I approach the sharing of any comments regarding the causes of the recent riots with my own stab-proof jacket of trepidation tightly fastened, because although I believe I have something worthwhile to add to the debate, so does EVERYONE. And to be frank, there has been a backwash of bullshit from too many commentators this past week.
The only report of any insight was the brief street-side interview with a young looter in Manchester, because he was able to tell us why HE was doing what he was doing. And essentially, it was to piss the police off, who “arrest you for nothing” these days. (When asked for an example he was found wanting.) Most other people who have aired their theories have merely exposed their own ignorance, prejudices and propensity for over-simplification.
I won’t pretend to be much less ignorant than these people. With Socratic humility though, I am prepared to acknowledge my ignorance. But I know enough to know what I don’t know.
My other qualification for even commenting at all comes from this: I’ve taught history in secondary schools for 19 years and for the first 9 of them, I taught teenagers from Tottenham and neighbouring areas. The whole melting pot of socio-economic baggage was brought into school. And since then, I’ve worked with a predominantly white, working-class, provincial town demographic.
This experience has taught me some things worth saying.
For starters, as I constantly remind my students in history, everything that happens does so for a number of different reasons. Causation is complex and multi-dimensional and open to judgment and interpretation. Commentators on the riots have tried to over-simplify the causes, citing one or at most two real reasons, whilst refuting counter-claims regarding other possible causes. Sadly, it is part of human nature to over-simplify, because it’s easier. Spouting off opinions is like betting on horses. It’s competitive. You want to be the person who sounds RIGHT, who picks the winning cause, the one most people will agree with. So you have to sound strong-minded and choose just ONE cause and start your sentence with “I’ll tell you why they rioted, it’s because...” with that arrogance that precludes any humble admission of your actual ignorance.
I also regularly demand that my history students back up their arguments with sound evidence. But in the debate on the causes of the rioting, as with most things, what many people tend to do is hear lots of different theories and choose the ones that either sound right (suiting our own prejudices maybe) or the ones echoed the most often or the ones that sound most convincing. And then they regurgitate these opinions as if THEIR OWN. They don’t have time or inclination to access the FACTS to substantiate their pontificating. They just want to repeat the cause that they’ve painted onto their banner and are now parading with a certainty that they hold aloft the TRUTH.
Finally, I ensure my students never apply a generalisation to everyone from whichever society (or group in society) that we are studying. We talk about TYPICALITY yes; typical attitudes within a group, as agreed by historians who have thoroughly researched the subject. But my students are told NEVER to ASSUME that what we might call TYPICAL would apply to any more than MOST people.
And that’s how we organise a school, which in itself is a microcosm of society. At times for convenience and practicality we HAVE to treat the students as a whole or as groups, but it would be morally wrong and destructive not to actively treat them as individuals on a daily basis as well.
The looters and rioters were individuals acting for the most part with a group mentality.
What assumptions were made?
There are too many PRESUMPTUOUS muck-spreaders on TV and in real-life who assume that the trouble-makers are:
• On benefits
• From single-parent families
• Of a particular ethnic background
• Stupid
The fact that there’s bound to be SOME truth in SOME cases does not justify beliefs that this criteria is suitable to apply to the whole group. But people want solutions and solutions are easier if the causes are simpler and if the people who need dealing with are a homogenous group. If they were a homogenous group, then the same measures or laws are likely to work. For example, the call to remove their benefits sounds to some like a good idea, but they have to assume that everyone who looted or rioted is on benefits. Are they? How do you know? I doubt it.
The other problem with over-simplification is that it fails to acknowledge the varying degrees to which people were involved or to what extent they might usually behave in a similar manner anyway. Everyone accepted the concept of opportunism and this is how things work in schools.
I’ve learned from the thousands of 11-19 year olds that I’ve worked with over time that every person has the capacity to do good and to cause harm. What sets us apart from each other are the decisions we make every moment of the day in terms of these two choices. External factors are ALWAYS at play. We are all products of our environment. When people say that, other ignorant, over-simplifying, self-righteous and presumptuous people make an accusation that any reference to environment automatically creates an excuse. Not so. People react differently to their own environment, because of the multi-dimensional character of other external forces, most of them individualised, that have a bearing on the decisions they make. For example, one child of ethnic origin in a single parent household on benefits in Tottenham will not necessarily make the same decisions in life to another in the same situation, because there’s far more to us all than our ethnicity, familial circumstances, socio-economic position and postcode. Acknowledging that common external factors CAN create pressures which lead to a SIMILAR outcome is acceptable and indeed IMPORTANT when it comes to providing services to help people, but is ABSOLUTELY MORALLY BEREFT when it comes to judging people and their motives.
Like I say, a school is a mirror on society, because (almost) everyone in society has been to school. Schools always have a small core of students who will too often refuse to conform to the systems in place for the benefit of their own well-being and that of others. Similarly, society will always contains a core who will engage in criminal activity. Every effort should be made to continually offer these people a chance to change, a way out, because some will. And similarly, measures will always be needed to protect everyone else from the actions of this core of people.
The scale of the riots suggests that there were more involved than just the core of the usual criminally-intent members of society. In a school, a much larger group could be referred to as BORDERLINE in terms of their capacity to misbehave. Depending on external forces, they will sometimes choose to disrupt lessons, not do their homework, argue rudely with teachers, break rules, etc... and sometimes they will conform to rules and be co-operative, positive, hard-working etc, etc. So what schools have to do is to manage the external factors that they do have control over. If you have fair, agreed, beneficial procedures applied consistently in a school, then you will find the BORDERLINE students make the decisions that benefit them and others. But similarly, the very same students will muck around for the less effective teachers, will take advantage of inconsistencies or loopholes in the systems and most importantly REACT NEGATIVELY TO A SITUATION IN WHICH THEY ARE TREATED UNFAIRLY OR NOT BEING GIVEN WHAT IS EXPECTED which is good quality teaching and learning and opportunities that they see others being given. In other words, lots of people will fuck about given the opportunity, a reason to or an expectation of probable impunity.
We all have the capacity to think FUCK IT for some amount of time and to refuse to consider the consequences of our actions. The difference is again to what degree.
Apply this BORDERLINE theory to life. It is no coincidence that the riots are happening at a time when the perception amongst people is that there is more inequality than before, less entitlement to services, fewer prospects. And no, that doesn’t excuse it, and no it wasn’t a deliberate protest about these things. But it does create a situation where people are MORE LIKELY to act in this way. Whatever has happened to society over the last few decades has given these people who rioted and looted less reason NOT to think FUCK IT, less reason to distance themselves from opportunities for criminality, less external forces to make them think and act positively. It is quite logical to maintain that these issues DO EXIST and therefore quite likely that they are a factor.
