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.
Sunday, 25 July 2010
Tuesday, 20 July 2010
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.
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.
Saturday, 10 July 2010
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…
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…
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