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.

History

“They say that the UK is the most constipated country in the world.

I’d like to see some hard evidence of that.”

If you teach history, you probably encourage your students to think like TV police detectives. This method of pedagogy wasn’t so popular in the 1970’s, unless your teacher wanted you to use casually racist terminology, kick seven shades of shit out of people and order women to either put their knickers on or take them off before making the tea.

Teaching history in the 1970’s and 80’s rarely strayed from the imparting of facts and the expectation that these facts were all remembered. There was no analysis, synthesis, comparison, evaluation, interpretation, enquiry or any other skill that required application of the knowledge acquired from copying lines from textbooks and undertaking simple comprehension exercises.

Nowadays, all of you find yourself questioning students in order to develop their own questioning abilities, whilst hoping that they don’t question you about anything that you don’t know the answer to.

Like history.

The difficulty you probably encounter when confronted by interested students with inquiring minds is that they expect you to know everything about history. Given that history is everything that ever happened to everyone ever, this expectation is a somewhat unreasonably weighty one.

Unlike Marmite subjects, such as Maths and Geography, people tend to either love or hate parts of history depending on the era studied. Adults will often tell you which bits of history they enjoy, although this rarely strays outside the ubiquitous Tudor, World War Two and Roman periods. You’ll be told at Parents’ Evening how a son or daughter (or to be fair, it’s usually a son) watches the History Channel a lot. But this channel only really exists to remind us that the Nazis were bad and to show us what brilliant weapons we had in the war.

Two of the most ignorant accusations made against History are:

“Why do we have to learn about stuff that happened in the past, rather than what’s happening now?”
and…
“Why don’t we learn about British History?”

If you’re a teacher worth your salt, you’ll answer a question with a question. To the first, you might respond with, “Do you watch the news?” If the student doesn’t watch the news, then you’ve identified the pointlessness in trying to answer when they’ve just undermined their own question. If they do watch the news, then you’re onto a winner.

The second question does have more worth. The answer is that we know people are naturally more interested in death, disaster, extremism and suffering and these characteristics are best served by studying slavery, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. All of which are important to study, but their very presence overshadows all the British history that you also teach, because students soon forget about our nation’s more moderate and gradual historical evolution over the centuries. The development of Parliamentary power, the social reforms of the Industrial Revolution, the conflict and consensus between political parties; none of these match the emotionally-charged badness of History’s evil bastards.

Death and disaster sell. The students who lap this up are the future motorway rubber-neckers. In showing the film “Mississippi Burning” to some 14 year-olds recently (yes, I know it’s an 18 certificate, but it was all done above board) a girl acted on our advice to leave the room when she found a scene too distressing. She sat through the close-range gunshot to the head in the opening scene and the racist violence and abuse thereafter, but told me that watching a fish being cut open was just too disgusting to bear.

Film and other multi-media have made History far more visual and (therefore) appealing than it used to be. Back in those less enlightened decades mentioned earlier, History books might have had a black and white drawing every fifth or sixth page. Some people might argue that at least in those text-dominated days students were encouraged to use their imagination, whereas now we can show them History in the manner of a form of entertainment. Arguably, we shouldn’t abandon visual stimuli when it is available out of some fear of strangling imagination, because throughout history the development of art, writing and performance only served to encourage imagination rather than replace it. (So, the old fart that once criticised interactive whiteboards to me, citing the restricting imagination argument, can go whistle out of his arse.)

And there is so much multi-media to choose from. You might want to avoid those TV documentaries that have a Simon Schama or David Starkey constantly on camera, walking across a historical site, trying to describe the events in a patronisingly, supercilious and annoying voice. Both of these wankers need to be locked up in the Tower for a decade before being beheaded by their personal gimp with a blunt hardback volume of one of their books.

Better than that is You Tube. A lot of what you’ll find, though, is some American kids’ High School projects; and for all the reasons obvious in that sentence, these videos will be as good as diarrhoea. So avoid that soft option and find proper footage of 20th century events or some nerds dressed up and recreating a Civil War battle or a memorably foolish song from the Horrible Histories franchise.

In fact, the only way to make students remember History and therefore want to learn more about it is to send it up. Granted, there’s not much mileage for humour in slavery, genocide or any wars within living memory; but everything else in history is fair game for ridicule. We all have a nasty streak to our sense of humour, and this should be exploited.

Open Evening

Bums on seats are what provide schools with the funds necessary to put you the teacher in the classroom with an interactive whiteboard, a set of textbooks and a pay cheque just robust enough to wave away the wolves from your modest middle-class front door. Every one of these bums squeezes out of the government a couple of grand a year and thus we have in simple terms two types of school – the under subscribed and the over subscribed.

Don’t be under the mistaken illusion that under subscribed schools are shit and over subscribed schools are good, even if the Coalition government seems capable of one day refining Ofsted’s inspection criteria down to these two base judgements. For those that have worked in both flavoured establishments, the difference is subtle and in many cases at odds with local perceptions. In fact, it is local perceptions that help drive a school towards one of these two poles. Parents, where possible, move home away from the Undies (as we might call the under subscribed schools) to live nearer the Overies (the places with such good reputations that the entry criteria is the ability to smell the PE changing rooms from your own back garden.) The result is that the Undies get the students of parents unable to move home, while the Overies find that the surrounding residential area has over-inflated property prices due to demand and therefore house only those students whose parents can afford to buy or rent there. The difference between the two sets of parents is usually therefore a socio-economic one, and this sadly creates different sets of baggage for the students in the two schools: the Undies harbour a greater number of students from less prosperous and/or less stable and/or less academically successful households, while the Overies get to feast on students whose parents actually use the term “and/or” in their correspondence. (And the word “actually” for that matter… And the phrase “for that matter” incidentally… And… ok, moving on)

Now, back to bums on seats. The Overies are not all complacent about remaining Overies, unless they are selective schools that cream off much of the district’s most academic (i.e. good at tests) kids. Many Overies were once Undies and had to work fucking hard to set the snowball rolling in the opposite direction. They know that the bum rush could one day dry up and so they must maintain their appeal to the local child-bearers. As for the Undies, they have to convince parents that they’re not as shit as they appear (from their shitty results and articles in a vindictive local press) so that they can attract as many bums on seats as possible that want to be bums on seats there and not just bums that have to settle for seats they didn’t want, because the seats where they wanted to put their bums have all been taken by bums sitting in bigger gardens a mere waft of sweaty arm-pits away from their local Overy establishment.

Therefore, for the Overies and for the Undies, Open Evening is the biggest night of the year. This is when a school slaps on its lipstick, takes out it’s most appealing low-cut dress and flashes the local community its most charming smile in an effort to say, “Come and plant that bum on my seat, mister.”

Yes, I agree. I know what you’re thinking. That’s not the most suitable metaphor for the process of attracting 11 year olds and their parents into choosing your school for their secondary education. But it’s correct. We do indeed spruce ourselves up and put on a good show, because we want to look our best. Which is why students are sent home early on that day and come in late the day after to find the school completely unrecognisable. All the displays are new, there are signs up showing the direction to each department, there are plants – yes, organic wildlife – dotted around the place and there’s no sign of even one stray coke can, bent chair leg or graffiti penis anywhere.

So, what happens on Open Evening? Each department displays its best resources and examples of student work and invites prospective students to take part in a fun activity that totally misrepresents what lessons will be like in practice once they join the school. But the kids don’t mind, because they win sweets.

The resources on show can sometimes offer an alternative reality as well. When a child is handling historical artefacts, or using some amazing technological gadget or getting to play with keyboards in the music department, you know full well that these things cost too much to risk taking out except in A’level lessons, because otherwise they’ll get trashed.

But the kids don’t mind, because they get to play with stuff and get sweets and the teachers are fun. Only, you know by half six when you’re face feels like it’s been stretched round the fat side of a tennis racquet that your smile has been false all Open Evening, because you’ve been here for 10 hours and some little shit is sticking a school prospectus into the Bunsen burner as an experiment while his Dad asks you difficult questions on account of him being a parent-governor and therefore an ill-informed nosey do-gooder.

Open Evenings provide teachers with their longest working day of the year. If you’re working in one of the Overies, then 45 minutes after the advertised finish time, with so many punters still loitering and asking about your policy for “pushing more able children” (and fuck me, everyone’s child is more able!) then your fixed smile looks so murderous that only those with social insight uncommon to their socio-economic group feel the need to climb back over the fence into their back garden before you say something mildly offensive to them. And if you work in one of the Undies, then you can start packing up an hour early, because the third set of parents have already been past your corridor and your exercise in futility has exhausted you.