My final analogy to schools: I have worked in a school in which leadership and quality of teaching and learning and the opportunities offered to students has improved over a small number of years. The actual students in that school improved their behaviour and attitude to work as a result. The same students would regress back if we started to get things wrong in what we were doing with them.
Sadly, the biggest difference is that it is far easier for a school to make changes to help a situation. Society is more complex and even more subject to external forces, particularly economic and social ones, huge monsters that no one can control. At best they can be influenced and manipulated to help create more benefit than harm. There are no easy solutions to this, because there are no easy causes.
Friday 12 August 2011
Sunday 24 July 2011
Harry Potter and the Grim Reality of Real Life
In the 8th book of the series, our 3 heroes have all left school to discover that even without Voldemort, the world is a pretty shitty place.
Despite the usual teenage distractions during her 6th form years, Hermione netted a clean sweep of A* grades in all her subjects. The Daily Prophet might have maintained that exams are easier nowadays, thus discrediting her achievement, but fortunately for the integrity of journalism that particular piece of bog roll masquerading as a newspaper was forced to close after hacking into the voicemails of everyone who lost a relative in the final battle against Voldemort and the Death Eaters.
Hermione could have taken up her place at a top university with those grades, but her Maths was strong enough to allow her to calculate that £9k a year in fees plus living costs for 3 years would leave her with a debt of such overwhelming magnitude that she’d have to live at home for 40 years and look to get on the housing ladder in her early 60’s. She therefore had to settle for a university that was charging less than the maximum fees, in a town with more affordable rents. She’s studying Media and Bieber Studies in the University of Central South Coastal England in Bognor Regis (which is housed in the newly renovated chalets of what used to be Butlin’s.)
For Harry, like the majority of school leavers, a job in the retail sector beckoned. Tesco have taken him on to one of their management training courses. And Ron applied for a level 3 apprenticeship in Computer Animation Design, because he “likes computer games” and sees a future for himself in this field along with tens of thousands of others.
In their wake, Hogwarts has become an Academy in order to redress the funding deficit that all schools are currently experiencing. A new Head has been appointed, who wants to change the uniform and go for a more corporate image. This would entail a complete rebuild, particularly of those staircases that tend to split apart from each other and cause a health and safety risk. There’s no money available from the government to update the buildings to the desired office-style corridors and peacock blue interior, so the new Head has made a deal with the giants of the Communications industry, Floo Networks in which Hogwarts receives a large investment of capital and Floo Networks receives 3 executive seats on the Board of Trustees.
You might be wondering why money seems to be in short supply to support education. Well, essentially, the top bosses of Gringott’s had spent decades getting rich off the back of high-risk investments, over-lending and lots of other unregulated naughty financial stuff that most people don’t understand, except for the fat bonuses the greedy little goblins had been paying themselves. Consequently, the arse fell out of the economy at a time when The Ministry of Magic was spending beyond its means and there now exists a huge deficit that needs paying off. The new Minister for Magic, Dunghill Camberbum, has declared that this deficit was not his fault, is quite frankly appalling and needs paying off sooner rather than later so that he can be seen as the slayer of the deficit in the same way that Harry Potter is seen as the slayer of Voldemort. So, at a huge risk to economic stability, Camberbum is cutting government spending at all levels, including those unwieldy and unnecessary bastions of social welfare, the education, police and health services.
With Voldemort dead, he expects less of a drain on health services and besides people can just help themselves and set up their own things and buy stuff from private companies. And surely the police will have less to do without so many Death Eaters around, so cuts can be made there. And schools are full of subversive lefty-liberals who hate the Ministry anyway, so fuck them. They can work longer and contribute more to their pensions, the moaning, useless, soft-touch, part-timers.
As a result, Hogwarts now has 8 teachers over 120 years old teaching a full timetable to students who require entertainment to motivate them into working, or else they’ll just play on their Blackberry’s and I-phones and look up facts on Wikipedia if they’re expected to know anything. The new Minister for Schools, Machiavellius Gove has decreed that the new National Curriculum should include compulsory study of more traditional and academic subjects, like the things Gove a(nd his usual dinner party guests) enjoyed at school, such as Ancient Mesopotamian, Classical Sculpture and systematic buggery.
In the final scene of the book, Harry, Ron and Hermione all join a anti-Ministry protest in London. Ron is cautioned for shouting rude words at Mr Gove as he drives past with his window open to let the smell of his breath out (the word used is CUNT but this is only included in the adult edition of the book), Hermione joins a sit-in at a branch of Olivander’s Wands Emporium and Harry is sentenced to 16 months in prison for doing a poo on a statue of Cornelius Fudge, the former Minister for Magic.
Despite the usual teenage distractions during her 6th form years, Hermione netted a clean sweep of A* grades in all her subjects. The Daily Prophet might have maintained that exams are easier nowadays, thus discrediting her achievement, but fortunately for the integrity of journalism that particular piece of bog roll masquerading as a newspaper was forced to close after hacking into the voicemails of everyone who lost a relative in the final battle against Voldemort and the Death Eaters.
Hermione could have taken up her place at a top university with those grades, but her Maths was strong enough to allow her to calculate that £9k a year in fees plus living costs for 3 years would leave her with a debt of such overwhelming magnitude that she’d have to live at home for 40 years and look to get on the housing ladder in her early 60’s. She therefore had to settle for a university that was charging less than the maximum fees, in a town with more affordable rents. She’s studying Media and Bieber Studies in the University of Central South Coastal England in Bognor Regis (which is housed in the newly renovated chalets of what used to be Butlin’s.)
For Harry, like the majority of school leavers, a job in the retail sector beckoned. Tesco have taken him on to one of their management training courses. And Ron applied for a level 3 apprenticeship in Computer Animation Design, because he “likes computer games” and sees a future for himself in this field along with tens of thousands of others.
In their wake, Hogwarts has become an Academy in order to redress the funding deficit that all schools are currently experiencing. A new Head has been appointed, who wants to change the uniform and go for a more corporate image. This would entail a complete rebuild, particularly of those staircases that tend to split apart from each other and cause a health and safety risk. There’s no money available from the government to update the buildings to the desired office-style corridors and peacock blue interior, so the new Head has made a deal with the giants of the Communications industry, Floo Networks in which Hogwarts receives a large investment of capital and Floo Networks receives 3 executive seats on the Board of Trustees.
