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.