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.
Wednesday, 19 May 2010
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.
Thursday, 29 April 2010
Teacherspeak Part 3 (From B to G, with no O in the middle)
More “Teacherspeak” words – things you say as a teacher that would require a huge cloud of volcanic ash to prevent your words flying straight over a child’s head.
After “appropriate,” “audacity” and “apply,” I’ve managed to strain and squeeze out some more words for other letters of the alphabet.
B is for “bare minimum”, which is the amount of work you accuse students of having done when they’ve been lazy bastards. The student immediately considers phoning Childline when he or she gets home, because they think you said something about them having a “bare mini bum”, which is more than a little creepy, and equally disarming is the follow-up accusation that they’ve been “bone idle.”
Teacher: You’ve been bone-idle.
Student: Is that like Pop Idol, but for anorexics?
C is for "consistent". The expectation that if students can do something well, then they have to be able to do it well all of the time. If not, then they become inconsistent.
Teacher writes in mark book: Inconsistent effort.
Student reads in mark book: Blah blah blah effort.
D is for “develop.” You probably throw this word around all over the place. Most confusing is when used in the imperative tense.
Teacher: (Writes when marking) Develop your points a little more!
Student: (Reads) More points.
D is also for “detail.”
Teacher at parents’ evening: What she needs to do is to begin analysing the factors in order to reach an independent conclusion, and to do this, she must learn to make comparisons, evaluate the evidence, assess the different interpretations and communicate her judgements using substantiated evidence that she has selected discriminately from her own research.
Parent, turning to daughter: You hear that? You have to write in more detail.
E is for “exemplary.” A word which you will want to say a lot, won’t know how to spell until after the 100th report you write trying to incorporate it, and which students only understand, because it starts with the same prefix as “excellent.” It sounds like excellent, so it must mean something good. By that reasoning, you could get away with writing “execrable” effort in an exercise book and a student will glow with pride. Perhaps even the phrase, “Your work is excrement.”
F is for “Fuck’s sake,” which can be safely utilised in all of your numerous moments of frustration, because when said under your breath it sounds to everyone more than 2 metres away from you as something no worse an innocuous huffing and puffing.
G is for “gifted and talented,” the current buzzword for children who have a particular gift or talent for one or more areas of the school curriculum. The profession refuses to admit to itself that this form of labelling is immoral, despite willingly teaching students in History that the first of the eight stages of genocide is categorisation. By the time you read this guide, students across the country are likely to find themselves victims of the second stage of genocide, symbolisation. Wearing of Gifted and Talented badges will be made compulsory. Stage 3 is Dehumanisation. Given that the whole concept is about elitism, G and T students considered as being “above” others in terms of gifts and talents, therefore become the “super” men. And as we all know, Superman was an alien and thereby not human.
Stage 4 is organisation, so here at least the slippery path towards genocide grinds to a gradual crawl thanks to the inevitable mud of bureaucracy associated with getting anything done in teaching. It’ll be like trip organising, a process of paperwork, risk-assessment and impact-evaluation, which could only have been devised for satirical purposes by Franz Kafka. However, once accomplished, the fifth stage towards genocide, that is polarisation, comes into force. Logically, if a minority group are identified and labelled as Gifted and Talented, then the remaining majority become Ungifted and Talentless. Stage 6, the victims are identified for stage 7, the extermination. Stage 8 is denial, but I think I’ve given this now-deceased horse enough of a flogging.
Next week, the letter H onwards.
After “appropriate,” “audacity” and “apply,” I’ve managed to strain and squeeze out some more words for other letters of the alphabet.
B is for “bare minimum”, which is the amount of work you accuse students of having done when they’ve been lazy bastards. The student immediately considers phoning Childline when he or she gets home, because they think you said something about them having a “bare mini bum”, which is more than a little creepy, and equally disarming is the follow-up accusation that they’ve been “bone idle.”
Teacher: You’ve been bone-idle.
Student: Is that like Pop Idol, but for anorexics?
C is for "consistent". The expectation that if students can do something well, then they have to be able to do it well all of the time. If not, then they become inconsistent.
Teacher writes in mark book: Inconsistent effort.
Student reads in mark book: Blah blah blah effort.
D is for “develop.” You probably throw this word around all over the place. Most confusing is when used in the imperative tense.
