The Rioters, the over-simplifiers and the presumptuous.

I approach the sharing of any comments regarding the causes of the recent riots with my own stab-proof jacket of trepidation tightly fastened, because although I believe I have something worthwhile to add to the debate, so does EVERYONE. And to be frank, there has been a backwash of bullshit from too many commentators this past week.

The only report of any insight was the brief street-side interview with a young looter in Manchester, because he was able to tell us why HE was doing what he was doing. And essentially, it was to piss the police off, who “arrest you for nothing” these days. (When asked for an example he was found wanting.) Most other people who have aired their theories have merely exposed their own ignorance, prejudices and propensity for over-simplification.

I won’t pretend to be much less ignorant than these people. With Socratic humility though, I am prepared to acknowledge my ignorance. But I know enough to know what I don’t know.

My other qualification for even commenting at all comes from this: I’ve taught history in secondary schools for 19 years and for the first 9 of them, I taught teenagers from Tottenham and neighbouring areas. The whole melting pot of socio-economic baggage was brought into school. And since then, I’ve worked with a predominantly white, working-class, provincial town demographic.

This experience has taught me some things worth saying.

For starters, as I constantly remind my students in history, everything that happens does so for a number of different reasons. Causation is complex and multi-dimensional and open to judgment and interpretation. Commentators on the riots have tried to over-simplify the causes, citing one or at most two real reasons, whilst refuting counter-claims regarding other possible causes. Sadly, it is part of human nature to over-simplify, because it’s easier. Spouting off opinions is like betting on horses. It’s competitive. You want to be the person who sounds RIGHT, who picks the winning cause, the one most people will agree with. So you have to sound strong-minded and choose just ONE cause and start your sentence with “I’ll tell you why they rioted, it’s because...” with that arrogance that precludes any humble admission of your actual ignorance.

I also regularly demand that my history students back up their arguments with sound evidence. But in the debate on the causes of the rioting, as with most things, what many people tend to do is hear lots of different theories and choose the ones that either sound right (suiting our own prejudices maybe) or the ones echoed the most often or the ones that sound most convincing. And then they regurgitate these opinions as if THEIR OWN. They don’t have time or inclination to access the FACTS to substantiate their pontificating. They just want to repeat the cause that they’ve painted onto their banner and are now parading with a certainty that they hold aloft the TRUTH.

Finally, I ensure my students never apply a generalisation to everyone from whichever society (or group in society) that we are studying. We talk about TYPICALITY yes; typical attitudes within a group, as agreed by historians who have thoroughly researched the subject. But my students are told NEVER to ASSUME that what we might call TYPICAL would apply to any more than MOST people.

And that’s how we organise a school, which in itself is a microcosm of society. At times for convenience and practicality we HAVE to treat the students as a whole or as groups, but it would be morally wrong and destructive not to actively treat them as individuals on a daily basis as well.

The looters and rioters were individuals acting for the most part with a group mentality.

What assumptions were made?

There are too many PRESUMPTUOUS muck-spreaders on TV and in real-life who assume that the trouble-makers are:
• On benefits
• From single-parent families
• Of a particular ethnic background
• Stupid

The fact that there’s bound to be SOME truth in SOME cases does not justify beliefs that this criteria is suitable to apply to the whole group. But people want solutions and solutions are easier if the causes are simpler and if the people who need dealing with are a homogenous group. If they were a homogenous group, then the same measures or laws are likely to work. For example, the call to remove their benefits sounds to some like a good idea, but they have to assume that everyone who looted or rioted is on benefits. Are they? How do you know? I doubt it.

The other problem with over-simplification is that it fails to acknowledge the varying degrees to which people were involved or to what extent they might usually behave in a similar manner anyway. Everyone accepted the concept of opportunism and this is how things work in schools.

I’ve learned from the thousands of 11-19 year olds that I’ve worked with over time that every person has the capacity to do good and to cause harm. What sets us apart from each other are the decisions we make every moment of the day in terms of these two choices. External factors are ALWAYS at play. We are all products of our environment. When people say that, other ignorant, over-simplifying, self-righteous and presumptuous people make an accusation that any reference to environment automatically creates an excuse. Not so. People react differently to their own environment, because of the multi-dimensional character of other external forces, most of them individualised, that have a bearing on the decisions they make. For example, one child of ethnic origin in a single parent household on benefits in Tottenham will not necessarily make the same decisions in life to another in the same situation, because there’s far more to us all than our ethnicity, familial circumstances, socio-economic position and postcode. Acknowledging that common external factors CAN create pressures which lead to a SIMILAR outcome is acceptable and indeed IMPORTANT when it comes to providing services to help people, but is ABSOLUTELY MORALLY BEREFT when it comes to judging people and their motives.

