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.
Tuesday, 20 July 2010
Saturday, 10 July 2010
Stereotypes
Somewhere in the PSHE curriculum, it says that you have to teach students about stereotypes.
Undeniably, there is an ideological agenda at the core of such teaching, which the cynical might label as political and the more reasoned might describe as enlightening, humanitarian, egalitarian or something else soft and nice, which I generally agree with, not being a bastard that is.
Let’s face it, the country is awash with prejudice, because it is a very natural flaw of human nature to lazily categorise people into simplistic groups and cast barely substantiated judgements at them, while deep down we don’t actually fully subscribe to these glib thoughts that prop up our prejudices.
Therefore, you will assume that students have these prejudices, and so you teach them – or rather challenge them – to think deeply about their opinions of other (groups of) people in the hope that they become a lot more enlightened than their parents (and a great fucking amount more enlightened than their grandparents) in their attitudes towards people who are superficially dissimilar to themselves.
This is how it might go. Lesson one – write down every word you can think of to describe a homosexual.
The flood gates open. To challenge prejudice you have to bring it out into the open. Like a séance. Call up the evil spirits and only then can you exorcise them.
Only, to the students, it appears that you’ve given them license to write a plethora of abusive and insulting words onto sugar paper. It might even become competitive, with efforts to out-do each other in terms of how many forms of homophobic abuse they can think of.
Once this catharsis is complete, you are able to start tackling the tricky subject of stereotypes, in which you preach that everyone is in fact different and you blindly ignore the truth that we all conform to a stereotype to some extent at least, because if we didn’t then the whole concept of stereotypes would not even exist.
It’s too dangerous to tell students that they are in fact “not” completely individual, forming independent opinions and endowed with unique tastes and talents.
It’s better to let students find out the dark and bleak truth for themselves.
They all assume that they’re different, but in an effort to fit in, they try to be the same as each other and end up casting suspicion on (or systematically bullying) anyone who seems significantly different to them.
The evidence confronts them everyday, because like it or not, you as teachers often conform to teacher stereotypes. Beyond the shared capacity for weird humour, talking too much, use of obscure “Teacherspeak” phrases and the wearing of smart casual clothing from supermarkets and Matalan, you do tend to dip a toe, a foot or a leg into the subject-stereotype puddle. In some cases, you plunge in up to your ears.
This is not where I fall into the trap of picking on PE teachers for being illiterate, beer-swilling, overly-butch, pseudo-rebels. Even though the odd female one does manage to fill every gap in that particular mould. (But none that I work with now, should any colleague be reading this. In fact, far from it, to be fair.) That would be a cliché. If anything, PE staff demonstrate remarkable literary competence in the application of suffixes, by adroitly adding a Y or O to the end of each others’ surnames. (PE teachers refuse to recognise that anyone has a first name, even students.) Linguistic dexterity can sometimes lead to the use of “–ers” where a pronoun ends up sounding too Brazilian or just too daft when buffered with Y or O.
Just imagine if some of history’s greatest individuals had ended up as PE teachers! US Civil Rights leader, Kingy; English playwright, the Bard, Shakeso, and British War-Time PM, Churchers. There’s a suggestion that Gandhi was in fact a PE teacher, named Mahatma Gand.
On the subject of History, people who teach this subject provide the strongest evidence against the accusation that “those who can do and those who can’t teach.” Because although there may occasionally be some truth in the stereotypical view that drama teachers are failed actors (Luvvies without the luck,) who would ever think that any History teacher ever wanted to become an historian? This might also stem from the fact (my view) that History teachers are perhaps the most normal of all subject deliverers and the least teacher-like. In fact, anyone teaching a Humanities subject by default is more human and better able to relate to other members of the species. Probably because at university they did the least work and had the most time to sit around talking and drinking with other people.
In contrast, Scientists at university were in the lab on campus all day 5 or 6 days a week, many ending up with an inability to communicate with humans. Mathematicians are the same. That’s why there is a shortage of teachers in both these areas. Only those who managed to demonstrate human characteristics and some awareness that living organisms can be communicated with outside of a petri dish, have felt tempted to apply for teacher training. Mind you, that doesn’t stop the majority growing beards.
