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.
Saturday, 21 May 2011
Saturday, 19 March 2011
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.
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.
Thursday, 24 February 2011
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.
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.
Saturday, 12 February 2011
Turning to the Dark Side
There’s a line in teaching and once you’ve crossed it you are lost to the Dark Side. It’s like that moment in Revenge of the Sith (the final Star Wars movie to you non-nerds) when Anakin (soon-to-be Darth Vader) Skywalker kills Samuel L Jackson (who isn’t half as hard as he is in Pulp Fiction) and drops to his knees to pledge loyalty to Darth Sidious, who’s like the Star Wars version of Bricktop from Snatch, a right nasty bastard.
Multiple film references aside, what I’m talking about here is the iron curtain between all the nice hard-working downtrodden teaching staff and the insidiously under-worked, over-paid, power-corrupted Senior Leadership Team. Becoming SLT is like catching leprosy and joining the Nazi SS at the same time.
However, you might be paradoxically liked as an individual and yet still detested as a group once you’ve been promoted out of the rank and file. Invariably any inevitable chink in your armour or less-than-perfect decision enacted as that group will justify the application of the term “useless” to SLT, thus altering the name to the Senior Leadership Useless Team, hereafter to be referred to as SLuTs.
As SLuTs you will have your own language, Masonic-like, an odious form of Teacherspeak, designed to sound professional and intended to pompously model to other staff a politically correct, precise and charmless educational terminology. For example, SLuTs are at pains to avoid using the word “kids.” But rather than settle for “students” you now favour the term “learners.” In fact, you often corrupt the plural form of this word and speak about “the learner.”
“How will this new strategy impact on the learner?”
Oh, la-di-fucking-da! (As Paul McCartney would have written if he wasn’t such a disgustingly cheerful bastard.)
The blame for such crass language lies with the failed teachers… sorry, I mean the ex-teachers who changed careers for training. One in-service training provider describes its teaching courses as “blended learning.” You might experience blended learning in your rise to tyranny, which officially means you have employed different types of learning on the course and unofficially means that you have had your time wasted in a variety of near-pointless activities.
Perhaps your re-education to think and speak in this higher form of educational vocabulary is the reason why you will suddenly stop socialising with non-SluT staff once you turn to the dark side. By-passing after-work drinks on a Friday and a polite lie to excuse yourself from the departmental meal will become second nature. After all, they are the rebels and you are Darth Vader and they wouldn’t want you to do that Jedi choking trick on them as they sip on their drink and socialise around the same table as you. Not only that, but there is the danger of startling the underlings by appearing almost human when you let your hair down. Seeing a SluT laugh, joke and get even moderately tipsy in a pub only serves to unnerve people and gives them that same uncomfortable sick feeling many of us have when we hear our parents talk about their sex lives.
In any job that can create stress, people will sometimes get emotional. Before defecting to the dark side you can let vent in the staff room as much as you like. Anger, tears, rebellious rants, opinionated pontificating, that’s all human nature. But stick on the Darth Vader suit and you have to bury all that emotion. Cold, hard, professionalism is required. And deep inside, where that repressed emotion festers, a ball of bastardness must build up. You might think holding a fart in all day while you teach is difficult, but this is something else. This is why you are given your own office as a SLuT, so that you can hide away a couple of times a day and stick drawing pins into blu-tack dolls of the members of staff who have given you the most grief. Or weep over a mountain of boring paperwork. Or lance your own thighs with a staple-gun as you tediously trawl through your inbox full of emails that are one of the following:
§ Educational junkmail
§ Notices to all staff from admin that are relevant to about 6 people
§ Problems to sort that can’t be sorted
§ Requests for meetings or replies to your requests for meetings
§ Someone pointlessly emailing the word thanks
But you can’t feel sorry for yourself. You don’t teach full days anymore. You have more time to do boring jobs (like making up boring jobs to give teachers who do teach full days most days.) And you get paid more, seemingly for working less, because no one sees 90% of what work you do. But they’ll notice your mistakes, like a goalkeeper gets judged on his errors more than his saves. Such is a SLuTs lot in life. So, deal with it, pick up your cheque and treat yourself to a couple of new suits each month. Just make sure they’re all black, armour-plated and come with a shiny helmet, cloak and light-sabre.