Like I say, a school is a mirror on society, because (almost) everyone in society has been to school. Schools always have a small core of students who will too often refuse to conform to the systems in place for the benefit of their own well-being and that of others. Similarly, society will always contains a core who will engage in criminal activity. Every effort should be made to continually offer these people a chance to change, a way out, because some will. And similarly, measures will always be needed to protect everyone else from the actions of this core of people.

The scale of the riots suggests that there were more involved than just the core of the usual criminally-intent members of society. In a school, a much larger group could be referred to as BORDERLINE in terms of their capacity to misbehave. Depending on external forces, they will sometimes choose to disrupt lessons, not do their homework, argue rudely with teachers, break rules, etc... and sometimes they will conform to rules and be co-operative, positive, hard-working etc, etc. So what schools have to do is to manage the external factors that they do have control over. If you have fair, agreed, beneficial procedures applied consistently in a school, then you will find the BORDERLINE students make the decisions that benefit them and others. But similarly, the very same students will muck around for the less effective teachers, will take advantage of inconsistencies or loopholes in the systems and most importantly REACT NEGATIVELY TO A SITUATION IN WHICH THEY ARE TREATED UNFAIRLY OR NOT BEING GIVEN WHAT IS EXPECTED which is good quality teaching and learning and opportunities that they see others being given. In other words, lots of people will fuck about given the opportunity, a reason to or an expectation of probable impunity.

We all have the capacity to think FUCK IT for some amount of time and to refuse to consider the consequences of our actions. The difference is again to what degree.

Apply this BORDERLINE theory to life. It is no coincidence that the riots are happening at a time when the perception amongst people is that there is more inequality than before, less entitlement to services, fewer prospects. And no, that doesn’t excuse it, and no it wasn’t a deliberate protest about these things. But it does create a situation where people are MORE LIKELY to act in this way. Whatever has happened to society over the last few decades has given these people who rioted and looted less reason NOT to think FUCK IT, less reason to distance themselves from opportunities for criminality, less external forces to make them think and act positively. It is quite logical to maintain that these issues DO EXIST and therefore quite likely that they are a factor.

My final analogy to schools: I have worked in a school in which leadership and quality of teaching and learning and the opportunities offered to students has improved over a small number of years. The actual students in that school improved their behaviour and attitude to work as a result. The same students would regress back if we started to get things wrong in what we were doing with them.

Sadly, the biggest difference is that it is far easier for a school to make changes to help a situation. Society is more complex and even more subject to external forces, particularly economic and social ones, huge monsters that no one can control. At best they can be influenced and manipulated to help create more benefit than harm. There are no easy solutions to this, because there are no easy causes.

Harry Potter and the Grim Reality of Real Life

In the 8th book of the series, our 3 heroes have all left school to discover that even without Voldemort, the world is a pretty shitty place.

Despite the usual teenage distractions during her 6th form years, Hermione netted a clean sweep of A* grades in all her subjects. The Daily Prophet might have maintained that exams are easier nowadays, thus discrediting her achievement, but fortunately for the integrity of journalism that particular piece of bog roll masquerading as a newspaper was forced to close after hacking into the voicemails of everyone who lost a relative in the final battle against Voldemort and the Death Eaters.

Hermione could have taken up her place at a top university with those grades, but her Maths was strong enough to allow her to calculate that £9k a year in fees plus living costs for 3 years would leave her with a debt of such overwhelming magnitude that she’d have to live at home for 40 years and look to get on the housing ladder in her early 60’s. She therefore had to settle for a university that was charging less than the maximum fees, in a town with more affordable rents. She’s studying Media and Bieber Studies in the University of Central South Coastal England in Bognor Regis (which is housed in the newly renovated chalets of what used to be Butlin’s.)

For Harry, like the majority of school leavers, a job in the retail sector beckoned. Tesco have taken him on to one of their management training courses. And Ron applied for a level 3 apprenticeship in Computer Animation Design, because he “likes computer games” and sees a future for himself in this field along with tens of thousands of others.

In their wake, Hogwarts has become an Academy in order to redress the funding deficit that all schools are currently experiencing. A new Head has been appointed, who wants to change the uniform and go for a more corporate image. This would entail a complete rebuild, particularly of those staircases that tend to split apart from each other and cause a health and safety risk. There’s no money available from the government to update the buildings to the desired office-style corridors and peacock blue interior, so the new Head has made a deal with the giants of the Communications industry, Floo Networks in which Hogwarts receives a large investment of capital and Floo Networks receives 3 executive seats on the Board of Trustees.