Which brings us – as I wonder if I spelt petri dish correctly – to the most unbearded of staff, English teachers. Women whose love of literature just slightly outdoes their love of small children, plum for secondary over primary education and swell the ranks of English departments leaving no room for men to get a look in. Only a confident man would enter an English department office anyway, because the sheer magnitude of combined intellect and femininity can be too intimidating for most males.
Finally, a mention for languages teachers. They pretty much defy all stereotyping, because they are only united by their ability to speak another language, so they tend to be a diverse breed.
So, there you have it. Students are confronted by stereotypes, students fit stereotypes and yet students are taught not to stereotype. Now, write down all the words that might describe teachers…
Undeniably, there is an ideological agenda at the core of such teaching, which the cynical might label as political and the more reasoned might describe as enlightening, humanitarian, egalitarian or something else soft and nice, which I generally agree with, not being a bastard that is.
Let’s face it, the country is awash with prejudice, because it is a very natural flaw of human nature to lazily categorise people into simplistic groups and cast barely substantiated judgements at them, while deep down we don’t actually fully subscribe to these glib thoughts that prop up our prejudices.
Therefore, you will assume that students have these prejudices, and so you teach them – or rather challenge them – to think deeply about their opinions of other (groups of) people in the hope that they become a lot more enlightened than their parents (and a great fucking amount more enlightened than their grandparents) in their attitudes towards people who are superficially dissimilar to themselves.
This is how it might go. Lesson one – write down every word you can think of to describe a homosexual.
The flood gates open. To challenge prejudice you have to bring it out into the open. Like a séance. Call up the evil spirits and only then can you exorcise them.
Only, to the students, it appears that you’ve given them license to write a plethora of abusive and insulting words onto sugar paper. It might even become competitive, with efforts to out-do each other in terms of how many forms of homophobic abuse they can think of.
Once this catharsis is complete, you are able to start tackling the tricky subject of stereotypes, in which you preach that everyone is in fact different and you blindly ignore the truth that we all conform to a stereotype to some extent at least, because if we didn’t then the whole concept of stereotypes would not even exist.
It’s too dangerous to tell students that they are in fact “not” completely individual, forming independent opinions and endowed with unique tastes and talents.
It’s better to let students find out the dark and bleak truth for themselves.
They all assume that they’re different, but in an effort to fit in, they try to be the same as each other and end up casting suspicion on (or systematically bullying) anyone who seems significantly different to them.
The evidence confronts them everyday, because like it or not, you as teachers often conform to teacher stereotypes. Beyond the shared capacity for weird humour, talking too much, use of obscure “Teacherspeak” phrases and the wearing of smart casual clothing from supermarkets and Matalan, you do tend to dip a toe, a foot or a leg into the subject-stereotype puddle. In some cases, you plunge in up to your ears.
This is not where I fall into the trap of picking on PE teachers for being illiterate, beer-swilling, overly-butch, pseudo-rebels. Even though the odd female one does manage to fill every gap in that particular mould. (But none that I work with now, should any colleague be reading this. In fact, far from it, to be fair.) That would be a cliché. If anything, PE staff demonstrate remarkable literary competence in the application of suffixes, by adroitly adding a Y or O to the end of each others’ surnames. (PE teachers refuse to recognise that anyone has a first name, even students.) Linguistic dexterity can sometimes lead to the use of “–ers” where a pronoun ends up sounding too Brazilian or just too daft when buffered with Y or O.
Just imagine if some of history’s greatest individuals had ended up as PE teachers! US Civil Rights leader, Kingy; English playwright, the Bard, Shakeso, and British War-Time PM, Churchers. There’s a suggestion that Gandhi was in fact a PE teacher, named Mahatma Gand.
On the subject of History, people who teach this subject provide the strongest evidence against the accusation that “those who can do and those who can’t teach.” Because although there may occasionally be some truth in the stereotypical view that drama teachers are failed actors (Luvvies without the luck,) who would ever think that any History teacher ever wanted to become an historian? This might also stem from the fact (my view) that History teachers are perhaps the most normal of all subject deliverers and the least teacher-like. In fact, anyone teaching a Humanities subject by default is more human and better able to relate to other members of the species. Probably because at university they did the least work and had the most time to sit around talking and drinking with other people.