You might be wondering why money seems to be in short supply to support education. Well, essentially, the top bosses of Gringott’s had spent decades getting rich off the back of high-risk investments, over-lending and lots of other unregulated naughty financial stuff that most people don’t understand, except for the fat bonuses the greedy little goblins had been paying themselves. Consequently, the arse fell out of the economy at a time when The Ministry of Magic was spending beyond its means and there now exists a huge deficit that needs paying off. The new Minister for Magic, Dunghill Camberbum, has declared that this deficit was not his fault, is quite frankly appalling and needs paying off sooner rather than later so that he can be seen as the slayer of the deficit in the same way that Harry Potter is seen as the slayer of Voldemort. So, at a huge risk to economic stability, Camberbum is cutting government spending at all levels, including those unwieldy and unnecessary bastions of social welfare, the education, police and health services.
With Voldemort dead, he expects less of a drain on health services and besides people can just help themselves and set up their own things and buy stuff from private companies. And surely the police will have less to do without so many Death Eaters around, so cuts can be made there. And schools are full of subversive lefty-liberals who hate the Ministry anyway, so fuck them. They can work longer and contribute more to their pensions, the moaning, useless, soft-touch, part-timers.
As a result, Hogwarts now has 8 teachers over 120 years old teaching a full timetable to students who require entertainment to motivate them into working, or else they’ll just play on their Blackberry’s and I-phones and look up facts on Wikipedia if they’re expected to know anything. The new Minister for Schools, Machiavellius Gove has decreed that the new National Curriculum should include compulsory study of more traditional and academic subjects, like the things Gove a(nd his usual dinner party guests) enjoyed at school, such as Ancient Mesopotamian, Classical Sculpture and systematic buggery.
In the final scene of the book, Harry, Ron and Hermione all join a anti-Ministry protest in London. Ron is cautioned for shouting rude words at Mr Gove as he drives past with his window open to let the smell of his breath out (the word used is CUNT but this is only included in the adult edition of the book), Hermione joins a sit-in at a branch of Olivander’s Wands Emporium and Harry is sentenced to 16 months in prison for doing a poo on a statue of Cornelius Fudge, the former Minister for Magic.
Saturday 21 May 2011
The School Library
I said to the school librarian, “Do you have a book about coincidences?”
She said, “Yes, one arrived just today.”
I said, “I took this book out on Energy sources, is it renewable?”
I said, “Do you have anything by Dickens?”
She said, “We have lots of things, by Jove!”
I said, “I’m looking for The Borrowers?”
She said, “Well, they’re all around you, dear.”
I said, “Do you have a book about people who are depressed because they feel that they just don’t fit in?”
She said, “Yes, it’s in the cookery section.”
I said, “I was wondering if you had a book about laziness.”
She said, “Yes, it’s on the furthest bookshelf on the right.”
I said, “I might leave it then.”
Try some of those gags on your school librarian and it’s unlikely you’ll get a laugh. Being a librarian is like going through the menopause for the whole of your life. It’s a joyless existence. Students come into the library when it’s cold outside, take the first book off the nearest shelf and just sit there with their friends. And eat. And take no notice of the librarian. When they do take out a book, they don’t bring it back and for the next ten years (including after they’ve left school), the librarian sends home letters asking for the return of the book or else they’ll be charged. And if they don’t pay, then the consequences are worse. They get another letter. And if they still don’t pay, they won’t be allowed to borrow another book from the library. Meaning, their best bet is to steal one. That way, they won’t get the threatening letters.
For a laugh, try to find in your school library the book that has sat on the shelf the longest since anyone last took it out. In my own kids’ school it is “The Stanley Holloway monologues.”
Does the Chess club meet in your school library? If so, I feel you are neglecting your duty of care. The library is for everyone, meaning that anyone can just walk in and see which kids are in the Chess club and thus identify exactly who to beat up after school. If you want to protect children, tell the Chess club to meet in the cleaner’s cupboard. And lock the door. But take the Domestos out first, of course. It’s not easy to accept being beaten at Chess.
In the first school I worked in, the librarian made students feel about as welcome as a diarrhoea-sufferer at a hot-tub party. She used to snatch food off kids without warning, spend hours typing lengthy individual memos to staff and walk around in soiled gardening clothes, hunched over a tea-pot in one hand, mumbling to herself incoherently. Her husband came to a staff social event once. We thought he was wearing one of those old man masks. He wasn’t. She was no oil painting either. Well, she was no painting, but she was very oily. And had a hunch. And was spotted on regional TV in the West country once, beavering around in the background during a feature from the home of J R Tolkein during a nerds’ convention at his home. I’m pretty sure she believed that black kids didn’t actually read books. She was altogether as odious a person on the inside as she was monstrously ugly on the outside, with her humpback, lank hair and saggy-arsed green tracksuit bottoms.
Regardless of their eccentricities and constant state of frustrated misery, you should support your school librarian. It’s not easy getting students to read books for fun in the multi-media dystopia in which we live, nor use a library for research when they have internet on their phones. After all, I don’t think there will ever be a website or Sky Arts documentary devoted to the monologues of Mr Stanley Augustus Holloway OBE.
She said, “Yes, one arrived just today.”
I said, “I took this book out on Energy sources, is it renewable?”
I said, “Do you have anything by Dickens?”
She said, “We have lots of things, by Jove!”
I said, “I’m looking for The Borrowers?”
She said, “Well, they’re all around you, dear.”
I said, “Do you have a book about people who are depressed because they feel that they just don’t fit in?”
She said, “Yes, it’s in the cookery section.”
I said, “I was wondering if you had a book about laziness.”
She said, “Yes, it’s on the furthest bookshelf on the right.”
I said, “I might leave it then.”
Try some of those gags on your school librarian and it’s unlikely you’ll get a laugh. Being a librarian is like going through the menopause for the whole of your life. It’s a joyless existence. Students come into the library when it’s cold outside, take the first book off the nearest shelf and just sit there with their friends. And eat. And take no notice of the librarian. When they do take out a book, they don’t bring it back and for the next ten years (including after they’ve left school), the librarian sends home letters asking for the return of the book or else they’ll be charged. And if they don’t pay, then the consequences are worse. They get another letter. And if they still don’t pay, they won’t be allowed to borrow another book from the library. Meaning, their best bet is to steal one. That way, they won’t get the threatening letters.