You might be wondering why money seems to be in short supply to support education. Well, essentially, the top bosses of Gringott’s had spent decades getting rich off the back of high-risk investments, over-lending and lots of other unregulated naughty financial stuff that most people don’t understand, except for the fat bonuses the greedy little goblins had been paying themselves. Consequently, the arse fell out of the economy at a time when The Ministry of Magic was spending beyond its means and there now exists a huge deficit that needs paying off. The new Minister for Magic, Dunghill Camberbum, has declared that this deficit was not his fault, is quite frankly appalling and needs paying off sooner rather than later so that he can be seen as the slayer of the deficit in the same way that Harry Potter is seen as the slayer of Voldemort. So, at a huge risk to economic stability, Camberbum is cutting government spending at all levels, including those unwieldy and unnecessary bastions of social welfare, the education, police and health services.

With Voldemort dead, he expects less of a drain on health services and besides people can just help themselves and set up their own things and buy stuff from private companies. And surely the police will have less to do without so many Death Eaters around, so cuts can be made there. And schools are full of subversive lefty-liberals who hate the Ministry anyway, so fuck them. They can work longer and contribute more to their pensions, the moaning, useless, soft-touch, part-timers.

As a result, Hogwarts now has 8 teachers over 120 years old teaching a full timetable to students who require entertainment to motivate them into working, or else they’ll just play on their Blackberry’s and I-phones and look up facts on Wikipedia if they’re expected to know anything. The new Minister for Schools, Machiavellius Gove has decreed that the new National Curriculum should include compulsory study of more traditional and academic subjects, like the things Gove a(nd his usual dinner party guests) enjoyed at school, such as Ancient Mesopotamian, Classical Sculpture and systematic buggery.

In the final scene of the book, Harry, Ron and Hermione all join a anti-Ministry protest in London. Ron is cautioned for shouting rude words at Mr Gove as he drives past with his window open to let the smell of his breath out (the word used is CUNT but this is only included in the adult edition of the book), Hermione joins a sit-in at a branch of Olivander’s Wands Emporium and Harry is sentenced to 16 months in prison for doing a poo on a statue of Cornelius Fudge, the former Minister for Magic.

The School Library

I said to the school librarian, “Do you have a book about coincidences?”
She said, “Yes, one arrived just today.”

I said, “I took this book out on Energy sources, is it renewable?”

I said, “Do you have anything by Dickens?”
She said, “We have lots of things, by Jove!”

I said, “I’m looking for The Borrowers?”
She said, “Well, they’re all around you, dear.”

I said, “Do you have a book about people who are depressed because they feel that they just don’t fit in?”
She said, “Yes, it’s in the cookery section.”

I said, “I was wondering if you had a book about laziness.”
She said, “Yes, it’s on the furthest bookshelf on the right.”
I said, “I might leave it then.”

Try some of those gags on your school librarian and it’s unlikely you’ll get a laugh. Being a librarian is like going through the menopause for the whole of your life. It’s a joyless existence. Students come into the library when it’s cold outside, take the first book off the nearest shelf and just sit there with their friends. And eat. And take no notice of the librarian. When they do take out a book, they don’t bring it back and for the next ten years (including after they’ve left school), the librarian sends home letters asking for the return of the book or else they’ll be charged. And if they don’t pay, then the consequences are worse. They get another letter. And if they still don’t pay, they won’t be allowed to borrow another book from the library. Meaning, their best bet is to steal one. That way, they won’t get the threatening letters.

For a laugh, try to find in your school library the book that has sat on the shelf the longest since anyone last took it out. In my own kids’ school it is “The Stanley Holloway monologues.”

Does the Chess club meet in your school library? If so, I feel you are neglecting your duty of care. The library is for everyone, meaning that anyone can just walk in and see which kids are in the Chess club and thus identify exactly who to beat up after school. If you want to protect children, tell the Chess club to meet in the cleaner’s cupboard. And lock the door. But take the Domestos out first, of course. It’s not easy to accept being beaten at Chess.

In the first school I worked in, the librarian made students feel about as welcome as a diarrhoea-sufferer at a hot-tub party. She used to snatch food off kids without warning, spend hours typing lengthy individual memos to staff and walk around in soiled gardening clothes, hunched over a tea-pot in one hand, mumbling to herself incoherently. Her husband came to a staff social event once. We thought he was wearing one of those old man masks. He wasn’t. She was no oil painting either. Well, she was no painting, but she was very oily. And had a hunch. And was spotted on regional TV in the West country once, beavering around in the background during a feature from the home of J R Tolkein during a nerds’ convention at his home. I’m pretty sure she believed that black kids didn’t actually read books. She was altogether as odious a person on the inside as she was monstrously ugly on the outside, with her humpback, lank hair and saggy-arsed green tracksuit bottoms.