In contrast, Scientists at university were in the lab on campus all day 5 or 6 days a week, many ending up with an inability to communicate with humans. Mathematicians are the same. That’s why there is a shortage of teachers in both these areas. Only those who managed to demonstrate human characteristics and some awareness that living organisms can be communicated with outside of a petri dish, have felt tempted to apply for teacher training. Mind you, that doesn’t stop the majority growing beards.
Which brings us – as I wonder if I spelt petri dish correctly – to the most unbearded of staff, English teachers. Women whose love of literature just slightly outdoes their love of small children, plum for secondary over primary education and swell the ranks of English departments leaving no room for men to get a look in. Only a confident man would enter an English department office anyway, because the sheer magnitude of combined intellect and femininity can be too intimidating for most males.
Finally, a mention for languages teachers. They pretty much defy all stereotyping, because they are only united by their ability to speak another language, so they tend to be a diverse breed.
So, there you have it. Students are confronted by stereotypes, students fit stereotypes and yet students are taught not to stereotype. Now, write down all the words that might describe teachers…
Wednesday, 9 June 2010
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.”
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.”
Tuesday, 1 June 2010
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?
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?
Wednesday, 19 May 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, 11 May 2010
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!
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!
Wednesday, 5 May 2010
Teacherspeak Part 4 (H to O)
Careful, because I am about to get a bit serious and start pontificating from my soapbox with this next word; but bear with me, because I will swiftly return to more puerile observations once that’s out the way. So…
H is for homophobic. It is only recently, after so many years of challenging sexist and racist attitudes in schools, that teachers are applying the same approach to homophobia. It is a sad feature of our society that it takes decades and even generations for malevolently discriminatory attitudes towards others to be combated with any degree of widespread success. Why is it that people need time to stop being sexist, before getting their heads around why racism is also wrong and only after that can you expect them to appreciate the hurt they cause by seeing homosexuality as a joke and consequently as criteria for bullying or social exclusion. Perhaps the reason why teachers had largely ignored this in the past, is perhaps partly because through TV and other media, homosexuality had been a subject for humour (which it can be as much as anything else of course, but it shouldn’t be predominantly a subject for humour.) It could also be partly because many male teachers didn’t have the confidence to challenge students making disparaging remarks about homosexuality, because simply by defending it, they were worried that students might accuse them of being it:
Student: Urgh, he’s such a gay.
Teacher: Should you be making homophobic comments like that?
Student: Urgh, sir, are you gay as well?
Finally, a third reason for ignoring homophobia for so long could be the lobbying by those true arseholes of the world, the extremists and fundamentalists, who believe that unless you are condemning something (or at least sweeping it under the carpet), then by default you are promoting it. And when you promote something to children, then they will all end up doing it, seeing as they are all so easily brainwashed. Yeah, right. The true arseholes of the world believe that by teaching about sex, rather than equipping students with the knowledge of how to stay safe and an understanding of the emotional consequences of sexual relationships, we are in contrast simply preaching some form of uninhibited free lust culture; that by doing the same in regard to drugs, we are turning children into potential junkies. And by challenging homophobia and teaching that all through history a large minority of humans have been naturally inclined towards homosexual intercourse, we are making boys fancy boys and girls fancy girls, and God forbid if we succeed then the human race will die out for lack of babies!
Please don’t ever feel disinclined to demand that students desist from labelling anything bad as gay:
Teacher: Homework tonight.
Student: Homework? Ah, that’s so gay!
And in telling a 6’3” 16 year old thug to stop taking the piss out of the camp boy in class, please don’t ever feel that your own precarious confidence is in need of more protection than the camp boy is. Homophobia is a good word to use with students, even if it does sound like the title of a horror film in which gay people take over a small town in mid-west USA.
On a much less serious note…
I is for immediately. One of the ultimate conflicts between adults and teenagers is timescale on carrying out instructions. Now is a more suitable substitute with an even greater clarity of expression, but it lacks the authority of the additional four syllables.