For a laugh, try to find in your school library the book that has sat on the shelf the longest since anyone last took it out. In my own kids’ school it is “The Stanley Holloway monologues.”
Does the Chess club meet in your school library? If so, I feel you are neglecting your duty of care. The library is for everyone, meaning that anyone can just walk in and see which kids are in the Chess club and thus identify exactly who to beat up after school. If you want to protect children, tell the Chess club to meet in the cleaner’s cupboard. And lock the door. But take the Domestos out first, of course. It’s not easy to accept being beaten at Chess.
In the first school I worked in, the librarian made students feel about as welcome as a diarrhoea-sufferer at a hot-tub party. She used to snatch food off kids without warning, spend hours typing lengthy individual memos to staff and walk around in soiled gardening clothes, hunched over a tea-pot in one hand, mumbling to herself incoherently. Her husband came to a staff social event once. We thought he was wearing one of those old man masks. He wasn’t. She was no oil painting either. Well, she was no painting, but she was very oily. And had a hunch. And was spotted on regional TV in the West country once, beavering around in the background during a feature from the home of J R Tolkein during a nerds’ convention at his home. I’m pretty sure she believed that black kids didn’t actually read books. She was altogether as odious a person on the inside as she was monstrously ugly on the outside, with her humpback, lank hair and saggy-arsed green tracksuit bottoms.
Regardless of their eccentricities and constant state of frustrated misery, you should support your school librarian. It’s not easy getting students to read books for fun in the multi-media dystopia in which we live, nor use a library for research when they have internet on their phones. After all, I don’t think there will ever be a website or Sky Arts documentary devoted to the monologues of Mr Stanley Augustus Holloway OBE.
Saturday 19 March 2011
Becoming an OfSTED Inspector
One day, when you are tired of failing as a teacher, when your social ineptness has alienated you from your colleagues, when your body has reached the final stage of arid decomposition and you take on the appearance of an animated cadaver, and when the last remnants of your humanity have dripped from your soul to leave a void, an abyss of strangulated callousness, then, one morning, at that moment of revelation over a bowl of cornflakes and razorblades and a glass of sour milk, you decide that it is time to apply to OfSTED to become a schools inspector.
Perhaps all along you saw this moment coming. The seeds of this inhuman mentality had long since been broadcast across the ploughed furrows of your psyche. That inexorable desire to be a traffic warden, football referee, tax officer, night club bouncer or GP receptionist. That same mentality, laced with the sort of malevolence that you’d find in history’s despots, warmongers and directors of genocide that breeds an odious species of fucker such as yourself. Somehow, you knew all along you’d end up here, seeping into a staff room like sewage to introduce yourself to a battle-weary, bleary-eyed and terror-stricken array of teachers, with that same old joke on your lips, “Thank you for making us feel welcome, when we know we’re not!”
Inspections from the Office for Standards in Education are like an irritating four-yearly dose of genital thrush. The only benefit is that it reminds you to never let your guard down. But you, you who will gradually evolve into this purveyor of pernicious and punitive interrogation, you knew all along that this was your pathway. Those episodes of “On the Buses” in your formative years; each time you heard Blakey crow his oily order to “get that bus out, Butler,” you felt his pain. They laughed at him, but he was in the right. You too wanted to get Butler, to be able to say, “That’s made my day, that has,” by exacting revenge on this maverick, this charmer, this popular and witty human full of life, the exact opposite to you. What was imperative was that the bus went out on time.
So, there you are, seeping back out of the staff room, smelling the fear flowing out of your victims in your wake, ready to spend your day flying in and out of their lessons like a vulture on the look out for someone’s entrails to feast upon. And the thrill of this power is all the more satisfying when you see how detailed their lesson plans are, how well marked their books are and how well delivered their teaching is, knowing that you won’t even bother observing many of these people, or reading much of what they’ve typed up nor spend more than a few minutes reading what has taken them countless hours to mark. As far as you’re concerned, it’s like judging the Elephant Man wearing drag in a beauty contest. Despite the effort, you’ll still tell him he’s an ugly bugger.
OfSTED raise the bar every so often, such as recently, so that what was once good becomes just satisfactory. You might agree with this as an inspector, as you stare adoringly at the portrait of Stalin on your OfSTED office wall (next to portraits of Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Gadaffi and some dead mice you recently stuck up there with a staple gun one dull Friday afternoon) because Stalin dragged the Soviet Union silently and fearfully through an industrial revolution thanks to a combination of unrealistic targets as a carrot and the threat of the gulags as a stick. And you love the Orwellian Doublespeak of the OfSTED epithet that it is not satisfactory to be satisfactory, you can only be satisfactory if you’re good and if you are judged satisfactory in everything then that is unsatisfactory overall and you fail.
The gradings are simple. Some patronising cunt must have once decreed that parents need things simple, because they read The Sun, watch ITV and won’t want to consider much more evidence beyond a single word like “satisfactory” when choosing the right school for their child in what is probably the most important decision of their lives.
Below the three acceptable grades of “outstanding”, “good” and “satisfactory” there is “shit”, “notice to become not shit” and “right in the shit now.” However, even “satisfactory” has the scent of shit to it.
Blakey and Stalin never made allowances for context and nor will you. Once you’ve swept in and out of a school like a Dementor sucking the life out of every soul, you can have a nice relaxing day back in the office typing it all up, punctuating your time by unravelling paper clips, sipping petrol from your hip flask and sharpening your talons on the ragged block of granite you have inside your ribcage in place of a heart.
Perhaps all along you saw this moment coming. The seeds of this inhuman mentality had long since been broadcast across the ploughed furrows of your psyche. That inexorable desire to be a traffic warden, football referee, tax officer, night club bouncer or GP receptionist. That same mentality, laced with the sort of malevolence that you’d find in history’s despots, warmongers and directors of genocide that breeds an odious species of fucker such as yourself. Somehow, you knew all along you’d end up here, seeping into a staff room like sewage to introduce yourself to a battle-weary, bleary-eyed and terror-stricken array of teachers, with that same old joke on your lips, “Thank you for making us feel welcome, when we know we’re not!”
Inspections from the Office for Standards in Education are like an irritating four-yearly dose of genital thrush. The only benefit is that it reminds you to never let your guard down. But you, you who will gradually evolve into this purveyor of pernicious and punitive interrogation, you knew all along that this was your pathway. Those episodes of “On the Buses” in your formative years; each time you heard Blakey crow his oily order to “get that bus out, Butler,” you felt his pain. They laughed at him, but he was in the right. You too wanted to get Butler, to be able to say, “That’s made my day, that has,” by exacting revenge on this maverick, this charmer, this popular and witty human full of life, the exact opposite to you. What was imperative was that the bus went out on time.