The Start of Term

You were anxious that you’d forget to go back to work on September 1st because for the last 6 weeks, days and dates have dissolved into one big soup of inertia and apathy and you’ve lost any sense of time. Fortunately, you will be alerted to the fact that the start of term approaches by the following occurrences:

- Trailers on TV for the new series of The Inbetweeners and Waterloo Road;
- You can’t fit your trolley through the supermarket entrance without knocking into a display of special offer “Back to Skool” stationary (you curse the dickhead who suggested the deliberate mis-spelling of this slogan);
- There is a long queue of shaggy-haired young boys with their mums in the barbers.

The day the supermarket runs dry of “Back to Skool” stationary is the day you should be back at work.

INSET day! No kids. Every teacher wears their own clothes, women splash on fake tan and the men sport their summer beard for the final time. The Head, in casual corduroy trousers and mis-matched jumper, delivers his state of the nation speech, flashes up the exam results on a powerpoint and rallies the troops. Then he gets all the newbies to stand up to be introduced, while the rest of you ask yourselves in reference to each one, “would I?”

Then chaos commences. Because no matter what work and preparation anyone has done over the summer, the inability for anyone to liase with each other means that everything is only 80% ready.

Everything apart from the IT system, which is about 30% ready, because the network support team have spent the summer eating pies, watching porn, doing 3 hour days and hiding each others’ trousers round the school for a joke.

Two days later the kids come back. Starting with the Year 7’s. In the bad old days, you’d be bending over backwards to introduce the nervy little ‘uns into secondary school life with a friendly, gentle approach. Nowadays, you find your chin on your chest as you watch open-mouthed at how overly confident and cocky the new generation have turned out. What the fuck do they do in primary schools? Train them to be Big Brother contestants? As it turns out, this mouthy minority colour your view, you end up shouting at a whole class and 2/3 of them go home with piss-stains in their new “Back to Skool” trousers due to the trauma.

Then the older kids return. And it’s like you’d never had six weeks of daytime TV, hour-long baths at 2pm and making arse-moulds out of your sofa. All the behavioural baggage they took away last July, they bring back in September. You wonder about their lives in those 6 weeks and realise it was much the same as yours, but probably involved more hanging around McDonald’s and park playgrounds.

You plan your lessons for the first week: Give out exercise books, re-establish ground rules, draw a title page. By the 3rd day, after 18 lessons of this, the students crave intellectual challenge and start asking questions about the news. Like, why does everyone hate the old man in the disabled car? He’s the Pope, you say.

And then you get on with the job of starting to teach your new GCSE syllabus, which you spent many hours planning over the summer (between baths and the human abattoir that is known as The Jeremy Kyle show) knowing full well that the fucking Tories want to replace it as soon as possible with a different qualification which will improve standards of education in this country, standards that have fallen every successive year under Labour. (Based purely on the evidence of the Jeremy Kyle show rather than a less-sensational, media-appealing body of evidence such as exam results and Ofsted inspection reports, which tend to offer the opposite view.)

Finally, you open your new academic diary and with your fresh gel pen you neatly write dates for parents’ evenings and reports, before counting the number of days left until half term, when for one small week, you get to be a blob again.

Summer Holidays

There’s no shirking the issue, I have to deal with it sometime and that time is now. Controversial, arguably unfair or perhaps well-earned depending on the degree of your jealous animosity or guilty defensiveness, I refer now to the subject matter of a teacher’s 5 ½ week summer holiday.

Out of deference to all you normal folk who get less annual leave in a year than we teachers are gifted in July-August, I will try not to complain about it. I will merely paint a picture using a variety of colours. Like Benetton.

First of all, yes we do work in the summer, the conscientious more so. But without a time pressure work tends to expand to fill the space you shove it into. Like a tampon. Thirty minutes work can fill four hours, because you tend to build in a varied programme of regular breaks, one break every time you get bored. So, if you’re marking, that tends to be every 3 minutes.

And it’s amazing what you can find to do to punctuate your time with. A cup of coffee, ten minutes of Jeremy Kyle, a poo, twenty minutes on twitter, reordering your CD rack, another poo.

Now, for the sake of comedy rather than accuracy, we could divide teachers into a small number of groups based on likely summer holiday pastimes.

Group 1 – the under 30’s with no children and expendable income. Sub-group 1A, singles. Travel. Usually South-East Asia.
Sub-group 1B, those in couples. Travel. Anywhere hot for a week, some dutiful visits to respective family members and a festival.
Sub-group 1C, those engaged to be married. Stay at home and paint the walls.

Group 2 – the over 45’s with adult children and expendable income.
Sub-group 2A, Heads, Deputies and Assistant Headteachers. Four weeks in France, returning in time for results day.
Sub-group 2B, middle-managers. Two weeks in France.

Group 3 – the thirty-somethings with young children.
Five weeks of visiting the park (when its not raining), soft-play centres, swimming pools, cinemas etc… one excursion every day or two, and lots of time at home feeling like you need adult company, but knowing it would be morally reprehensible to pay for it. So, you go on Facebook instead.
Then one week in Devon in a cottage by the sea.

Group 4 – the forty-somethings, with children who are able to piss off out to play on their own.
Work, a cup of coffee, ten minutes of Jeremy Kyle, a poo, twenty minutes on twitter, reordering your CD rack, another poo.
Then one week in France.

Taking away the structure of a normal term-time week is like a fat person removing a corset. Your life gets flabby. You embrace procrastination like a religion, almost like a holy war on urgency. You know there are lots of useful jobs you could do round the house and lots of family members you could visit, but there’s never any need to do any of it today or this week. There are a lot of tomorrows and a lot of next weeks to put things off until.

If you have a partner who does a normal job, then you might experience the following:
A phone call at 10 o’clock in the morning to see how your day is going. You have of course not long got up and have absolutely nothing to say in reply;
Your partner wanting to go to bed at 11, and you agreeing out of politeness, not wanting to seem unsociable, and then reading for about two hours while they snore, because you simply haven’t expended enough energy to need any sleep that particular night;
A dutiful urge to do housework… thirty minutes before your partner gets home, so it looks like you weren’t sat on your arse all day;
A need to have a list of about four things to tell your partner you’ve done when he/she gets home, which sound like they quite conceivably could have filled your whole day (suggesting that you lead a purposeful existence) when really it only took a combined total of twenty minutes to do all of them.

Most of us do actually go into work in the summer, usually to create some rubbish by clearing out cupboards for the site team to lug down to the skip in between doing all the jobs they had planned to do. Any work on computers in work is forbidden, however, as the network team (aka The IT Crowd) also require 5 weeks to do three days work in doing whatever they do to the computers in that time. Stuff, I think it is. (They tell us, but who fucking understands what they say?)

And that’s the summer. A leviathan break from work in which you don’t finish your novel, don’t have anything interesting to say about what you’re doing (to your partner, on twitter or on facebook), don’t do enough work or jobs round the house and generally question the whole purpose of your existence as a human being.

I’m sure Satre was a teacher who wrote his books in August.

Right, I’m off for a poo. I may be some time.

Philosophy, Twitter and Big Brother

If you studied the history of philosophical thought, then you’d realise that someone has something original and worthwhile to say about every 50 years.

But some people on Twitter seem to believe that they have something philosophically profound to say every 50 seconds.

We’re all entitled to mould and perfect our own individual philosophies in life and I’m not undermining our freedom to share these with the world; but I am humoured beyond annoyance by the apparent presumption by so many that they are the thought-prophets of the new age.

As evidence for my claim, I will randomly browse Twitter now and report to you verbatim some of the 2-bit, fatuous and puerile philosophical utterances that I encounter. I may even be tempted to rip apart a few of them:

“Don’t change yourself for anybody but yourself… be happy with who you are!”
Well, I wouldn’t encourage your average rapist, paedophile or drug-dealer to adhere to that clichéd teaching.

“The world’s a playground. You know that when you’re a kid, but somewhere along the line everybody forgets it.”
So this arsehole wants us all to be irresponsibly hedonistic? In my playground at school there was bullying, casual racism and sexual harassment (I kicked Tracey O’Brien up the bum to show her I fancied her.)

