Around about 5am, you’ll meet up with the students outside school, where some balding 1970’s throwback in a tight-fitting polo shirt will introduce himself as Reg the coach driver. As he hurls suitcases into the hull of his vehicle, the students mutter derogatory whispers to each other about your choice of “own clothes.” Jeans. You dress like their mums and dads. The only students who are also wearing jeans are the four Emo’s who vampirically shield their faces from the sunrise. And by jeans, I mean spray on black denim, stretching from ankle to halfway up their arse, the rest covered with some degree of modesty by 30 cm of grey flannel pants. All the other students, eager to cast away the identify-stifling monotony of school uniform, express their individuality by wearing their own clothes, which in every case consists of the same grey tracksuit bottoms and pastel t-shirt. But they still laugh at your middle-aged choice of blue jeans. Groovy.
The coach pulls away, seatbelts lazily slung over one arm, and the students tuck into their breakfasts of cans of coke, chocolate bars and packets of Haribo. You feel like you’ll be the first to get sick. But as it turns out, this honour goes to a Year 9 girl who sat on the back seat and only got halfway through her bucket of pick n’ mix before requiring a second bucket at the front of the coach.
So, did you decide on an overseas trip, in which case the airport now beckons, or have you made a coach your home for the week? Did this all spring from a staffroom conversation about countries in the world you’d love to visit, but couldn’t afford to? China? Russia? Singapore? By taking a party of school children there, you only pay in terms of effort. And sure, it’ll be a big effort. It’s no holiday. But it’s an experience. Potentially, in our job, we could “experience” any country in the world at no financial cost, as long as we can persuade parents to stump up the fare for their child and as long as there isn’t currently an earthquake, political revolution or Civil War occurring at that time. Given that you have to book these things 18 months in advance, you never quite know. (Not that many of us were burnt over Libya recently.)
One child will have the audacity to ask you if teachers have to pay. When you explain that you don’t, because you’re working, in fact working overtime because you’re on duty 24 hours a day for 7 days, the student just asks again, “But you don’t have to pay, right? We’re paying your fare?” Yes, and your parents’ taxes pay our wages and we still get longer holidays then them, so fuck off now please.
Continental trips don’t always require travel by air. To keep the costs down, you may have opted for coach all the way. A fine idea until the 18th hour of travelling through France, through the night, four hours since the last piss-stop, the coach bog closed because the tank is now full of all the consequences of that Haribo and coke, plus you can’t sleep due to the crick in your neck and the faint odour of vomit and fart.
However, on the way there the channel tunnel is fun. Student gullibility proves as entertaining as ever as they stare out of the windows trying to spot fish. You halt temporarily at customs while French immigration cause you anxiety by taking a dislike to the one non-European passport in your pile. As the Nigerian Year 10 boy is led away you joke to the rest that he’s being strip searched, but you play down talk of this when he arrives back 30 minutes later looking like he’d just spent the night at Michael Jackson’s house.
Hotels have little to recommend them beyond having a roof, a toilet and somewhere to lie down to sleep. In this respect, they marginally edge out a coach for comfort. On the continent, they tend to have considered escape from fire only insofar as to ensure that windows open wide and should you have the same powers as Spiderman then you won’t be at risk of burning or falling to your death. Assume that the staircase will not permit escape, having been added as an afterthought for persons with 20-inch waists and 50-inch inside leg measurements. Those taking students on mountaineering trips should however find staircases and fire escapes manageable and just as challenging and fun as the mountains.
The hotel experience allows students to practice their studied languages too, because they will come into contact with members of the public, usually as they walk through the bar area. Although this section of the public isn’t anymore diverse than middle-aged men with moustaches and an unhealthy interest in your older female students, it still presents an opportunity for conversation. Like, “What the fuck are you looking at, you dirty old perv?”
Another horizon-widening opportunity comes courtesy of another school sharing your hotel. Teenagers tend to stare at each other un-self-consciously and then moan to teachers that the other kids keep looking at them. At some point, conflict will arise and so the resulting social contact with the teachers of the other school can be exploited to help your own professional development. You learn something. You learn that your rules for your students and your level of care and your resistance to the chance of getting pissed on duty makes you a far more responsible teacher than they are. Beware the phrase, “They’re only kids.”