J is for jeopardise. You warn students about how their exam performance, future earning potential and career opportunities will all be jeopardised by their current bone-idle attitude to work unless they apply themselves more. They will just think that the words you’re using are gay.
K is for Kinaesthetic. Understanding that people have different learning styles, requires you to ensure that lessons have some kind of kinaesthetic element to them. To the uninitiated, that means learning by physically doing; with the exception of physically reading or physically writing, as these don’t count, because having your arse on your chair and your hands redundant equals non- kinaesthetic. If you’re new to this, you probably make students do card sorts, which is really just like reading, only you get to move the cards around. That’s a shit version of kinaesthetic learning. When you share information about learning styles with the students it is difficult for everyone to understand what you mean, so you’ll have to teach them using each of the 3 main different styles. So, when you explain it to them, only the auditory lot will get it. If you show them all a diagram, only the visual learners know what you’re on about. And because we’re dealing with abstracts here and not realities, then the kinaesthetic learners won’t have a fucking clue what anything of it is about and will be throwing glue sticks up at the ceiling to make them hang, rather than using them to stick the confusing picture into their exercise books, which they have very little writing in anyway.
L is for library, as in use the library, which really has only one advantage to most students over the Internet and that is the Internet cannot possibly keep you warm and dry when it pisses down at lunchtime.
M is for manage. You tell students to manage their own learning, manage their time, manage to be punctual to school, manage to pay attention for more than a few seconds, manage to shut the door on the way in, manage to avoid hitting or touching each other, manage to get to lessons, manage to pick up their mess from the floor, manage to write more than two lines, manage to stop chatting and do some work: The list of imperative commands prefixed by manage to is endless. The education system therefore succeeds in developing skills of management in young people, so that when they become older people they can all become managers for a living; from Manager of the French Fries Section in McDonald’s up to Prime Manager of Britain.
Ironically, teachers stopped seeing yourselves as managers some time ago and began to view your selves as leaders. Heads of Department no longer manage teams, they lead them. At all levels, we have become leaders, so perhaps it is time to adapt our vocabulary with students to help them develop into leaders rather than managers. They will need to lead their own learning, be the leader of their own time, lead themselves to being punctual for school, lead their attention back onto the teacher or the work for more than a few seconds, be the shutting-the-door leader, lead others in not interfering with each other, lead the way to lessons, become lead litter-pickers of the classroom, lead up to writing more than two lines and lead others in stopping chatting and doing some work.
N is for nearly, which actually means no.
Teacher: Which device do we use for holding a block of wood securely, while we work on it with a chisel?
Student: A large blob of Blu-tack.
Teacher: Nearly, but it’s actually a vice, so you were close with that answer.
O is for opportunities.
Teacher: You need to create opportunities for yourself in life.
Student: That’s rather abstract. Could you show me a diagram, as I’m a visual learner. Then I could put it in my book, once that glue stick falls back down.
H is for homophobic. It is only recently, after so many years of challenging sexist and racist attitudes in schools, that teachers are applying the same approach to homophobia. It is a sad feature of our society that it takes decades and even generations for malevolently discriminatory attitudes towards others to be combated with any degree of widespread success. Why is it that people need time to stop being sexist, before getting their heads around why racism is also wrong and only after that can you expect them to appreciate the hurt they cause by seeing homosexuality as a joke and consequently as criteria for bullying or social exclusion. Perhaps the reason why teachers had largely ignored this in the past, is perhaps partly because through TV and other media, homosexuality had been a subject for humour (which it can be as much as anything else of course, but it shouldn’t be predominantly a subject for humour.) It could also be partly because many male teachers didn’t have the confidence to challenge students making disparaging remarks about homosexuality, because simply by defending it, they were worried that students might accuse them of being it:
Student: Urgh, he’s such a gay.
Teacher: Should you be making homophobic comments like that?
Student: Urgh, sir, are you gay as well?