“God is too good. I don’t care what ur going through right now! Tell him thank u :) “
Tweeted by some bloke showing off his six-pack. I’m not sure people from the over 30 stone obese and depressed fraternity would empathise, nor the one third of the world’s population living in poverty who this c**t doesn’t care about.

Now the thing is, the culprit of this last crass comment had 107,000 followers. Fuck me, Jesus only had 12 and look what happened as a result of that! Is there a danger that one of these tossers will become the fulcrum for a new world religion?

In truth, no. Because nowadays people care far more about what they have to say than for what others are saying. We talk (or write or text or tweet) with far more concentration and attention that we listen. If I’m wrong, then try to remember what the rest of this blog is about, you self-obsessed narcissist!

So, to briefly link this to the subject of education, which is my clothes peg for such random rants as these, we don’t teach the history of philosophy very often, but we do encourage independent thought. After all, teachers are generally upper-working class, reasonably educated converts to lower-middle-class liberalism with socialist pretensions, ashamed of our darker more conservative thoughts. It’s not like we have an agenda is it?

Ok, that’s rather cynical. We are broadly humanist and humanitarian, or well meaning at least and our tolerance allows students to form their own opinions. We deliberately leave a void for them to fill, which is better than the bad old days when organised religion and submissive obedience filled most corners of that philosophical hole.

I think we do “values” very well in schools and philosophies very badly. And so enters Big Brother to fill the void.

My favourite pieces of crass philosophy from Big Brother, universally shared by every housetwat ever to appear on this show since it began targeting the lowest common denominator in the viewing public are as follows:

“Be yourself. Be genuine. Don’t try to be something you’re not.”

“Say it like it is. Be honest. If you got a problem with someone, say it to their face. Don’t be nice to them one minute and slag them off behind their back the next. That’s two-faced.”

“I’m just saying my opinion. I have a right to express my opinion.”

I don’t think Big Brother is to blame for expounding this shit and encouraging our youth to adhere to such insular, vain and disharmonious values in life. These philosophies are the bastard children of society and the programme-makers have inadvertently chosen only disciples of this ego-religion with which to populate the house and propagate such crap.

To start tearing at the edges of these trite attitudes…

“Be yourself.” As a natural form of development, in the search for one’s own identity, teenagers will often try to be anything but themselves. We’ve all created personas for ourselves until we’ve found one or more that fit and realised that’s who we are. We’ve all wanted to be someone else, but most of us grow out of that by the time we are 20. Those who don’t, apply for Big Brother.

“Be honest… say it to their face.” Can you really imagine a world where we all say what goes through our heads? How upsetting would that be for people? Most of us think bad things about most people at least some of the time. But would we really advocate that students in schools tell the fat girl she’s fat, the smelly boy he stinks, the stupid kid that he’s thick as poo? Would we say to people that we find them annoying, selfish, thoughtless, lying, attention-seeking, sleazy, etc… etc… unless we really had to? Of course not. That’s hurtful and not always necessary, so out of respect for people’s feelings it is usually better to express these views out of earshot. That’s not being two-faced, it’s showing some thoughtfulness.

Maybe I am wrong and this attitude is confined to Big Brother, because they can all be caught out by not “saying it like it is to your face” when their gossiping is played back after eviction. In which case, then the show “is “ poisoning young viewers’ values rather than reflecting them.

Fianally, this shit about our right to express our opinion. Yes, we do have this freedom, but as normal the constraints on every freedom are ignored by some in this regard. This is when this apparent right or opinion also entitles us to the right to insult others:

“I think you are a wanker. I’m not being rude, I’m just telling you my opinion.”

No, you’re being rude. And in some cases, your opinion could be racist, sexist or downright depraved. Let’s not let people grow up believing they can express “any” opinion please!

To end, going back to philosophy, I shall dip back into twitter and share with you one more example of bullshit:

I found this within a minute. A certain person, sadly indicative of his stereotype, in one tweet preached to us that it makes no sense “the way men downgrade women and don’t recognise a woman’s worth.” In his very next tweet he say he “tucks every female follower in, while kissing them softly on the forehead.”

Sleazy arsehole.

Goodbye.

End of Term

You will find it painfully difficult to give a shit about anything in the last week of term.

In the bad good old days of the nineties, the nineteen nineties that is, the end of term was essentially the final seven weeks after the May half term, when you could confiscate some kid’s bike and ride it around the staff room during a free lesson; or play pac-man while on exam invigilation; or generally abandon book marking as a comparatively pointless pastime in favour of disrupting a colleague’s lesson by walking past the window and staring skywards with a look of frozen terror on your face.

They’ve stopped you invigilating these days, plus you now have to account for all free time gained as a result of Years 11 and 13 leaving after their exams, with evidence of how you have used your “development time”.

Always have a problem with the concept of “development time.” What, is it like puberty or something?

You’ll be asked to teach right up until the last day, by which point 10% of students are already with their families on some beach or poolside soaking up some Med solar rays, and the other 90% know that reports are written, tests are done and they could write an essay in their exercise book on why teachers enjoy eating each other’s toenails as a coffee accompaniment at break, and they won’t get in trouble, because you’ll never read it.

They’ll ask you for a fun lesson, you’ll ask why, they’ll remind you it’s the end of term, you’ll claim that every lesson is fun and then add that is for you anyway. Then you’ll cave in and put Shrek on.

When it appears that the boy in the class who looks like Shrek is being cruelly and heartlessly taunted by everyone, including the nerdy kid with a surname for a first name, who does chess club in the library every lunchtime, then you dust off a more educational video.

The students are too dumbfounded by the artefact in your hand, the VHS tape, to take the opportunity to protest, as you slide into the VCR a many-times-shown copy of Blackadder, which you claim is funny and historical. There isn’t even a titter of amusement, as the poor quality of the tape and the too-swift and too-erudite Elton-Curtis comic similes leave students frowning and demanding that Shrek goes back on.

You know you still have one more lesson with these cultural-trash-hungry teenagers and you’ve kept The Simpsons on DVD (no less!) to treat them with, so you have to resort to a wordsearch for the final 15 minutes.

The wordsearch is without doubt the final refuge for a teacher that has given up on everything, except maybe breathing. The wordsearch has all the educational value of 7 hours sleep and can be successfully completed by invertebrates and blind dogs whose paws have been hacked off.

But it fills a gap. You go to the staffroom and fall asleep, wake up when the bell goes for the final lesson, sign everyone’s leaving card before you amble back to the two 6th formers bothered to turn up and tell them a long story about years ago you used to love the end of term and really and truly speaking, once it got to half-two Friday this week, you’ll be half on your way to a hangover that only 6 weeks in bed can cure.

Stereotypes

Somewhere in the PSHE curriculum, it says that you have to teach students about stereotypes.

Undeniably, there is an ideological agenda at the core of such teaching, which the cynical might label as political and the more reasoned might describe as enlightening, humanitarian, egalitarian or something else soft and nice, which I generally agree with, not being a bastard that is.

Let’s face it, the country is awash with prejudice, because it is a very natural flaw of human nature to lazily categorise people into simplistic groups and cast barely substantiated judgements at them, while deep down we don’t actually fully subscribe to these glib thoughts that prop up our prejudices.

Therefore, you will assume that students have these prejudices, and so you teach them – or rather challenge them – to think deeply about their opinions of other (groups of) people in the hope that they become a lot more enlightened than their parents (and a great fucking amount more enlightened than their grandparents) in their attitudes towards people who are superficially dissimilar to themselves.

This is how it might go. Lesson one – write down every word you can think of to describe a homosexual.

The flood gates open. To challenge prejudice you have to bring it out into the open. Like a séance. Call up the evil spirits and only then can you exorcise them.

Only, to the students, it appears that you’ve given them license to write a plethora of abusive and insulting words onto sugar paper. It might even become competitive, with efforts to out-do each other in terms of how many forms of homophobic abuse they can think of.

Once this catharsis is complete, you are able to start tackling the tricky subject of stereotypes, in which you preach that everyone is in fact different and you blindly ignore the truth that we all conform to a stereotype to some extent at least, because if we didn’t then the whole concept of stereotypes would not even exist.

It’s too dangerous to tell students that they are in fact “not” completely individual, forming independent opinions and endowed with unique tastes and talents.

It’s better to let students find out the dark and bleak truth for themselves.

They all assume that they’re different, but in an effort to fit in, they try to be the same as each other and end up casting suspicion on (or systematically bullying) anyone who seems significantly different to them.