Whoever the kids are, they won’t want to go to sleep. Ever. At least not until about an hour before you try to wake them up in the morning. As you force your way into their rooms at 6.00am and encourage them out of bed, you realise how unsavoury and unhygienic it is allowing more than two teenagers to share a room. The one with six in smells like an abattoir and looks like East London on a morning in 1941.
Finally, you will find that the old myth of students wanting to get drunk and have sex on school trips is dispelled, because your lot are so crap and needy they wouldn’t have the guts. They will want to know at regular intervals of about five minutes where we’re going next, what’s it got there, how much longer is it, is there a shop and when do we get back to the hotel. You could be staring across at the Matterhorn, halfway up Machu Pichu, strolling along the Great Wall of China, sailing down the Rhine or standing by the Grand Canyon, it doesn’t matter, because they will still want to buy some fucking Haribo, have a fart contest in their hotel room and watch a very sweary American comedy film on the coach DVD player.
Thursday, 24 February 2011
Saturday, 12 February 2011
Turning to the Dark Side
There’s a line in teaching and once you’ve crossed it you are lost to the Dark Side. It’s like that moment in Revenge of the Sith (the final Star Wars movie to you non-nerds) when Anakin (soon-to-be Darth Vader) Skywalker kills Samuel L Jackson (who isn’t half as hard as he is in Pulp Fiction) and drops to his knees to pledge loyalty to Darth Sidious, who’s like the Star Wars version of Bricktop from Snatch, a right nasty bastard.
Multiple film references aside, what I’m talking about here is the iron curtain between all the nice hard-working downtrodden teaching staff and the insidiously under-worked, over-paid, power-corrupted Senior Leadership Team. Becoming SLT is like catching leprosy and joining the Nazi SS at the same time.
However, you might be paradoxically liked as an individual and yet still detested as a group once you’ve been promoted out of the rank and file. Invariably any inevitable chink in your armour or less-than-perfect decision enacted as that group will justify the application of the term “useless” to SLT, thus altering the name to the Senior Leadership Useless Team, hereafter to be referred to as SLuTs.
As SLuTs you will have your own language, Masonic-like, an odious form of Teacherspeak, designed to sound professional and intended to pompously model to other staff a politically correct, precise and charmless educational terminology. For example, SLuTs are at pains to avoid using the word “kids.” But rather than settle for “students” you now favour the term “learners.” In fact, you often corrupt the plural form of this word and speak about “the learner.”
“How will this new strategy impact on the learner?”
Oh, la-di-fucking-da! (As Paul McCartney would have written if he wasn’t such a disgustingly cheerful bastard.)
The blame for such crass language lies with the failed teachers… sorry, I mean the ex-teachers who changed careers for training. One in-service training provider describes its teaching courses as “blended learning.” You might experience blended learning in your rise to tyranny, which officially means you have employed different types of learning on the course and unofficially means that you have had your time wasted in a variety of near-pointless activities.
Perhaps your re-education to think and speak in this higher form of educational vocabulary is the reason why you will suddenly stop socialising with non-SluT staff once you turn to the dark side. By-passing after-work drinks on a Friday and a polite lie to excuse yourself from the departmental meal will become second nature. After all, they are the rebels and you are Darth Vader and they wouldn’t want you to do that Jedi choking trick on them as they sip on their drink and socialise around the same table as you. Not only that, but there is the danger of startling the underlings by appearing almost human when you let your hair down. Seeing a SluT laugh, joke and get even moderately tipsy in a pub only serves to unnerve people and gives them that same uncomfortable sick feeling many of us have when we hear our parents talk about their sex lives.
In any job that can create stress, people will sometimes get emotional. Before defecting to the dark side you can let vent in the staff room as much as you like. Anger, tears, rebellious rants, opinionated pontificating, that’s all human nature. But stick on the Darth Vader suit and you have to bury all that emotion. Cold, hard, professionalism is required. And deep inside, where that repressed emotion festers, a ball of bastardness must build up. You might think holding a fart in all day while you teach is difficult, but this is something else. This is why you are given your own office as a SLuT, so that you can hide away a couple of times a day and stick drawing pins into blu-tack dolls of the members of staff who have given you the most grief. Or weep over a mountain of boring paperwork. Or lance your own thighs with a staple-gun as you tediously trawl through your inbox full of emails that are one of the following:
§ Educational junkmail
§ Notices to all staff from admin that are relevant to about 6 people
§ Problems to sort that can’t be sorted
§ Requests for meetings or replies to your requests for meetings
§ Someone pointlessly emailing the word thanks
But you can’t feel sorry for yourself. You don’t teach full days anymore. You have more time to do boring jobs (like making up boring jobs to give teachers who do teach full days most days.) And you get paid more, seemingly for working less, because no one sees 90% of what work you do. But they’ll notice your mistakes, like a goalkeeper gets judged on his errors more than his saves. Such is a SLuTs lot in life. So, deal with it, pick up your cheque and treat yourself to a couple of new suits each month. Just make sure they’re all black, armour-plated and come with a shiny helmet, cloak and light-sabre.
