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.