So, there you are, seeping back out of the staff room, smelling the fear flowing out of your victims in your wake, ready to spend your day flying in and out of their lessons like a vulture on the look out for someone’s entrails to feast upon. And the thrill of this power is all the more satisfying when you see how detailed their lesson plans are, how well marked their books are and how well delivered their teaching is, knowing that you won’t even bother observing many of these people, or reading much of what they’ve typed up nor spend more than a few minutes reading what has taken them countless hours to mark. As far as you’re concerned, it’s like judging the Elephant Man wearing drag in a beauty contest. Despite the effort, you’ll still tell him he’s an ugly bugger.
OfSTED raise the bar every so often, such as recently, so that what was once good becomes just satisfactory. You might agree with this as an inspector, as you stare adoringly at the portrait of Stalin on your OfSTED office wall (next to portraits of Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Gadaffi and some dead mice you recently stuck up there with a staple gun one dull Friday afternoon) because Stalin dragged the Soviet Union silently and fearfully through an industrial revolution thanks to a combination of unrealistic targets as a carrot and the threat of the gulags as a stick. And you love the Orwellian Doublespeak of the OfSTED epithet that it is not satisfactory to be satisfactory, you can only be satisfactory if you’re good and if you are judged satisfactory in everything then that is unsatisfactory overall and you fail.
The gradings are simple. Some patronising cunt must have once decreed that parents need things simple, because they read The Sun, watch ITV and won’t want to consider much more evidence beyond a single word like “satisfactory” when choosing the right school for their child in what is probably the most important decision of their lives.
Below the three acceptable grades of “outstanding”, “good” and “satisfactory” there is “shit”, “notice to become not shit” and “right in the shit now.” However, even “satisfactory” has the scent of shit to it.
Blakey and Stalin never made allowances for context and nor will you. Once you’ve swept in and out of a school like a Dementor sucking the life out of every soul, you can have a nice relaxing day back in the office typing it all up, punctuating your time by unravelling paper clips, sipping petrol from your hip flask and sharpening your talons on the ragged block of granite you have inside your ribcage in place of a heart.
Thursday 24 February 2011
School Trips
Around about 5am, you’ll meet up with the students outside school, where some balding 1970’s throwback in a tight-fitting polo shirt will introduce himself as Reg the coach driver. As he hurls suitcases into the hull of his vehicle, the students mutter derogatory whispers to each other about your choice of “own clothes.” Jeans. You dress like their mums and dads. The only students who are also wearing jeans are the four Emo’s who vampirically shield their faces from the sunrise. And by jeans, I mean spray on black denim, stretching from ankle to halfway up their arse, the rest covered with some degree of modesty by 30 cm of grey flannel pants. All the other students, eager to cast away the identify-stifling monotony of school uniform, express their individuality by wearing their own clothes, which in every case consists of the same grey tracksuit bottoms and pastel t-shirt. But they still laugh at your middle-aged choice of blue jeans. Groovy.
The coach pulls away, seatbelts lazily slung over one arm, and the students tuck into their breakfasts of cans of coke, chocolate bars and packets of Haribo. You feel like you’ll be the first to get sick. But as it turns out, this honour goes to a Year 9 girl who sat on the back seat and only got halfway through her bucket of pick n’ mix before requiring a second bucket at the front of the coach.
So, did you decide on an overseas trip, in which case the airport now beckons, or have you made a coach your home for the week? Did this all spring from a staffroom conversation about countries in the world you’d love to visit, but couldn’t afford to? China? Russia? Singapore? By taking a party of school children there, you only pay in terms of effort. And sure, it’ll be a big effort. It’s no holiday. But it’s an experience. Potentially, in our job, we could “experience” any country in the world at no financial cost, as long as we can persuade parents to stump up the fare for their child and as long as there isn’t currently an earthquake, political revolution or Civil War occurring at that time. Given that you have to book these things 18 months in advance, you never quite know. (Not that many of us were burnt over Libya recently.)
One child will have the audacity to ask you if teachers have to pay. When you explain that you don’t, because you’re working, in fact working overtime because you’re on duty 24 hours a day for 7 days, the student just asks again, “But you don’t have to pay, right? We’re paying your fare?” Yes, and your parents’ taxes pay our wages and we still get longer holidays then them, so fuck off now please.
Continental trips don’t always require travel by air. To keep the costs down, you may have opted for coach all the way. A fine idea until the 18th hour of travelling through France, through the night, four hours since the last piss-stop, the coach bog closed because the tank is now full of all the consequences of that Haribo and coke, plus you can’t sleep due to the crick in your neck and the faint odour of vomit and fart.
However, on the way there the channel tunnel is fun. Student gullibility proves as entertaining as ever as they stare out of the windows trying to spot fish. You halt temporarily at customs while French immigration cause you anxiety by taking a dislike to the one non-European passport in your pile. As the Nigerian Year 10 boy is led away you joke to the rest that he’s being strip searched, but you play down talk of this when he arrives back 30 minutes later looking like he’d just spent the night at Michael Jackson’s house.
Hotels have little to recommend them beyond having a roof, a toilet and somewhere to lie down to sleep. In this respect, they marginally edge out a coach for comfort. On the continent, they tend to have considered escape from fire only insofar as to ensure that windows open wide and should you have the same powers as Spiderman then you won’t be at risk of burning or falling to your death. Assume that the staircase will not permit escape, having been added as an afterthought for persons with 20-inch waists and 50-inch inside leg measurements. Those taking students on mountaineering trips should however find staircases and fire escapes manageable and just as challenging and fun as the mountains.
The hotel experience allows students to practice their studied languages too, because they will come into contact with members of the public, usually as they walk through the bar area. Although this section of the public isn’t anymore diverse than middle-aged men with moustaches and an unhealthy interest in your older female students, it still presents an opportunity for conversation. Like, “What the fuck are you looking at, you dirty old perv?”
Another horizon-widening opportunity comes courtesy of another school sharing your hotel. Teenagers tend to stare at each other un-self-consciously and then moan to teachers that the other kids keep looking at them. At some point, conflict will arise and so the resulting social contact with the teachers of the other school can be exploited to help your own professional development. You learn something. You learn that your rules for your students and your level of care and your resistance to the chance of getting pissed on duty makes you a far more responsible teacher than they are. Beware the phrase, “They’re only kids.”