Multiple film references aside, what I’m talking about here is the iron curtain between all the nice hard-working downtrodden teaching staff and the insidiously under-worked, over-paid, power-corrupted Senior Leadership Team. Becoming SLT is like catching leprosy and joining the Nazi SS at the same time.
However, you might be paradoxically liked as an individual and yet still detested as a group once you’ve been promoted out of the rank and file. Invariably any inevitable chink in your armour or less-than-perfect decision enacted as that group will justify the application of the term “useless” to SLT, thus altering the name to the Senior Leadership Useless Team, hereafter to be referred to as SLuTs.
As SLuTs you will have your own language, Masonic-like, an odious form of Teacherspeak, designed to sound professional and intended to pompously model to other staff a politically correct, precise and charmless educational terminology. For example, SLuTs are at pains to avoid using the word “kids.” But rather than settle for “students” you now favour the term “learners.” In fact, you often corrupt the plural form of this word and speak about “the learner.”
“How will this new strategy impact on the learner?”
Oh, la-di-fucking-da! (As Paul McCartney would have written if he wasn’t such a disgustingly cheerful bastard.)
The blame for such crass language lies with the failed teachers… sorry, I mean the ex-teachers who changed careers for training. One in-service training provider describes its teaching courses as “blended learning.” You might experience blended learning in your rise to tyranny, which officially means you have employed different types of learning on the course and unofficially means that you have had your time wasted in a variety of near-pointless activities.
Perhaps your re-education to think and speak in this higher form of educational vocabulary is the reason why you will suddenly stop socialising with non-SluT staff once you turn to the dark side. By-passing after-work drinks on a Friday and a polite lie to excuse yourself from the departmental meal will become second nature. After all, they are the rebels and you are Darth Vader and they wouldn’t want you to do that Jedi choking trick on them as they sip on their drink and socialise around the same table as you. Not only that, but there is the danger of startling the underlings by appearing almost human when you let your hair down. Seeing a SluT laugh, joke and get even moderately tipsy in a pub only serves to unnerve people and gives them that same uncomfortable sick feeling many of us have when we hear our parents talk about their sex lives.
In any job that can create stress, people will sometimes get emotional. Before defecting to the dark side you can let vent in the staff room as much as you like. Anger, tears, rebellious rants, opinionated pontificating, that’s all human nature. But stick on the Darth Vader suit and you have to bury all that emotion. Cold, hard, professionalism is required. And deep inside, where that repressed emotion festers, a ball of bastardness must build up. You might think holding a fart in all day while you teach is difficult, but this is something else. This is why you are given your own office as a SLuT, so that you can hide away a couple of times a day and stick drawing pins into blu-tack dolls of the members of staff who have given you the most grief. Or weep over a mountain of boring paperwork. Or lance your own thighs with a staple-gun as you tediously trawl through your inbox full of emails that are one of the following:
§ Educational junkmail
§ Notices to all staff from admin that are relevant to about 6 people
§ Problems to sort that can’t be sorted
§ Requests for meetings or replies to your requests for meetings
§ Someone pointlessly emailing the word thanks
But you can’t feel sorry for yourself. You don’t teach full days anymore. You have more time to do boring jobs (like making up boring jobs to give teachers who do teach full days most days.) And you get paid more, seemingly for working less, because no one sees 90% of what work you do. But they’ll notice your mistakes, like a goalkeeper gets judged on his errors more than his saves. Such is a SLuTs lot in life. So, deal with it, pick up your cheque and treat yourself to a couple of new suits each month. Just make sure they’re all black, armour-plated and come with a shiny helmet, cloak and light-sabre.
Saturday, 4 December 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, 28 October 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, 26 September 2010
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.
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.
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