The evidence confronts them everyday, because like it or not, you as teachers often conform to teacher stereotypes. Beyond the shared capacity for weird humour, talking too much, use of obscure “Teacherspeak” phrases and the wearing of smart casual clothing from supermarkets and Matalan, you do tend to dip a toe, a foot or a leg into the subject-stereotype puddle. In some cases, you plunge in up to your ears.

This is not where I fall into the trap of picking on PE teachers for being illiterate, beer-swilling, overly-butch, pseudo-rebels. Even though the odd female one does manage to fill every gap in that particular mould. (But none that I work with now, should any colleague be reading this. In fact, far from it, to be fair.) That would be a cliché. If anything, PE staff demonstrate remarkable literary competence in the application of suffixes, by adroitly adding a Y or O to the end of each others’ surnames. (PE teachers refuse to recognise that anyone has a first name, even students.) Linguistic dexterity can sometimes lead to the use of “–ers” where a pronoun ends up sounding too Brazilian or just too daft when buffered with Y or O.

Just imagine if some of history’s greatest individuals had ended up as PE teachers! US Civil Rights leader, Kingy; English playwright, the Bard, Shakeso, and British War-Time PM, Churchers. There’s a suggestion that Gandhi was in fact a PE teacher, named Mahatma Gand.

On the subject of History, people who teach this subject provide the strongest evidence against the accusation that “those who can do and those who can’t teach.” Because although there may occasionally be some truth in the stereotypical view that drama teachers are failed actors (Luvvies without the luck,) who would ever think that any History teacher ever wanted to become an historian? This might also stem from the fact (my view) that History teachers are perhaps the most normal of all subject deliverers and the least teacher-like. In fact, anyone teaching a Humanities subject by default is more human and better able to relate to other members of the species. Probably because at university they did the least work and had the most time to sit around talking and drinking with other people.

In contrast, Scientists at university were in the lab on campus all day 5 or 6 days a week, many ending up with an inability to communicate with humans. Mathematicians are the same. That’s why there is a shortage of teachers in both these areas. Only those who managed to demonstrate human characteristics and some awareness that living organisms can be communicated with outside of a petri dish, have felt tempted to apply for teacher training. Mind you, that doesn’t stop the majority growing beards.

Which brings us – as I wonder if I spelt petri dish correctly – to the most unbearded of staff, English teachers. Women whose love of literature just slightly outdoes their love of small children, plum for secondary over primary education and swell the ranks of English departments leaving no room for men to get a look in. Only a confident man would enter an English department office anyway, because the sheer magnitude of combined intellect and femininity can be too intimidating for most males.

Finally, a mention for languages teachers. They pretty much defy all stereotyping, because they are only united by their ability to speak another language, so they tend to be a diverse breed.

So, there you have it. Students are confronted by stereotypes, students fit stereotypes and yet students are taught not to stereotype. Now, write down all the words that might describe teachers…

Meetings

Bet you any money you complain about meetings. Bet you any money you moan about how some of them are a waste of time, are too long, don’t allow people a chance to air their views, allow people too much of a chance to air their views, infringe on your desire to get home early, feel repetitive and stale and completely lack any opportunities for anyone to make jokes.

Get a grip. The only reason why you moan about meetings is because they are called meetings. If someone said, “Can you come along and a few of us will chat about this,” then it wouldn’t feel so bad.

But as soon as you give something a name, it becomes a thing. And things are not always good. Things are like monsters, that stalk you and catch up with you and then sometimes even you send a monster after other people, even though you know everybody hates monsters.

Meetings. They’re things. In fact, they’re things with tassels. There are little things attached to the thing that you call a meeting. Such as an agenda.

Agendas are the things with the fewest words that still always get printed on A4. Despite this, you’ll abbreviate the last item as AOB, because God forbid you write “Any Other Business” and take up too much room on the big, Arctic landscape that is your A4 agenda.

Ouch, there’s another thing. An item. Items on an agenda. Tassels on tassels. In normal life, an item is either a piece of clothing (if you’re a woman) or a couple who are in love, co-habit or at least attend weekly social events together (if, again, you’re a woman. Men only use the word item in reference to agendas.)

Another tassel is the minutes. Formal meetings will always start with item one, issues from the previous minutes; which means, let’s just check if:

§ The person taking the minutes of the last meeting exhibited symptoms of a pulse at any moment during it;
§ The discussion ended with something of some worth actually being said;
§ The moment at which someone farted, suggested another person was thick or dribbled onto their tie mid-sentence was recorded just to spice up the dull monotony of the subject matter.

Minutes also remind us of those tassels we call “actions.” Like the word “minute”, the noun “action” transforms itself incongruously into a verb in your meeting:

Teacher 1: Could you minute that please.
Minute-taker: Write it down you mean?
Teacher 1: Yes, minute it, so that someone can action it next week.
Minute-taker: Do it?
Teacher 1: Yes, do it!
Teacher 2: Once they’ve actioned it, do you want them to evidence it as well?
Teacher 1: Let’s agenda that item for the next meeting.

Even the person in charge of the meeting is said to be “chairing it.” Chair is a noun for fuck’s sake!

The real worry regarding literacy in schools is not so much the inability of children to spell, but the fact that teachers, through over-exposure to meetings, can be conditioned into erroneously selecting nouns to deploy as verbs. This can spill over into everyday life and have potentially disastrous consequences for our relationships:

Teacher (in pub, to friends): My turn to round us all then.
Friend: Round us? Do you mean, buy a round?
Teacher: Yeah, once I’ve toileted myself and mobiled my girlfriend.
Friend: Er..OK.
Teacher: Let me agenda what you want from the bar and I’ll conversation it to the barman and money him what he requires.
Friend: Oh, Twat off!

Once you’ve extracted all the verb-disguised-nouns and the endless clichés – which I won’t even get started on, I’ll wait for another time and “hit the ground running” – then all you’re left with are the anecdotes and the silences.

If it’s a nice cuddly meeting, a few departmental colleagues, people who are relaxed and want to unwind, then you get anecdotes. Nothing like agreeing with someone’s point by recounting an entire dialogue you had while telling off some miscreant earlier that day, one of those right fucking boring “I said-he said” monologues.

If, however, it’s a bit more high-powered and a larger forum, perhaps all the middle managers (or leaders, duh) then it’s less relaxed and the anecdotes are withheld leaving only silences. One of those silences like crucifixion, where you can get tinitis from the sound of someone scratching their balls. There’s nothing like saying something in one of those meetings, followed by a nervous, “Any questions?” or “What do other people think?” to be met with a line of faces more expressionless than a police suspect line-up.

At which point the person chairing the meeting says, “For the minutes, none of us could care less.”

Assemblies

Almost without rival, the worst word you could ever use in an assembly is Jesus.

Now, if your Christian beliefs and sensibilities are such that you already detect the odour of offence, please cease reading. I suspect, though, that if you have come this far, you might just cope. I have no intention here of launching an invective against Christianity as a way of life or a set of beliefs, nor do I draw my bow tautly and aim for the door of any of the established Christian Churches. Much as I am tempted. (And you cannot blame me for that; it’s all Satan’s fault - much like the rife paedophilia within the Church of Ireland over recent decades.)

It’s just that, love him or hate him, Jesus does not engage with the vast majority of students when his name emerges in the opening phrases of an assembly. Why then do we jam him in? Church schools can’t really avoid it. Jesus is as much an essential component of a Church school assembly as a flat, tasteless slice of beef is in a McDonald’s hamburger. For non-Church schools, he is a gherkin. Someone’s told them they have to squeeze him in, and despite the incongruity of doing so, there he is.

The second most unappealing word for students to hear in assembly, one that gives them an almost equal cause to recoil in distaste, is poem.

Teacher: I want to read you a poem this morning…
Students: (sigh / tut.)

We’re told to include a spiritual element in our assemblies, and yet most of us are clueless as to what this means. We immediately think of religion, which arguably for most people under 18 in the country is the antithesis of spiritual. But by throwing in a few of Jesus’s well-known parables, a little Christian morality, we can feel safe in the knowledge that we are at least not neglecting our students’ spiritual development.