Whoever the kids are, they won’t want to go to sleep. Ever. At least not until about an hour before you try to wake them up in the morning. As you force your way into their rooms at 6.00am and encourage them out of bed, you realise how unsavoury and unhygienic it is allowing more than two teenagers to share a room. The one with six in smells like an abattoir and looks like East London on a morning in 1941.
Finally, you will find that the old myth of students wanting to get drunk and have sex on school trips is dispelled, because your lot are so crap and needy they wouldn’t have the guts. They will want to know at regular intervals of about five minutes where we’re going next, what’s it got there, how much longer is it, is there a shop and when do we get back to the hotel. You could be staring across at the Matterhorn, halfway up Machu Pichu, strolling along the Great Wall of China, sailing down the Rhine or standing by the Grand Canyon, it doesn’t matter, because they will still want to buy some fucking Haribo, have a fart contest in their hotel room and watch a very sweary American comedy film on the coach DVD player.
The coach pulls away, seatbelts lazily slung over one arm, and the students tuck into their breakfasts of cans of coke, chocolate bars and packets of Haribo. You feel like you’ll be the first to get sick. But as it turns out, this honour goes to a Year 9 girl who sat on the back seat and only got halfway through her bucket of pick n’ mix before requiring a second bucket at the front of the coach.
So, did you decide on an overseas trip, in which case the airport now beckons, or have you made a coach your home for the week? Did this all spring from a staffroom conversation about countries in the world you’d love to visit, but couldn’t afford to? China? Russia? Singapore? By taking a party of school children there, you only pay in terms of effort. And sure, it’ll be a big effort. It’s no holiday. But it’s an experience. Potentially, in our job, we could “experience” any country in the world at no financial cost, as long as we can persuade parents to stump up the fare for their child and as long as there isn’t currently an earthquake, political revolution or Civil War occurring at that time. Given that you have to book these things 18 months in advance, you never quite know. (Not that many of us were burnt over Libya recently.)
One child will have the audacity to ask you if teachers have to pay. When you explain that you don’t, because you’re working, in fact working overtime because you’re on duty 24 hours a day for 7 days, the student just asks again, “But you don’t have to pay, right? We’re paying your fare?” Yes, and your parents’ taxes pay our wages and we still get longer holidays then them, so fuck off now please.
Continental trips don’t always require travel by air. To keep the costs down, you may have opted for coach all the way. A fine idea until the 18th hour of travelling through France, through the night, four hours since the last piss-stop, the coach bog closed because the tank is now full of all the consequences of that Haribo and coke, plus you can’t sleep due to the crick in your neck and the faint odour of vomit and fart.
However, on the way there the channel tunnel is fun. Student gullibility proves as entertaining as ever as they stare out of the windows trying to spot fish. You halt temporarily at customs while French immigration cause you anxiety by taking a dislike to the one non-European passport in your pile. As the Nigerian Year 10 boy is led away you joke to the rest that he’s being strip searched, but you play down talk of this when he arrives back 30 minutes later looking like he’d just spent the night at Michael Jackson’s house.
Hotels have little to recommend them beyond having a roof, a toilet and somewhere to lie down to sleep. In this respect, they marginally edge out a coach for comfort. On the continent, they tend to have considered escape from fire only insofar as to ensure that windows open wide and should you have the same powers as Spiderman then you won’t be at risk of burning or falling to your death. Assume that the staircase will not permit escape, having been added as an afterthought for persons with 20-inch waists and 50-inch inside leg measurements. Those taking students on mountaineering trips should however find staircases and fire escapes manageable and just as challenging and fun as the mountains.
The hotel experience allows students to practice their studied languages too, because they will come into contact with members of the public, usually as they walk through the bar area. Although this section of the public isn’t anymore diverse than middle-aged men with moustaches and an unhealthy interest in your older female students, it still presents an opportunity for conversation. Like, “What the fuck are you looking at, you dirty old perv?”
Another horizon-widening opportunity comes courtesy of another school sharing your hotel. Teenagers tend to stare at each other un-self-consciously and then moan to teachers that the other kids keep looking at them. At some point, conflict will arise and so the resulting social contact with the teachers of the other school can be exploited to help your own professional development. You learn something. You learn that your rules for your students and your level of care and your resistance to the chance of getting pissed on duty makes you a far more responsible teacher than they are. Beware the phrase, “They’re only kids.”
Whoever the kids are, they won’t want to go to sleep. Ever. At least not until about an hour before you try to wake them up in the morning. As you force your way into their rooms at 6.00am and encourage them out of bed, you realise how unsavoury and unhygienic it is allowing more than two teenagers to share a room. The one with six in smells like an abattoir and looks like East London on a morning in 1941.
Finally, you will find that the old myth of students wanting to get drunk and have sex on school trips is dispelled, because your lot are so crap and needy they wouldn’t have the guts. They will want to know at regular intervals of about five minutes where we’re going next, what’s it got there, how much longer is it, is there a shop and when do we get back to the hotel. You could be staring across at the Matterhorn, halfway up Machu Pichu, strolling along the Great Wall of China, sailing down the Rhine or standing by the Grand Canyon, it doesn’t matter, because they will still want to buy some fucking Haribo, have a fart contest in their hotel room and watch a very sweary American comedy film on the coach DVD player.
Saturday 12 February 2011
Turning to the Dark Side
There’s a line in teaching and once you’ve crossed it you are lost to the Dark Side. It’s like that moment in Revenge of the Sith (the final Star Wars movie to you non-nerds) when Anakin (soon-to-be Darth Vader) Skywalker kills Samuel L Jackson (who isn’t half as hard as he is in Pulp Fiction) and drops to his knees to pledge loyalty to Darth Sidious, who’s like the Star Wars version of Bricktop from Snatch, a right nasty bastard.
Multiple film references aside, what I’m talking about here is the iron curtain between all the nice hard-working downtrodden teaching staff and the insidiously under-worked, over-paid, power-corrupted Senior Leadership Team. Becoming SLT is like catching leprosy and joining the Nazi SS at the same time.
However, you might be paradoxically liked as an individual and yet still detested as a group once you’ve been promoted out of the rank and file. Invariably any inevitable chink in your armour or less-than-perfect decision enacted as that group will justify the application of the term “useless” to SLT, thus altering the name to the Senior Leadership Useless Team, hereafter to be referred to as SLuTs.
