of examination cheating cases the 'creative accountancy' comes via coursework? Perhaps we should put CCTV in students' homes to monitor their parents doing their coursework, or install programmes on their laptops that record the sites they've visited to download pre-written essays.

Or maybe we should monitor 'booster' classes where support staff 'encourage' some of the more recalicitrant students to complete their coursework, and where students who have hitherto not managed to complete a single essay in eighteen months somehow manage to knock off four or five peces of A grade work in a matter of days.

The link between examination passes and real academic progress is becoming more and more tenuous as schools become increasingly obsessed with their place in the league tables.

The exponential growth of the use of CCTV is creepy in a whole lot of ways that we could discuss at interminable length (go to Lishman's blog if you're interested in conspiracy theories - there's a link up here somewhere).

But let's get this clear. It won't stop cheating.

I blame the hippies ...

There’s been a lot of talk from Government, and Shadow Cabinet, ministers recently, about how they’re going to deal with ‘violence in the classroom’.

Well, here’s the thing; they aren’t.

They’re not going to stop violence in the classroom. They could, but they won’t. They aren’t going to solve the problem of violence in schools for the same reasons that they don’t solve the problem of violence in A&E departments or violence against firemen.

There are a number of reasons for this; I’ll go through some of them.

Firstly, we have a real problem at the moment that the decision-makers in our society are the product of the polytechnics and universities of the 1960’s and early 70’s – they’re a bunch of disappointed hippies clinging to the forlorn belief that, if only we are nice to people for long enough, they’ll be nice back to us in return. Those middle-class former students and cultural revolutionaries who wore donkey jackets, identified with the working man, smoked spliffs (but didn't inhale, apparently) and ‘tore down the barriers’ of social repression three or four decades ago are unable to grasp the concept that, now, they are the establishment.

And they got it wrong.

What this means in practice is that we have a small but very influential group of ministers, education professionals, legal experts, well-meaning school governors, Heads, Deputy Heads and other ‘professionals’ who decide what is acceptable in schools but who, crucially, never enter the classroom and, from my experience, never send their own children to typical ‘bog standard’ secondary schools.

Very much a case of do as we say, not as we do.


Secondly, we have a social contract that says that, no matter how badly you behave, you’ll always get support, and unless you do something heinous you’ll never really get punished.

And by heinous, I’m not talking about something like beating someone to death in an unprovoked street attack – that’ll only get you two years served for manslaughter.

Basically, you can do whatever you like, and nothing bad will happen.

And while I understand and applaud the motives for this laudable approach - it harks back to the mid-nineteenth century philanthropists who were rightly appalled by the realities of child-labour, savage penal codes and exploitative working conditions – the simple fact is, this mid-brow sub-Marxist approach to current social conditions is not only wildly inadequate, it’s actually serving to encourage, if not actually create, a class of helpless, welfare dependant, chaotic families that… well, just have a look at the Shannon Matthews case on TV to see where that particular road leads.


Thirdly, and on a similar theme, the family unit is breaking down; in some areas of most towns it’s disintegrating completely. For young boys, we’re seeing an equivalent breakdown in socialisation and increase in what is euphemistically termed anti-social behaviour, often given a pseudo-medical label and treated with drugs, the long-term effects of which we don’t yet know or understand.

And girls? I don’t even want to go there.

To be honest, all of the above factors act to create violent situations on a daily basis throughout the country. Teachers’ authority is constantly undermined by professionals determined to protect the rights of the violent, the anti-social and the abusive, often to the detriment of the hard-working kids in the class.

Parents who we never ever see on parents’ evening, who's phones are permanently switched off whenever we try to contact them, and who never come to meetings when invited, to discuss their child’s appalling behaviour, will nevertheless come roaring down to school, shouting and swearing at all and sundry, should we be so precipitate as to confiscate Cherelle's iPod (because we're trying to teach her some stuff and we'd like her to listen a bit).

And Cherelle watches this and understands.

The good kids, still a majority, I might add, just sigh and put up with it, occasionally asking why, if Liam’s behaviour is bad enough that he has to be sent to the Special Unit, he gets to go home an hour early every day, except on Fridays when he is taken out of school to do rock climbing, mountain biking and …(insert your own favourite outdoor sport here).

And what do the ‘challenging’ students think?

Well, they may be under-achieving educationally, but they aren’t stupid. Like any amoral, egocentric, pathologically indulged teenager would, they’re taking full advantage of a system which refuses to stop their poor behaviour and which rewards them copiously on the odd occasions that they do something well.