There isn’t really a great leap from Jesus to poetry, as we aim to do the spiritual thing from a more secular angle, thus making it more palatable to non-Christian tastes (i.e. that of most students.) But poetry is like Indie / Alternative music – when it’s good, its amazing, and when it’s not, it’s fucking awful. Add that to the fact that it’s rare to hear a teacher blessed with the capacity to actually read a poem with any depth of feeling, and you’ll see why poems, like Jesus, should be non-negotiable no-no’s in assembly.

The third and final apathy-inducing word to open your assembly with is story. Fine for the primary lot, lovely, a story, yes, how exciting. Say it to your secondary audience and you’ll see every pair of shoulders collectively lower by two inches as their owners push their bums forward and sink deflated in their plastic seats, minds switched to standby.

Any teacher walking to the front of an assembly holding a book about assemblies needs to be stoned to death, pre-Roman Judean-style. These stones can help to save us all from becoming Lost in teaching; unquestionably, death is far preferable.

Advances in technology, which have led to many schools equipping their main halls with a decent sound system, large screen and projector linked up to a computer, have created opportunities to put on more engaging assemblies.

Music has a spiritual impact on people. Many of us grew up miming the words to Christian hymns in assembly, drowned out by the school piano and the one member of staff with operatic pretensions. Nowadays, you can only get away with asking your primary school congregation to indulge in collective singing; try it in a secondary school, and the silence will be louder than bombs.

When the profession began to surrender in the face of the futility of this exercise, there was a void, which we filled with Jesus, poetry and stories. Then the technology arrived and some of us were brave enough (or cowardly enough, depending on your point of view) to ditch the dusty old Book of 1000 Assembly Ideas, and instruct our IT staff to play pop music over the sound system as the students filed into the hall.

But even this great leap forward in trying to engage with the youth of today is often derailed by those of us who become Lost in Teaching when it’s our turn to perform and preach through the medium of assembly. In an effort to get down with the kids, a concept to be explored further another time in this blog, some of us will play our choice of music, rather than anything the students enjoy listening to, simply because we don’t know what they listen to.

It’s fair to say that after the age of about 15 or 16, it is not uncommon for some teenagers to develop a sophisticated appreciation of the more classic pop musical genres from the second half of the 20th century. This was the age when I abandoned listening to the Top 40 on a Sunday evening, ceased taping my favourite songs onto an audio cassette, and instead began to discover and buy records that had been released before or shortly after I was born. Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Doors and David Bowie all became my music, once I had matured enough to appreciate the rich pop-cultural history of my country (and the USA in its capacity as Britain’s cultural feeder country.)

However, to your average student aged 11 to 14, any music more than five years old sounds rubbish. They will frown and giggle when you play them Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2) rather than find themselves spiritually moved by David Gilmore’s exquisite guitar solo or challenged to reflect on Roger Water’s radical, anti-establishment lyrics. They will contort their mouths in bewildered distaste when you mistakenly attempt to introduce them to The Smiths. And you will assume that anything from your own youth that had a fundamental spiritual impact on you as an older teenager, naturally lends itself to doing the same job on younger teenagers a generation later. It might do one day, when they discover it themselves, but it won’t do when their teacher plays it in assembly, and then uses the lyrics to try and impart some kind of message about morals, working hard or respecting the rights of others.

Perhaps it is time to take advice from advertising gurus. There are only a few messages we ever want students to soak up and adhere to and they could be condensed into a series of advertising slogans. Put these phrases to music, ideally some form of annoyingly addictive jingle, and play them at the start and end of every assembly and the result will be subliminal brainwashing of all of our young people and teacher mind control of youth culture. The slogans that could comprehensively encapsulate the entire gospel of the British education system are as follows:

1. Show everyone respect.
2. Be responsible.
3. Work hard.

Everything else is a mere sub-slogan of these.

So my suggestion is as follows. Make the students sing these lyrics to the tune of You’ve Got the Love by Florence and the Machine (with Dizzee Rascal):

Sometimes I feel like showing everyone respect (yearrh yearrh),
I know I got to work real hard,
Sometimes I feel like being so responsible,
This is the school that’s gonna see me through.
(yearrh)

Jesus, that was pathetic. Where’s my book of poems?

Parents' Evenings

At primary school, Parents’ Evenings have significantly more worth that they do at secondary school. You teach 30 students, you teach nearly all subjects to these 30 students and you teach them nearly all of the time. Consequently, you know them inside out and can be lucid, insightful and comprehensive in the judgments and perceptions that you share with their parents when they come to see you.

At secondary school, you teach hundreds of students. You usually just teach them one subject, and depending on what that is, you have contact with most of these between one and four lessons a week. Never mind knowing them inside out, if the Parents’ Evening falls within the first term and you happen to be their Drama or Music teacher, then you’re lucky if you even know their name when their parents sit down in front of you.

There’s an obvious flaw in a system that sends 11-year-olds from the responsibility of one main teacher in primary school to about a dozen in secondary school. But that’s a serious debate for another forum. The question here is this: What do you do when a student and accompanying parents plonk themselves down in front of you and you don’t have a fucking clue as to who they are?

A slight frown as you survey your appointment sheet, before turning it towards the student and saying:

Did you make an appointment? I can’t see your name written down here.

The student is thus prompted into finding his or her own name on your sheet, pointing to it and saving your embarrassment in front of the parents.

Unless of course, the parents are teachers and know this trick!

You will make two paradoxical assumptions every parents evening. One is that no one’s parents are themselves teachers. The other is that, despite this, they will still understand everything you say to them in your own language of teacherspeak.

A third, separate assumption, is that what you want to tell them and what they want to know comfortably coincide. Most parents want to know, in order of importance:

1. How clever is their kid compared to others in the class?
2. Are they behaving?
3. Are they working hard?
4. What, in general terms, does the child need to do to improve?
5. Can you control the class?

Most teachers want to say, in order of importance:

1. What level or grade they are currently on, compared to their target and what this actually means.
2. How much progress they have made in terms of their levels, grades, sub-levels or sub-grades.
3. How hard they’re working.
4. How nice they are.
5. How they can improve, in specific terms with reference to the demonstrable skills required in your subject.

So, a small overlap there, then! It is uncommon for teachers to ask the obvious question to a parent sitting before them:

What would you like to know?

The main reason for this is because you are Lost in Teaching and feel the compulsion to deliver a lengthy monologue as soon as parents sit down. A secondary reason is because when you once tried asking that question the answer from the parent was unhelpfully vague:

Teacher: So, what would you like to know?
Parent: How she’s getting on.

This is the point at which you risk looking a dick right from the start by cheerfully responding with a throwaway line about how well the child is doing. You say this, because you don’t recall having any reason to tell her off. Then you look at your mark book and realise that the child is way below target, working inconsistently and a bit crap at doing homework. Straight away you now have to back-peddle.

You squirm your way out of that mess and begin to search your limited pool of cliché excuses for underachievement, swiftly settling for the most vague of constructive criticisms:

Well, she has tended to be a little chatty and easily distracted in class recently.

You temper this revelation with the words recently and little in order to avoid the accusation that you should have contacted the parents as soon as a problem became evident. Many parents will encourage you to ring them anytime there is a problem, which is easier said than done given the time needed to get their number, to phone, leave a message, (feel awkward about the fact that they have a humorous voicemail message on their mobile, Krusty the Clown being my favourite) and then have to ring back after they’ve rang you back while you were teaching and left a message for you, (feeling awkward that the school has a ill-humoured receptionist taking messages.)

The problem with identifying the root cause of a student’s underachievement as the existence of disruption in your lesson is that you’ve given a red rag to the more bullish of parents.

Parent: Is there a lot of disruption in your class?

How do you answer that? If you do have problems with behaviour management, either because you’re (a) newly qualified, (b) unluckily burdened with a difficult group, (c) unfortunate to be working in a school with endemic behaviour problems or (d) just plain crap and in the wrong job, then are you actually going to admit to any of these? Once again, you feel forced to dilute your comments.

The art of diluting, backtracking or wholly changing the emphasis of your judgments on a student, is often applied as you adapt to the responses of parents. For those who appear stricter, who give their child murderous looks as soon as you begin to mention anything even slightly negative, you’ll find yourself turning defence lawyer and trying to appease their wrath in case your testimony turns out to be the final evidence tipping the scales towards a subsequent private execution later that evening at home. For those parents who appear annoying blasé and cheerful, despite the fact that their child has been a lazy, disruptive and disobedient shithead in your class since September, you’ll be tempted to lay the criticism on extra thick with a trowel until it is clear that there is no redeeming quality or positive remark they could possibly dig out of you.