Multiple film references aside, what I’m talking about here is the iron curtain between all the nice hard-working downtrodden teaching staff and the insidiously under-worked, over-paid, power-corrupted Senior Leadership Team. Becoming SLT is like catching leprosy and joining the Nazi SS at the same time.
However, you might be paradoxically liked as an individual and yet still detested as a group once you’ve been promoted out of the rank and file. Invariably any inevitable chink in your armour or less-than-perfect decision enacted as that group will justify the application of the term “useless” to SLT, thus altering the name to the Senior Leadership Useless Team, hereafter to be referred to as SLuTs.
As SLuTs you will have your own language, Masonic-like, an odious form of Teacherspeak, designed to sound professional and intended to pompously model to other staff a politically correct, precise and charmless educational terminology. For example, SLuTs are at pains to avoid using the word “kids.” But rather than settle for “students” you now favour the term “learners.” In fact, you often corrupt the plural form of this word and speak about “the learner.”
“How will this new strategy impact on the learner?”
Oh, la-di-fucking-da! (As Paul McCartney would have written if he wasn’t such a disgustingly cheerful bastard.)
The blame for such crass language lies with the failed teachers… sorry, I mean the ex-teachers who changed careers for training. One in-service training provider describes its teaching courses as “blended learning.” You might experience blended learning in your rise to tyranny, which officially means you have employed different types of learning on the course and unofficially means that you have had your time wasted in a variety of near-pointless activities.
Perhaps your re-education to think and speak in this higher form of educational vocabulary is the reason why you will suddenly stop socialising with non-SluT staff once you turn to the dark side. By-passing after-work drinks on a Friday and a polite lie to excuse yourself from the departmental meal will become second nature. After all, they are the rebels and you are Darth Vader and they wouldn’t want you to do that Jedi choking trick on them as they sip on their drink and socialise around the same table as you. Not only that, but there is the danger of startling the underlings by appearing almost human when you let your hair down. Seeing a SluT laugh, joke and get even moderately tipsy in a pub only serves to unnerve people and gives them that same uncomfortable sick feeling many of us have when we hear our parents talk about their sex lives.
In any job that can create stress, people will sometimes get emotional. Before defecting to the dark side you can let vent in the staff room as much as you like. Anger, tears, rebellious rants, opinionated pontificating, that’s all human nature. But stick on the Darth Vader suit and you have to bury all that emotion. Cold, hard, professionalism is required. And deep inside, where that repressed emotion festers, a ball of bastardness must build up. You might think holding a fart in all day while you teach is difficult, but this is something else. This is why you are given your own office as a SLuT, so that you can hide away a couple of times a day and stick drawing pins into blu-tack dolls of the members of staff who have given you the most grief. Or weep over a mountain of boring paperwork. Or lance your own thighs with a staple-gun as you tediously trawl through your inbox full of emails that are one of the following:
§ Educational junkmail
§ Notices to all staff from admin that are relevant to about 6 people
§ Problems to sort that can’t be sorted
§ Requests for meetings or replies to your requests for meetings
§ Someone pointlessly emailing the word thanks
But you can’t feel sorry for yourself. You don’t teach full days anymore. You have more time to do boring jobs (like making up boring jobs to give teachers who do teach full days most days.) And you get paid more, seemingly for working less, because no one sees 90% of what work you do. But they’ll notice your mistakes, like a goalkeeper gets judged on his errors more than his saves. Such is a SLuTs lot in life. So, deal with it, pick up your cheque and treat yourself to a couple of new suits each month. Just make sure they’re all black, armour-plated and come with a shiny helmet, cloak and light-sabre.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