Regardless of their eccentricities and constant state of frustrated misery, you should support your school librarian. It’s not easy getting students to read books for fun in the multi-media dystopia in which we live, nor use a library for research when they have internet on their phones. After all, I don’t think there will ever be a website or Sky Arts documentary devoted to the monologues of Mr Stanley Augustus Holloway OBE.

Becoming an OfSTED Inspector

One day, when you are tired of failing as a teacher, when your social ineptness has alienated you from your colleagues, when your body has reached the final stage of arid decomposition and you take on the appearance of an animated cadaver, and when the last remnants of your humanity have dripped from your soul to leave a void, an abyss of strangulated callousness, then, one morning, at that moment of revelation over a bowl of cornflakes and razorblades and a glass of sour milk, you decide that it is time to apply to OfSTED to become a schools inspector.

Perhaps all along you saw this moment coming. The seeds of this inhuman mentality had long since been broadcast across the ploughed furrows of your psyche. That inexorable desire to be a traffic warden, football referee, tax officer, night club bouncer or GP receptionist. That same mentality, laced with the sort of malevolence that you’d find in history’s despots, warmongers and directors of genocide that breeds an odious species of fucker such as yourself. Somehow, you knew all along you’d end up here, seeping into a staff room like sewage to introduce yourself to a battle-weary, bleary-eyed and terror-stricken array of teachers, with that same old joke on your lips, “Thank you for making us feel welcome, when we know we’re not!”

Inspections from the Office for Standards in Education are like an irritating four-yearly dose of genital thrush. The only benefit is that it reminds you to never let your guard down. But you, you who will gradually evolve into this purveyor of pernicious and punitive interrogation, you knew all along that this was your pathway. Those episodes of “On the Buses” in your formative years; each time you heard Blakey crow his oily order to “get that bus out, Butler,” you felt his pain. They laughed at him, but he was in the right. You too wanted to get Butler, to be able to say, “That’s made my day, that has,” by exacting revenge on this maverick, this charmer, this popular and witty human full of life, the exact opposite to you. What was imperative was that the bus went out on time.

So, there you are, seeping back out of the staff room, smelling the fear flowing out of your victims in your wake, ready to spend your day flying in and out of their lessons like a vulture on the look out for someone’s entrails to feast upon. And the thrill of this power is all the more satisfying when you see how detailed their lesson plans are, how well marked their books are and how well delivered their teaching is, knowing that you won’t even bother observing many of these people, or reading much of what they’ve typed up nor spend more than a few minutes reading what has taken them countless hours to mark. As far as you’re concerned, it’s like judging the Elephant Man wearing drag in a beauty contest. Despite the effort, you’ll still tell him he’s an ugly bugger.

OfSTED raise the bar every so often, such as recently, so that what was once good becomes just satisfactory. You might agree with this as an inspector, as you stare adoringly at the portrait of Stalin on your OfSTED office wall (next to portraits of Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Gadaffi and some dead mice you recently stuck up there with a staple gun one dull Friday afternoon) because Stalin dragged the Soviet Union silently and fearfully through an industrial revolution thanks to a combination of unrealistic targets as a carrot and the threat of the gulags as a stick. And you love the Orwellian Doublespeak of the OfSTED epithet that it is not satisfactory to be satisfactory, you can only be satisfactory if you’re good and if you are judged satisfactory in everything then that is unsatisfactory overall and you fail.

The gradings are simple. Some patronising cunt must have once decreed that parents need things simple, because they read The Sun, watch ITV and won’t want to consider much more evidence beyond a single word like “satisfactory” when choosing the right school for their child in what is probably the most important decision of their lives.

Below the three acceptable grades of “outstanding”, “good” and “satisfactory” there is “shit”, “notice to become not shit” and “right in the shit now.” However, even “satisfactory” has the scent of shit to it.

Blakey and Stalin never made allowances for context and nor will you. Once you’ve swept in and out of a school like a Dementor sucking the life out of every soul, you can have a nice relaxing day back in the office typing it all up, punctuating your time by unravelling paper clips, sipping petrol from your hip flask and sharpening your talons on the ragged block of granite you have inside your ribcage in place of a heart.

School Trips

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.

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.

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!