Teacher: (Writes when marking) Develop your points a little more!
Student: (Reads) More points.
D is also for “detail.”
Teacher at parents’ evening: What she needs to do is to begin analysing the factors in order to reach an independent conclusion, and to do this, she must learn to make comparisons, evaluate the evidence, assess the different interpretations and communicate her judgements using substantiated evidence that she has selected discriminately from her own research.
Parent, turning to daughter: You hear that? You have to write in more detail.
E is for “exemplary.” A word which you will want to say a lot, won’t know how to spell until after the 100th report you write trying to incorporate it, and which students only understand, because it starts with the same prefix as “excellent.” It sounds like excellent, so it must mean something good. By that reasoning, you could get away with writing “execrable” effort in an exercise book and a student will glow with pride. Perhaps even the phrase, “Your work is excrement.”
F is for “Fuck’s sake,” which can be safely utilised in all of your numerous moments of frustration, because when said under your breath it sounds to everyone more than 2 metres away from you as something no worse an innocuous huffing and puffing.
G is for “gifted and talented,” the current buzzword for children who have a particular gift or talent for one or more areas of the school curriculum. The profession refuses to admit to itself that this form of labelling is immoral, despite willingly teaching students in History that the first of the eight stages of genocide is categorisation. By the time you read this guide, students across the country are likely to find themselves victims of the second stage of genocide, symbolisation. Wearing of Gifted and Talented badges will be made compulsory. Stage 3 is Dehumanisation. Given that the whole concept is about elitism, G and T students considered as being “above” others in terms of gifts and talents, therefore become the “super” men. And as we all know, Superman was an alien and thereby not human.
Stage 4 is organisation, so here at least the slippery path towards genocide grinds to a gradual crawl thanks to the inevitable mud of bureaucracy associated with getting anything done in teaching. It’ll be like trip organising, a process of paperwork, risk-assessment and impact-evaluation, which could only have been devised for satirical purposes by Franz Kafka. However, once accomplished, the fifth stage towards genocide, that is polarisation, comes into force. Logically, if a minority group are identified and labelled as Gifted and Talented, then the remaining majority become Ungifted and Talentless. Stage 6, the victims are identified for stage 7, the extermination. Stage 8 is denial, but I think I’ve given this now-deceased horse enough of a flogging.
Next week, the letter H onwards.
Tuesday, 20 April 2010
What you say to students: Teacherspeak (Part 2 - still "A")
Following on (as opposed to “following through” as I’ve heard people say in meetings, though never actually smelt them do) from the first blog about “Teacherspeak” - the condition in which you the teacher becomes “Lost in Teaching” by using language that is almost meaningless (or at best anachronistic) to students - I would like to move from the pointlessness of “appropriate” to another A-word you may feel a compunction to utter, and that is “audacity.”
A strange old word this, in that it is flattering to be labelled “audacious,” as it suggests boldness in the face of overwhelming odds, and yet it is insulting to be charged with the crime of “audacity.” People have a right to be audacious, but no right to show audacity. That would be “entirely inappropriate!”
Teacher: I’ve just caught you bunking out of school to go to the shop, and you have the audacity to eat that chocolate bar in front of me?
Student: (Thinks) Audacity must mean teeth.
These words are not the preserve of the more aged amongst your profession. Within months, even novice teachers are mimicking their older colleagues, having subliminally soaked up their parlance, and are already flopping their appropriates and audacities about all over the place.
Not that I was intending to compile a whole A-Z of Teacherspeak, but the next is another word beginning with A and marks our journey from the spoken to the written word. You may consider this phrase technical language and therefore suitable for reports as well as oral interjections when students are not working hard enough:
“You need to apply yourself more.”
Now, the idea of applying anything without it coming out of a small, circular tin with a sponge and mirror is totally alien to a great many 15-year old girls. These are the same girls who think that a foundation tier is a blob of make-up not yet smoothed onto the skin rather than the exam paper that the less clever kids do. As for the boys, who knows how they translate the instruction to “apply themselves” more? It sounds rather too much like something they’d prefer to do behind a closed door and not in a classroom.
As adults, the usage changes, and we all think of “applying” for jobs. And in the interviews we might get for those jobs, we don’t sit there and boast to the panel how we “apply ourselves a lot,” because that’s just Yoda’s way of saying he’s gone for loads of jobs and not had much luck.