They have no boundaries, though they know where these boundaries are and will quite happily lodge a complaint, should they perceive that a teacher has crossed one, they can’t really be punished, they enjoy almost one to one adult supervision, rarely have to do real class-work and enjoy special status within the school.



Hmm. This is coming across as a rant, and I try to keep my blogs on the sunny side of the street, so apologies if you were looking for some mildly amusing tale of classroom mayhem, but occasionally I have to say, this is how it is.


The reason that students behave violently in classrooms is simple.
It’s because they can.



Oh, and yeah, I blame the hippies.

Wasted

After L-G's revelation that I was no longer the young, enthusiastic teacher I'd imagined myself to be, I gave some thought to the next twenty years of my teaching career, and how I should comport myself.

Like the unsocialised youth of today, I too needed a role model.

Should I aim toward becoming distinguished, I considered? George Clooney is distinguished. He's also extremely handsome. And rich. And famous. Women love him.

So, as the kids round here say ... "huh no!"

What about gravitas? Like Hugh Laurie in House. He's got a certain intellectual weight. And he's not too handsome, so maybe I could make a pitch at that. But Gregory House is a drug addict. He's in constant pain. He's really intelligent. And he rides a Ducati. And he has a team of scriptwriters.

Once again ...huh no!

This was getting desperate. What about just working on being fit and healthy? Phil Spencer from Location, Location? He's fit, a bit cheeky, and apparently quite attractive. I could do weights, shave the top of my head, take up property development.

But no, as attractive as I find Kirsty Allsopp (and I really, really do)I really couldn't see myself moving into the property game.


Clutching at straws now, I considered the possibility of becoming disreputable. Like Keith Richards. Now there's a role model. In twenty years time, I could be wandering into my classroom, slurring my words through a gravely voice, wearing trinkets in my hair, a bottle of JD dangling from a bracelet-clad wrist.

Apart from the fact I'd be sacked, which might prove to be an issue in my long-term career plans, when I paused to consider my year 11's reaction if I came into room 101 dressed like the guitarist from Motorhead or Motley Crue, I nearly choked on my coffee.


Besides, I haven't got the staying power to sustain a 300-hangover a year drink problem.

And I'm too squeamish for a drug habit.

Babylon Sister

It’s been over a month since I last blogged; to be honest I haven’t felt like it.

When I started blogging I was determined that my stuff wouldn’t degenerate into a whinge-fest – sure, there’d be accounts of the trials and tribulations of life in the classroom, but I hoped that the serious stuff would be leavened by humour and the odd wry anecdote.

But recently I’ve had no enthusiasm for writing about teaching. Or teaching.

It’s not the coursework deadlines.
It’s not that I’ve started writing a new book, though I have.
It's not even that the days are getting longer and I'm spending an hour or two most evenings, walking along the beach, though I am.

I don’t even think that it’s because life at the chalkface is getting grimmer, though the brutal truth is that schools are getting worse, day by day, week by week, and we’re handing over our educational future to ignorant politicians who are scared of the consequences of us attempting to educate, discipline or deal with the fat, unsocialised twelve year-olds to whom we’ve ceded control of the classroom.

No.
The reason I haven’t blogged for about thirty days is that, I think, I’m losing my mojo.

My enthusiasm.
My ideals.
My zest.

Sure, I can still teach. In fact, not caring so much means that I may well be a better teacher; I’m sure surgeons do a better job if they don’t really take a personal interest in the outcome of the operation. Professional distance is a good thing, whether it's with teaching, policing, nursing or working in a shop.

I'm finding myself less stressed and less harassed, which is good, maybe I'm getting my second wind, but I'm also feeling less involved, less interested, less sympathetic to the whole process. And I’m honestly not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

I was concerned enough to speak to Library-Girl about it.

Was I destined to become one of those embittered time-servers that so blighted my own secondary education, I asked her? Or worse, was I sliding down a one-way slope to educational mediocrity, destined to spend the next twenty years simmering in my own sarcasm, boiling in my own bile?

She listened to my growing panic, with that faint smile ghosting her mouth and after telling me to stop being a drama queen she said, "You've just changed up a gear, that's all. You've become a bit more serene. Maybe some of your passion has gone, but it's been replaced by a bit of wisdom. Some perspective even".
And she added, "and not before time".

I think she was telling me, to misquote a great song, I'm not crazy, I'm just getting older.
Hmm.