Of course, some parents can be equally defensive and will almost apologetically list the strategies they have used to encourage their child to work or behave:

Parent: We do tell him he must listen to the teacher and be respectful and do as he’s told.
Teacher: (Thinks) Amazing how he’s turned out so naughty when you’ve used such excellent parenting skills!

One of the most common defensive admissions from parents regards homework:

Parent: Well I send him to his room every night to do homework, so I assume he’s been doing it.
Teacher: (Thinks) Well, that’s your job done isn’t it! No need to actually go into his room to see if he’s doing it or ask to see it afterwards. I mean, what else could a teenager be doing in his bedroom with only his homework, his phone, his telly, his games console and maybe even his own laptop computer for distraction?

Some parents are actually more unhelpfully proactive in supporting their child’s homework. Directing the child towards a particular website, so they know what to copy and paste and try to pass off as their own work is one such crime. Reading that text through with their child to help them change some of the more difficult vocabulary in order to unsuccessfully fool the teacher into believing that it’s been written in the child’s own words, is another. And, perhaps more laudable, but not significantly more helpful is the purchase of a set of encyclopaedias, done with the erroneous assumption that everything you need to know about everything is contained within those volumes:

Parent: Well, she uses our encyclopaedias a lot to do her homework.
Teacher: (Thinks) That explains the 3-sentence project she’s just done on the Rainforest.

The final defence is a show of confusion over why an interest in a certain subject isn’t passed on genetically:

Parent: I don’t know why she’s not interested. I always loved Science at school.

This kind of comment can sometimes lead to the focus of the meeting switching from child to parents, as you’re told all about the parent’s school days. That’s the thing about teaching. Everyone’s been to school, so parents will always have something to say about their schooldays, believing that it will be of interest to you.

I admit I have iced this cake with a thick layer of cynicism so far. Personally, I have always enjoyed Parents’ Evenings. Most people are nice to talk to and when you know a child, it is always interesting and quite often a pleasure to meet the parents, particularly if you have nice things to say or if that child happens to be a really nice person. There’s much satisfaction to be had when letting parents know that their child not only works well, but is also happy and pleasant around school.

Everybody loves to be flattered, so anything positive said about a child will fill a parent with pride and reflected glory. For some reason, they are also flattered when you guess who they are, despite not having met them before and despite them turning up without their child:

Teacher: Hello! Rosie’s mum, isn’t it?
Parent: Yes (smiles.) How did you know?
Teacher: (Thinks) I won’t answer that, because the reality is that her breezeblock shaped chin and overlarge head are a dead giveaway.

Of course, flattery is one thing and flirting is another. When you’re a young teacher, beware the recently divorced / separated or single parent. If they fancy you, then box 2 on their desirable partner criteria list is also automatically ticked, because you clearly like children and consequently you become ideal stepparent material. It was once suggested to me by a single mum of a naughty boy that if his teacher were to come round to dinner, it might prompt him into behaving himself. His teacher happened to be engaged at the time and his mum had the sort of teeth that would allow her to eat an apple through a letterbox, so I can’t say I was tempted. But I am sure that conversations between teachers either side of a Parents’ Evening about MILFs and DILFs, or even sometimes SILFs and BILFs and later in your teaching career GILFs, are not unusual. Should you ever be tempted to flirt with a parent, bear in mind that in Jacqueline Wilson novels a child will often contemplate suicide when faced with the idea of her teacher going out with her Mum or Dad.

Teacherspeak - Part 5 (P to Z)

P is for persevere, which is the last refuge for you, the advice-giver, when you have no more ideas on how to get a student to learn something.

Student: I can’t do it.
Teacher: Just persevere! Keep trying. There’s no such word as “can’t”, there’s just the questions of “how” and “when.”
Student: How can I do it then?
Teacher: By persevering.

And don’t ever write persevere while marking, because it looks to a student like perverse.

Q is for quickly and quietly, adverbs you most commonly attach to the imperative of the verb to go.

R is for remember. We bestow upon students hundreds of facts and instructions every day and then tell them to remember what we’ve said. Research suggests that they will remember 20% of what they hear each day and you can be pretty sure that most of that is what their friends have said to them, hence the need for teachers to use other R-words, repeat and revise.

Teacher: I’ve already told you once.
Student: But research shows that I have only remembered 20% of what you told me once and in fact, as I am a visual learner, because you didn’t actually show me, I have remembered none of it at all!
Teacher: I had you in my mark book as a kinaesthetic learner, which reminds me – didn’t I just lend you a glue stick?
(see K)

S is for satisfactory. In effect, this is the most important word in teaching. It is the centre of the educational solar system, around which everything gravitates. On the ground, at grass roots level, it is the word you use to describe a student’s effort that is neither particularly good, nor particularly rubbish. In essence, if you can’t decide which, you use satisfactory, which denotes that something is neither. It is the word of complete indecision, the epitome of fence-sitting neutrality, the Switzerland of judgements. And when you are indecisive about whether or not to use the great word of indecision, you dilute your judgement further by adding fairly. A fairly satisfactory effort written in an exercise book is you telling a child that they haven’t worked hard enough, but you have seen worse.

Translate the word into the colloquial and you get OK. Isn’t that just the worse way to describe anything? It’s better to just say that something’s shit, at least then people know what you mean.

How’s the meal I just cooked for you?
It’s OK. (means – it doesn’t taste like turd.)

What do you think of the new album by the Eels?
It’s OK. (means – it has absolutely no emotional effect on me.)

Do you like my new dress?
It’s OK. (means – it kind of makes your arse look fat and your boobs sag, but most people might not notice and I’m not going out with you tonight anyway, so who cares?)

Even on an everyday level – and this might just be peculiarly English – people always ask:

How are you today?
I’m OK. (means either I am an emotional shell whose life has so little meaning that I am beyond even being unhappy, or I'm good and I can’t be bothered elaborating.)

Students tend to use this colloquial abbreviation in preference to the full-length satisfactory, and this is why the longer word is added to our ever-expanding alphabet of teacherspeak.

As I was saying, it is a fulcrum around which everything spins. All other judgments are measured relative to satisfactoriness. The comments in mark books, the reports we write, our analysis and evaluation of exam performance and most despicably of all, Ofsted pigeonholing of schools. You can only be outstanding, good, satisfactory or inadequate as a school in the outcome to an inspection. Please note that satisfactory is the 3rd of the four depreciating branding irons. In true Orwellian style, Ofsted also decided that it wasn’t satisfactory to only be satisfactory and that if you were satisfactory in every area but good in no area, then this was in fact unsatisfactory. Every few years, once most schools have flagellated themselves into improvement, then what used to be satisfactory becomes inadequate and to be satisfactory you have to be what used to be good (and if you were good before, now you’re only satisfactory.)

Which kind of proves that the word has absolutely no meaning whatsoever, in that it is relative to expectations, which vary and change with the wind, and therefore is as redundant as the term that kick-started this list, the equally non-objective appropriate.

T is for target. This concept marks one of the biggest changes in teaching from when I went to school to when I taught in one. Nowadays, targets predominate at every level as the prescribed manner in which qualitative judgments can be made on the standards of teaching and student learning. By qualitative, I don’t mean that these are “quality” judgements. Far from it. They are too simplistic - by necessity in order for them to be qualitative. Any other judgment would have to be subjective, and thereby carry as many advantages as disadvantages. So, these targets range from the individual students, who have bestowed upon them a grade or level that they are expected to achieve based on national averages and data regarding their own previous attainment, to targets for schools to meet to prove that they are not failing. The expectation is that all schools should have exam results higher than the national average. Now if you take half a second to think about what the word average means, then you’ll realise that half of schools will never be higher than average! Meaning that they cannot possibly be satisfactory!

Such is the way of the world and such is the meaning of targets these days. When I was at school there were three kinds of target. One was the student at the back of the room whose non-stop talking prompted my Classics teacher to send the blackboard rubber flying in his direction like a thunderbolt from Zeus; another was the clock in our French classroom at which we aimed our McDonald’s milk-shake-straw pea-shooters, until it was covered in chewed up, saliva-imbued pellets of soggy paper; and the last was the fat, smelly, stupid kid with the wide shoulders that made a noise like a floor-tom when you punched them. (As a teacher, I cannot condone the final action and would also make a plea that we don’t describe any student as fat, smelly or stupid even if they clearly happen to suffer from any of these three anti-social handicaps.)