As SLuTs you will have your own language, Masonic-like, an odious form of Teacherspeak, designed to sound professional and intended to pompously model to other staff a politically correct, precise and charmless educational terminology. For example, SLuTs are at pains to avoid using the word “kids.” But rather than settle for “students” you now favour the term “learners.” In fact, you often corrupt the plural form of this word and speak about “the learner.”
“How will this new strategy impact on the learner?”
Oh, la-di-fucking-da! (As Paul McCartney would have written if he wasn’t such a disgustingly cheerful bastard.)
The blame for such crass language lies with the failed teachers… sorry, I mean the ex-teachers who changed careers for training. One in-service training provider describes its teaching courses as “blended learning.” You might experience blended learning in your rise to tyranny, which officially means you have employed different types of learning on the course and unofficially means that you have had your time wasted in a variety of near-pointless activities.
Perhaps your re-education to think and speak in this higher form of educational vocabulary is the reason why you will suddenly stop socialising with non-SluT staff once you turn to the dark side. By-passing after-work drinks on a Friday and a polite lie to excuse yourself from the departmental meal will become second nature. After all, they are the rebels and you are Darth Vader and they wouldn’t want you to do that Jedi choking trick on them as they sip on their drink and socialise around the same table as you. Not only that, but there is the danger of startling the underlings by appearing almost human when you let your hair down. Seeing a SluT laugh, joke and get even moderately tipsy in a pub only serves to unnerve people and gives them that same uncomfortable sick feeling many of us have when we hear our parents talk about their sex lives.
In any job that can create stress, people will sometimes get emotional. Before defecting to the dark side you can let vent in the staff room as much as you like. Anger, tears, rebellious rants, opinionated pontificating, that’s all human nature. But stick on the Darth Vader suit and you have to bury all that emotion. Cold, hard, professionalism is required. And deep inside, where that repressed emotion festers, a ball of bastardness must build up. You might think holding a fart in all day while you teach is difficult, but this is something else. This is why you are given your own office as a SLuT, so that you can hide away a couple of times a day and stick drawing pins into blu-tack dolls of the members of staff who have given you the most grief. Or weep over a mountain of boring paperwork. Or lance your own thighs with a staple-gun as you tediously trawl through your inbox full of emails that are one of the following:
§ Educational junkmail
§ Notices to all staff from admin that are relevant to about 6 people
§ Problems to sort that can’t be sorted
§ Requests for meetings or replies to your requests for meetings
§ Someone pointlessly emailing the word thanks
But you can’t feel sorry for yourself. You don’t teach full days anymore. You have more time to do boring jobs (like making up boring jobs to give teachers who do teach full days most days.) And you get paid more, seemingly for working less, because no one sees 90% of what work you do. But they’ll notice your mistakes, like a goalkeeper gets judged on his errors more than his saves. Such is a SLuTs lot in life. So, deal with it, pick up your cheque and treat yourself to a couple of new suits each month. Just make sure they’re all black, armour-plated and come with a shiny helmet, cloak and light-sabre.
Multiple film references aside, what I’m talking about here is the iron curtain between all the nice hard-working downtrodden teaching staff and the insidiously under-worked, over-paid, power-corrupted Senior Leadership Team. Becoming SLT is like catching leprosy and joining the Nazi SS at the same time.
However, you might be paradoxically liked as an individual and yet still detested as a group once you’ve been promoted out of the rank and file. Invariably any inevitable chink in your armour or less-than-perfect decision enacted as that group will justify the application of the term “useless” to SLT, thus altering the name to the Senior Leadership Useless Team, hereafter to be referred to as SLuTs.
As SLuTs you will have your own language, Masonic-like, an odious form of Teacherspeak, designed to sound professional and intended to pompously model to other staff a politically correct, precise and charmless educational terminology. For example, SLuTs are at pains to avoid using the word “kids.” But rather than settle for “students” you now favour the term “learners.” In fact, you often corrupt the plural form of this word and speak about “the learner.”
“How will this new strategy impact on the learner?”
Oh, la-di-fucking-da! (As Paul McCartney would have written if he wasn’t such a disgustingly cheerful bastard.)
The blame for such crass language lies with the failed teachers… sorry, I mean the ex-teachers who changed careers for training. One in-service training provider describes its teaching courses as “blended learning.” You might experience blended learning in your rise to tyranny, which officially means you have employed different types of learning on the course and unofficially means that you have had your time wasted in a variety of near-pointless activities.
Perhaps your re-education to think and speak in this higher form of educational vocabulary is the reason why you will suddenly stop socialising with non-SluT staff once you turn to the dark side. By-passing after-work drinks on a Friday and a polite lie to excuse yourself from the departmental meal will become second nature. After all, they are the rebels and you are Darth Vader and they wouldn’t want you to do that Jedi choking trick on them as they sip on their drink and socialise around the same table as you. Not only that, but there is the danger of startling the underlings by appearing almost human when you let your hair down. Seeing a SluT laugh, joke and get even moderately tipsy in a pub only serves to unnerve people and gives them that same uncomfortable sick feeling many of us have when we hear our parents talk about their sex lives.
In any job that can create stress, people will sometimes get emotional. Before defecting to the dark side you can let vent in the staff room as much as you like. Anger, tears, rebellious rants, opinionated pontificating, that’s all human nature. But stick on the Darth Vader suit and you have to bury all that emotion. Cold, hard, professionalism is required. And deep inside, where that repressed emotion festers, a ball of bastardness must build up. You might think holding a fart in all day while you teach is difficult, but this is something else. This is why you are given your own office as a SLuT, so that you can hide away a couple of times a day and stick drawing pins into blu-tack dolls of the members of staff who have given you the most grief. Or weep over a mountain of boring paperwork. Or lance your own thighs with a staple-gun as you tediously trawl through your inbox full of emails that are one of the following:
§ Educational junkmail
§ Notices to all staff from admin that are relevant to about 6 people
§ Problems to sort that can’t be sorted
§ Requests for meetings or replies to your requests for meetings
§ Someone pointlessly emailing the word thanks
But you can’t feel sorry for yourself. You don’t teach full days anymore. You have more time to do boring jobs (like making up boring jobs to give teachers who do teach full days most days.) And you get paid more, seemingly for working less, because no one sees 90% of what work you do. But they’ll notice your mistakes, like a goalkeeper gets judged on his errors more than his saves. Such is a SLuTs lot in life. So, deal with it, pick up your cheque and treat yourself to a couple of new suits each month. Just make sure they’re all black, armour-plated and come with a shiny helmet, cloak and light-sabre.