Finally, a third reason for ignoring homophobia for so long could be the lobbying by those true arseholes of the world, the extremists and fundamentalists, who believe that unless you are condemning something (or at least sweeping it under the carpet), then by default you are promoting it. And when you promote something to children, then they will all end up doing it, seeing as they are all so easily brainwashed. Yeah, right. The true arseholes of the world believe that by teaching about sex, rather than equipping students with the knowledge of how to stay safe and an understanding of the emotional consequences of sexual relationships, we are in contrast simply preaching some form of uninhibited free lust culture; that by doing the same in regard to drugs, we are turning children into potential junkies. And by challenging homophobia and teaching that all through history a large minority of humans have been naturally inclined towards homosexual intercourse, we are making boys fancy boys and girls fancy girls, and God forbid if we succeed then the human race will die out for lack of babies!
Please don’t ever feel disinclined to demand that students desist from labelling anything bad as gay:
Teacher: Homework tonight.
Student: Homework? Ah, that’s so gay!
And in telling a 6’3” 16 year old thug to stop taking the piss out of the camp boy in class, please don’t ever feel that your own precarious confidence is in need of more protection than the camp boy is. Homophobia is a good word to use with students, even if it does sound like the title of a horror film in which gay people take over a small town in mid-west USA.
On a much less serious note…
I is for immediately. One of the ultimate conflicts between adults and teenagers is timescale on carrying out instructions. Now is a more suitable substitute with an even greater clarity of expression, but it lacks the authority of the additional four syllables.
J is for jeopardise. You warn students about how their exam performance, future earning potential and career opportunities will all be jeopardised by their current bone-idle attitude to work unless they apply themselves more. They will just think that the words you’re using are gay.
K is for Kinaesthetic. Understanding that people have different learning styles, requires you to ensure that lessons have some kind of kinaesthetic element to them. To the uninitiated, that means learning by physically doing; with the exception of physically reading or physically writing, as these don’t count, because having your arse on your chair and your hands redundant equals non- kinaesthetic. If you’re new to this, you probably make students do card sorts, which is really just like reading, only you get to move the cards around. That’s a shit version of kinaesthetic learning. When you share information about learning styles with the students it is difficult for everyone to understand what you mean, so you’ll have to teach them using each of the 3 main different styles. So, when you explain it to them, only the auditory lot will get it. If you show them all a diagram, only the visual learners know what you’re on about. And because we’re dealing with abstracts here and not realities, then the kinaesthetic learners won’t have a fucking clue what anything of it is about and will be throwing glue sticks up at the ceiling to make them hang, rather than using them to stick the confusing picture into their exercise books, which they have very little writing in anyway.
L is for library, as in use the library, which really has only one advantage to most students over the Internet and that is the Internet cannot possibly keep you warm and dry when it pisses down at lunchtime.
M is for manage. You tell students to manage their own learning, manage their time, manage to be punctual to school, manage to pay attention for more than a few seconds, manage to shut the door on the way in, manage to avoid hitting or touching each other, manage to get to lessons, manage to pick up their mess from the floor, manage to write more than two lines, manage to stop chatting and do some work: The list of imperative commands prefixed by manage to is endless. The education system therefore succeeds in developing skills of management in young people, so that when they become older people they can all become managers for a living; from Manager of the French Fries Section in McDonald’s up to Prime Manager of Britain.
Ironically, teachers stopped seeing yourselves as managers some time ago and began to view your selves as leaders. Heads of Department no longer manage teams, they lead them. At all levels, we have become leaders, so perhaps it is time to adapt our vocabulary with students to help them develop into leaders rather than managers. They will need to lead their own learning, be the leader of their own time, lead themselves to being punctual for school, lead their attention back onto the teacher or the work for more than a few seconds, be the shutting-the-door leader, lead others in not interfering with each other, lead the way to lessons, become lead litter-pickers of the classroom, lead up to writing more than two lines and lead others in stopping chatting and doing some work.
N is for nearly, which actually means no.
Teacher: Which device do we use for holding a block of wood securely, while we work on it with a chisel?
Student: A large blob of Blu-tack.
Teacher: Nearly, but it’s actually a vice, so you were close with that answer.
O is for opportunities.
Teacher: You need to create opportunities for yourself in life.
Student: That’s rather abstract. Could you show me a diagram, as I’m a visual learner. Then I could put it in my book, once that glue stick falls back down.
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