U is for underachieving. In other words, not meeting your target. In other words, a need to be more accurate when hurling your lightening-bolt-board-rubber; a need to take into account trajectory and wind-speed when aiming for the clock; and a need to make sure that the fat smelly stupid boy is distracted by the cake stall at the school fete when you approach him ready to strike.

V is for vague. Sometimes this is the only word to use when reading a piece of work by a student who doesn’t have a clue what he or she is on about. It isn’t as harsh as bollocks and is intrinsically vague in itself.

W is for well done, because it takes so much less time writing this than it would to actually give a more constructive evaluation of a piece of student work.

X is for an incorrect answer, but under new safeguarding procedures designed to protect children from harmful approaches by adults, it is recommended that you do not confuse a child with mixed messages; and so, just in case they misconstrue their crapness at mathematics for a show of affection from you in the form of a whole page full of red kisses, it is advisable that you write the word nearly next to each wrong answer.(see N)

Y is for young man/ young lady. If we teach them nothing, surely we should be teaching them about the laws of relatively as opposed to Platonic absolutes. (Have a minute to work that one out and forgive my obtuseness.)

Z is for zero. It sounds like an actual number; so when a student gets fuck-all right in a test, then at least they can be awarded a legitimate score.

Now, count up how many of these words you use on a regular basis.

If you scored more than 20, then you are truly lost in teaching. Well done!

If you scored between 10 and 19, then you are satisfactory.

If you scored below ten, then you are nearly making the most of your opportunities, but currently underachieving. To reach your target you have to develop your ability to apply teacherspeak in more situations, by remembering these words and showing some perseverance in terms of managing to use them on consistent basis. In other words, you’re gay!

Teacherspeak Part 4 (H to O)

Careful, because I am about to get a bit serious and start pontificating from my soapbox with this next word; but bear with me, because I will swiftly return to more puerile observations once that’s out the way. So…

H is for homophobic. It is only recently, after so many years of challenging sexist and racist attitudes in schools, that teachers are applying the same approach to homophobia. It is a sad feature of our society that it takes decades and even generations for malevolently discriminatory attitudes towards others to be combated with any degree of widespread success. Why is it that people need time to stop being sexist, before getting their heads around why racism is also wrong and only after that can you expect them to appreciate the hurt they cause by seeing homosexuality as a joke and consequently as criteria for bullying or social exclusion. Perhaps the reason why teachers had largely ignored this in the past, is perhaps partly because through TV and other media, homosexuality had been a subject for humour (which it can be as much as anything else of course, but it shouldn’t be predominantly a subject for humour.) It could also be partly because many male teachers didn’t have the confidence to challenge students making disparaging remarks about homosexuality, because simply by defending it, they were worried that students might accuse them of being it:

Student: Urgh, he’s such a gay.
Teacher: Should you be making homophobic comments like that?
Student: Urgh, sir, are you gay as well?

Finally, a third reason for ignoring homophobia for so long could be the lobbying by those true arseholes of the world, the extremists and fundamentalists, who believe that unless you are condemning something (or at least sweeping it under the carpet), then by default you are promoting it. And when you promote something to children, then they will all end up doing it, seeing as they are all so easily brainwashed. Yeah, right. The true arseholes of the world believe that by teaching about sex, rather than equipping students with the knowledge of how to stay safe and an understanding of the emotional consequences of sexual relationships, we are in contrast simply preaching some form of uninhibited free lust culture; that by doing the same in regard to drugs, we are turning children into potential junkies. And by challenging homophobia and teaching that all through history a large minority of humans have been naturally inclined towards homosexual intercourse, we are making boys fancy boys and girls fancy girls, and God forbid if we succeed then the human race will die out for lack of babies!

Please don’t ever feel disinclined to demand that students desist from labelling anything bad as gay:

Teacher: Homework tonight.
Student: Homework? Ah, that’s so gay!

And in telling a 6’3” 16 year old thug to stop taking the piss out of the camp boy in class, please don’t ever feel that your own precarious confidence is in need of more protection than the camp boy is. Homophobia is a good word to use with students, even if it does sound like the title of a horror film in which gay people take over a small town in mid-west USA.

On a much less serious note…

I is for immediately. One of the ultimate conflicts between adults and teenagers is timescale on carrying out instructions. Now is a more suitable substitute with an even greater clarity of expression, but it lacks the authority of the additional four syllables.

J is for jeopardise. You warn students about how their exam performance, future earning potential and career opportunities will all be jeopardised by their current bone-idle attitude to work unless they apply themselves more. They will just think that the words you’re using are gay.

K is for Kinaesthetic. Understanding that people have different learning styles, requires you to ensure that lessons have some kind of kinaesthetic element to them. To the uninitiated, that means learning by physically doing; with the exception of physically reading or physically writing, as these don’t count, because having your arse on your chair and your hands redundant equals non- kinaesthetic. If you’re new to this, you probably make students do card sorts, which is really just like reading, only you get to move the cards around. That’s a shit version of kinaesthetic learning. When you share information about learning styles with the students it is difficult for everyone to understand what you mean, so you’ll have to teach them using each of the 3 main different styles. So, when you explain it to them, only the auditory lot will get it. If you show them all a diagram, only the visual learners know what you’re on about. And because we’re dealing with abstracts here and not realities, then the kinaesthetic learners won’t have a fucking clue what anything of it is about and will be throwing glue sticks up at the ceiling to make them hang, rather than using them to stick the confusing picture into their exercise books, which they have very little writing in anyway.

L is for library, as in use the library, which really has only one advantage to most students over the Internet and that is the Internet cannot possibly keep you warm and dry when it pisses down at lunchtime.

M is for manage. You tell students to manage their own learning, manage their time, manage to be punctual to school, manage to pay attention for more than a few seconds, manage to shut the door on the way in, manage to avoid hitting or touching each other, manage to get to lessons, manage to pick up their mess from the floor, manage to write more than two lines, manage to stop chatting and do some work: The list of imperative commands prefixed by manage to is endless. The education system therefore succeeds in developing skills of management in young people, so that when they become older people they can all become managers for a living; from Manager of the French Fries Section in McDonald’s up to Prime Manager of Britain.

Ironically, teachers stopped seeing yourselves as managers some time ago and began to view your selves as leaders. Heads of Department no longer manage teams, they lead them. At all levels, we have become leaders, so perhaps it is time to adapt our vocabulary with students to help them develop into leaders rather than managers. They will need to lead their own learning, be the leader of their own time, lead themselves to being punctual for school, lead their attention back onto the teacher or the work for more than a few seconds, be the shutting-the-door leader, lead others in not interfering with each other, lead the way to lessons, become lead litter-pickers of the classroom, lead up to writing more than two lines and lead others in stopping chatting and doing some work.

N is for nearly, which actually means no.

Teacher: Which device do we use for holding a block of wood securely, while we work on it with a chisel?
Student: A large blob of Blu-tack.
Teacher: Nearly, but it’s actually a vice, so you were close with that answer.

O is for opportunities.

Teacher: You need to create opportunities for yourself in life.
Student: That’s rather abstract. Could you show me a diagram, as I’m a visual learner. Then I could put it in my book, once that glue stick falls back down.

Teacherspeak Part 3 (From B to G, with no O in the middle)

More “Teacherspeak” words – things you say as a teacher that would require a huge cloud of volcanic ash to prevent your words flying straight over a child’s head.

After “appropriate,” “audacity” and “apply,” I’ve managed to strain and squeeze out some more words for other letters of the alphabet.

B is for “bare minimum”, which is the amount of work you accuse students of having done when they’ve been lazy bastards. The student immediately considers phoning Childline when he or she gets home, because they think you said something about them having a “bare mini bum”, which is more than a little creepy, and equally disarming is the follow-up accusation that they’ve been “bone idle.”

Teacher: You’ve been bone-idle.
Student: Is that like Pop Idol, but for anorexics?

C is for "consistent". The expectation that if students can do something well, then they have to be able to do it well all of the time. If not, then they become inconsistent.

Teacher writes in mark book: Inconsistent effort.
Student reads in mark book: Blah blah blah effort.

D is for “develop.” You probably throw this word around all over the place. Most confusing is when used in the imperative tense.

Teacher: (Writes when marking) Develop your points a little more!
Student: (Reads) More points.

D is also for “detail.”