Saturday 4 December 2010
Snow and Sleigh Balls (yes, balls)
Unless like me you live in the (un)lucky pocket of England north of London, that has had a mere eunuch’s-inch worth of snow, you have probably found your school closed for a day or five recently. What you wish for is one overnight splurge that buries everything for a couple of days, forcing decisiveness from your Head in closing the school and letting you know early enough so that you can issue yourself a return ticket from bed to toilet for your morning wee.
What you often get, though, is that measure of snow which still allows your school to open, but which makes your journey a treacherous bastard. Once you’ve skidded (both inside and out) your way into work, throwing off the logic of your natural atheism to embrace the ancient human vulnerability that forces you to prayer to something for deliverance, you slide into school and beseech the same god to sabotage the boiler or at least send the sun out soon to melt the stuff before you have to go home. But if that cruel deity dumps more of the white stuff on you, then who will know your fate? There’ll be no Han Solo trekking out on a tauntaun to find you if you’re not home on time.
Then there’s the day to get through. Staff commitment has been tested. You applaud the teacher who has travelled by 5 forms of public transport across three counties to arrive on time; and you curse the colleague who lives a 5-minute walk away, but who stays at home, because the uncoordinated cluts fell over on the leaves in Autumn and is therefore too fucking spastic to negotiate a quarter mile of snow-lined pavement. At least these days you don’t find yourself covering her lesson.
Then you curse the fact that you’re on break duty today in that sector of the school site best designed for snowball fights. And yet the Head has decreed that there should be no throwing of snow. Trying to enforce that will be like trying to enforce a ban on buggery in a boarding school.
But you get through it and the snow continues for a few days and then it turns to ice and the snowball fights cause carnage, so that there is blood and limbs everywhere, and the playground resembles a white-washed version of the Somme. Kids are carted off for stitches, amputations and trauma-therapy and the world looks like someone’s dropped a giant dishwasher and shit flavoured Slush Puppy on it.
And then it’s nearly Christmas time. Because it’s December.
Fun-loving, altruistic staff organise the Christmas party, book a table for 40 at the local hotel, send out menus, take deposits, discover that only 12 are willing to come or cough up in advance and then cancel it. Everyone moans.
So, a low-key event is semi-organised at the local Chinese buffet (doing Turkey-fried testicles as a special) followed by an informal evening in the school’s local pub. And the six people with the least friends and family to buy presents for turn up.
This is still before the last week of term, as it’s an arse to book anything close to Christmas. The Buffet-Six decided unilaterally that next year’s Christmas do would be in July.
Come the last week of term, the kids start petitioning you for fun lessons or watching a film right from Monday period one. Knowing full well that 5 days of making Maths-themed Christmas Cards and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” will be more intolerable than trying to teach, you set them an assessment in revenge for their pitiful begging and then on Tuesday you slide “Home Alone” into the DVD.
By the time you finish showing “Home Alone 5: About time you can look after yourself, you’re 27 you lame asshole” it is indeed the last day of term. Half-day, a special assembly of performances from the less talented students and the failed actors and dancers on the staff (there has to be an age limit on wearing fish-net tights, never mind a gender one) and then it’s down the pub to drink yourself silly, to marvel at two colleagues who never spoke to each other before who are now snogging by the quiz machine and to degenerate into a game of shag-marry-avoid before realising it’s closing time, it’s snowed again and you’re all sleeping in the school gym feeling awkward about your answers to that game.
Merry Christmas.
What you often get, though, is that measure of snow which still allows your school to open, but which makes your journey a treacherous bastard. Once you’ve skidded (both inside and out) your way into work, throwing off the logic of your natural atheism to embrace the ancient human vulnerability that forces you to prayer to something for deliverance, you slide into school and beseech the same god to sabotage the boiler or at least send the sun out soon to melt the stuff before you have to go home. But if that cruel deity dumps more of the white stuff on you, then who will know your fate? There’ll be no Han Solo trekking out on a tauntaun to find you if you’re not home on time.
Then there’s the day to get through. Staff commitment has been tested. You applaud the teacher who has travelled by 5 forms of public transport across three counties to arrive on time; and you curse the colleague who lives a 5-minute walk away, but who stays at home, because the uncoordinated cluts fell over on the leaves in Autumn and is therefore too fucking spastic to negotiate a quarter mile of snow-lined pavement. At least these days you don’t find yourself covering her lesson.
Then you curse the fact that you’re on break duty today in that sector of the school site best designed for snowball fights. And yet the Head has decreed that there should be no throwing of snow. Trying to enforce that will be like trying to enforce a ban on buggery in a boarding school.
But you get through it and the snow continues for a few days and then it turns to ice and the snowball fights cause carnage, so that there is blood and limbs everywhere, and the playground resembles a white-washed version of the Somme. Kids are carted off for stitches, amputations and trauma-therapy and the world looks like someone’s dropped a giant dishwasher and shit flavoured Slush Puppy on it.
And then it’s nearly Christmas time. Because it’s December.
Fun-loving, altruistic staff organise the Christmas party, book a table for 40 at the local hotel, send out menus, take deposits, discover that only 12 are willing to come or cough up in advance and then cancel it. Everyone moans.
So, a low-key event is semi-organised at the local Chinese buffet (doing Turkey-fried testicles as a special) followed by an informal evening in the school’s local pub. And the six people with the least friends and family to buy presents for turn up.
This is still before the last week of term, as it’s an arse to book anything close to Christmas. The Buffet-Six decided unilaterally that next year’s Christmas do would be in July.
Come the last week of term, the kids start petitioning you for fun lessons or watching a film right from Monday period one. Knowing full well that 5 days of making Maths-themed Christmas Cards and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” will be more intolerable than trying to teach, you set them an assessment in revenge for their pitiful begging and then on Tuesday you slide “Home Alone” into the DVD.
By the time you finish showing “Home Alone 5: About time you can look after yourself, you’re 27 you lame asshole” it is indeed the last day of term. Half-day, a special assembly of performances from the less talented students and the failed actors and dancers on the staff (there has to be an age limit on wearing fish-net tights, never mind a gender one) and then it’s down the pub to drink yourself silly, to marvel at two colleagues who never spoke to each other before who are now snogging by the quiz machine and to degenerate into a game of shag-marry-avoid before realising it’s closing time, it’s snowed again and you’re all sleeping in the school gym feeling awkward about your answers to that game.
Merry Christmas.
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