I’m tempted next to see if I can maintain this alphabetical run and impress you with a B, a C, a D and so on. Next blog next week, we’ll see…
Monday, 12 April 2010
What you say to students: Teacherspeak (part one - A)
Teacherspeak is the most conspicuous symptom of a condition known as Lost in Teaching. This condition can afflict sufferers to varying degrees and for irregular intervals, but in essence it describes an uncontrollable behaviour in which we make sense only to ourselves and make absolutely no sense to students. When it strikes you, it feels as if the whole world halts on its axis and its 6.5 billion inhabitants all telepathically tune in to what you’re saying and become both humoured and enlightened by your wondrous performance of pedagogy.
That’s how it feels to you. How it looks to your class of students is that you’re suddenly talking bollocks, acting like a weirdo and have metaphorically disappeared up your own arsehole.
What we choose to say to students when we use the sort of language that they would never themselves use nor fully understand, is Teacherspeak. Imagine Orwell’s Newspeak and stick a tweed jacket on it and you’ll get the picture.
For starters, you won’t realise it at first, but after a while the word appropriate will become a malignant tumour on your daily vocabulary.
No one uses the word appropriate as a child. Your average parents, assuming that they aren’t teachers of course, never have cause to inflict this insidious lexicological folly on their children; and adults tend only to use the negative form when laughing at innuendos or cheeky behaviour, fondly labelled as inappropriate.
If I am wrong and you know someone who does use the word appropriate, but isn’t in fact a teacher, then the likelihood is that either they should be a teacher, or they have chosen another career in which the desire to self-righteously inflict their values on others and subsequently admonish them for their transgressions is equally fulfilled. A football referee, a special constable, a retail manager, in fact the list might be endless.
And that’s the problem with the word. It highlights the worst sensibilities of teachers. It inflicts their moral code on the students. And it is the last refuge of a bad rule. When there is no justifying the reason for telling a student to do something, you’ll fall back on this argument and end up saying that something is simply “not appropriate.”
Student: Why can’t I?
Teacher: Because it isn’t appropriate.
Student: (Thinks) What the fuck does that mean?
Who are you to decide what is and what isn’t appropriate without a reason to substantiate your judgment? And if you do have a reason, then you don’t really need to use the word appropriate at all, do you?
Student: Why can’t I punch Liam in the face?
Teacher: Because it will hurt him and you will infringe his human right to safety, a right which you would expect others to respect in regard to yourself.
Student: (Thinks) I understood most of that reason, I think. Fair enough.
Which is preferable to…
Student: Why can’t I punch Liam in the face?
Teacher: Because it is not appropriate.
Student: Would it be more appropriate to kick him then?
Now, just try to think of something, which would be seen as inappropriate and most of the time there’s a proper reason that can be cited instead. It isn’t just inappropriate for a teacher to have an affair with a student, it is wrong for a whole batch of reasons that I won’t choose to list here. (Not that it is not appropriate to list them, just that I can’t be arsed.) If you can’t think of a reason for deeming a particular action as inappropriate then the truth is that you just don’t like it– a matter of taste, not a matter of right and wrong.
Blindly pontificating to a child that his or her behaviour is not appropriate (rather than expressing your opinion that it might be inappropriate and asking what they think themselves about it) is as bad as using a phrase which died out the last time a meteor hit the earth and caused an ice age – that phrase being the now exhausted pillar of English snobbery across all social classes: because I said so!
Student: Why can’t I punch Liam in the face?
Teacher: Because I said so.
Student: And your omnipotence is such that I should consider this decree to be absolute and without recourse?
Teacher: I have spoken. So let it be written, so let it be done.
You’re not God in the fucking Ten Commandments, are you! If you are still telling kids to do something, because you said so, then piss off home and whip your own kids with a belt when they get back from the coalmine. There’s only one time that it is forgivable to resort to such a base, unfounded and tyrannical piece of reasoning as because I said so – and that’s when you simply can’t be bothered explaining the reason, because it’s too bloody long and students get bored of you talking once you reach your second sentence.
This could in fact bring me to another issue, the inexorable urge to say too much; the fact that you as a teacher has as much capacity to be concise as you have ability to blow into your own arsehole. (See how I left that one open for the rare and talented exceptions!) No, I’ll come back to your loquaciousness later.
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