Teacher at parents’ evening: What she needs to do is to begin analysing the factors in order to reach an independent conclusion, and to do this, she must learn to make comparisons, evaluate the evidence, assess the different interpretations and communicate her judgements using substantiated evidence that she has selected discriminately from her own research.
Parent, turning to daughter: You hear that? You have to write in more detail.

E is for “exemplary.” A word which you will want to say a lot, won’t know how to spell until after the 100th report you write trying to incorporate it, and which students only understand, because it starts with the same prefix as “excellent.” It sounds like excellent, so it must mean something good. By that reasoning, you could get away with writing “execrable” effort in an exercise book and a student will glow with pride. Perhaps even the phrase, “Your work is excrement.”

F is for “Fuck’s sake,” which can be safely utilised in all of your numerous moments of frustration, because when said under your breath it sounds to everyone more than 2 metres away from you as something no worse an innocuous huffing and puffing.

G is for “gifted and talented,” the current buzzword for children who have a particular gift or talent for one or more areas of the school curriculum. The profession refuses to admit to itself that this form of labelling is immoral, despite willingly teaching students in History that the first of the eight stages of genocide is categorisation. By the time you read this guide, students across the country are likely to find themselves victims of the second stage of genocide, symbolisation. Wearing of Gifted and Talented badges will be made compulsory. Stage 3 is Dehumanisation. Given that the whole concept is about elitism, G and T students considered as being “above” others in terms of gifts and talents, therefore become the “super” men. And as we all know, Superman was an alien and thereby not human.

Stage 4 is organisation, so here at least the slippery path towards genocide grinds to a gradual crawl thanks to the inevitable mud of bureaucracy associated with getting anything done in teaching. It’ll be like trip organising, a process of paperwork, risk-assessment and impact-evaluation, which could only have been devised for satirical purposes by Franz Kafka. However, once accomplished, the fifth stage towards genocide, that is polarisation, comes into force. Logically, if a minority group are identified and labelled as Gifted and Talented, then the remaining majority become Ungifted and Talentless. Stage 6, the victims are identified for stage 7, the extermination. Stage 8 is denial, but I think I’ve given this now-deceased horse enough of a flogging.

Next week, the letter H onwards.

What you say to students: Teacherspeak (Part 2 - still "A")

Following on (as opposed to “following through” as I’ve heard people say in meetings, though never actually smelt them do) from the first blog about “Teacherspeak” - the condition in which you the teacher becomes “Lost in Teaching” by using language that is almost meaningless (or at best anachronistic) to students - I would like to move from the pointlessness of “appropriate” to another A-word you may feel a compunction to utter, and that is “audacity.” 

A strange old word this, in that it is flattering to be labelled “audacious,” as it suggests boldness in the face of overwhelming odds, and yet it is insulting to be charged with the crime of “audacity.” People have a right to be audacious, but no right to show audacity. That would be “entirely inappropriate!” 

Teacher: I’ve just caught you bunking out of school to go to the shop, and you have the audacity to eat that chocolate bar in front of me? 

Student: (Thinks) Audacity must mean teeth. 

These words are not the preserve of the more aged amongst your profession. Within months, even novice teachers are mimicking their older colleagues, having subliminally soaked up their parlance, and are already flopping their appropriates and audacities about all over the place. 

Not that I was intending to compile a whole A-Z of Teacherspeak, but the next is another word beginning with A and marks our journey from the spoken to the written word. You may consider this phrase technical language and therefore suitable for reports as well as oral interjections when students are not working hard enough: 

“You need to apply yourself more.” 

Now, the idea of applying anything without it coming out of a small, circular tin with a sponge and mirror is totally alien to a great many 15-year old girls. These are the same girls who think that a foundation tier is a blob of make-up not yet smoothed onto the skin rather than the exam paper that the less clever kids do. As for the boys, who knows how they translate the instruction to “apply themselves” more? It sounds rather too much like something they’d prefer to do behind a closed door and not in a classroom. As adults, the usage changes, and we all think of “applying” for jobs. And in the interviews we might get for those jobs, we don’t sit there and boast to the panel how we “apply ourselves a lot,” because that’s just Yoda’s way of saying he’s gone for loads of jobs and not had much luck. I’m tempted next to see if I can maintain this alphabetical run and impress you with a B, a C, a D and so on. Next blog next week, we’ll see…

What you say to students: Teacherspeak (part one - A)

Teacherspeak is the most conspicuous symptom of a condition known as Lost in Teaching. This condition can afflict sufferers to varying degrees and for irregular intervals, but in essence it describes an uncontrollable behaviour in which we make sense only to ourselves and make absolutely no sense to students. When it strikes you, it feels as if the whole world halts on its axis and its 6.5 billion inhabitants all telepathically tune in to what you’re saying and become both humoured and enlightened by your wondrous performance of pedagogy. 

That’s how it feels to you. How it looks to your class of students is that you’re suddenly talking bollocks, acting like a weirdo and have metaphorically disappeared up your own arsehole. 

 

What we choose to say to students when we use the sort of language that they would never themselves use nor fully understand, is Teacherspeak. Imagine Orwell’s Newspeak and stick a tweed jacket on it and you’ll get the picture. 

 

For starters, you won’t realise it at first, but after a while the word appropriate will become a malignant tumour on your daily vocabulary. No one uses the word appropriate as a child. Your average parents, assuming that they aren’t teachers of course, never have cause to inflict this insidious lexicological folly on their children; and adults tend only to use the negative form when laughing at innuendos or cheeky behaviour, fondly labelled as inappropriate. If I am wrong and you know someone who does use the word appropriate, but isn’t in fact a teacher, then the likelihood is that either they should be a teacher, or they have chosen another career in which the desire to self-righteously inflict their values on others and subsequently admonish them for their transgressions is equally fulfilled.  A football referee, a special constable, a retail manager, in fact the list might be endless. And that’s the problem with the word. It highlights the worst sensibilities of teachers. It inflicts their moral code on the students. And it is the last refuge of a bad rule. When there is no justifying the reason for telling a student to do something, you’ll fall back on this argument and end up saying that something is simply “not appropriate.” 

Student: Why can’t I? 

Teacher: Because it isn’t appropriate. 

Student: (Thinks) What the fuck does that mean? Who are you to decide what is and what isn’t appropriate without a reason to substantiate your judgment? And if you do have a reason, then you don’t really need to use the word appropriate at all, do you? 

Student: Why can’t I punch Liam in the face? 

Teacher: Because it will hurt him and you will infringe his human right to safety, a right which you would expect others to respect in regard to yourself. 

Student: (Thinks) I understood most of that reason, I think. Fair enough. 

 

Which is preferable to… 

Student: Why can’t I punch Liam in the face? 

Teacher: Because it is not appropriate. 

Student: Would it be more appropriate to kick him then? 

 

Now, just try to think of something, which would be seen as inappropriate and most of the time there’s a proper reason that can be cited instead. It isn’t just inappropriate for a teacher to have an affair with a student, it is wrong for a whole batch of reasons that I won’t choose to list here. (Not that it is not appropriate to list them, just that I can’t be arsed.) If you can’t think of a reason for deeming a particular action as inappropriate then the truth is that you just don’t like it– a matter of taste, not a matter of right and wrong. Blindly pontificating to a child that his or her behaviour is not appropriate (rather than expressing your opinion that it might be inappropriate and asking what they think themselves about it) is as bad as using a phrase which died out the last time a meteor hit the earth and caused an ice age – that phrase being the now exhausted pillar of English snobbery across all social classes: because I said so! 

 

Student: Why can’t I punch Liam in the face? 

Teacher: Because I said so. 

Student: And your omnipotence is such that I should consider this decree to be absolute and without recourse? 

Teacher: I have spoken. So let it be written, so let it be done. 

You’re not God in the fucking Ten Commandments, are you! If you are still telling kids to do something, because you said so, then piss off home and whip your own kids with a belt when they get back from the coalmine. There’s only one time that it is forgivable to resort to such a base, unfounded and tyrannical piece of reasoning as because I said so – and that’s when you simply can’t be bothered explaining the reason, because it’s too bloody long and students get bored of you talking once you reach your second sentence. This could in fact bring me to another issue, the inexorable urge to say too much; the fact that you as a teacher has as much capacity to be concise as you have ability to blow into your own arsehole. (See how I left that one open for the rare and talented exceptions!) No, I’ll come back to your loquaciousness later.