Class War E-Book

anonymous

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Ever wondered what life is really like for today's teachers? Reasoning that it's either laugh or cry, this author does both while intoning a mantra of 'July, July, July' and praying for a minor heart attack in return for a foot in the door to early retirement. From fending off inspectors to dealing with the alarming rise in mental health issues and increasing alienation of young people, it's fair to say the job has never been more difficult. Written by an anonymous author working in a state secondary school, this uproariously funny, desperately necessary book takes us inside the classroom to see morale at rock-bottom and a system on its knees. Hilarious, heartbreaking and impassioned, Class War is about the importance of good schools and talented teachers at a time when they have never been more essential. Painting a heartfelt portrait of the profession and an education system where no one should be left behind but too many are, this book reveals there is laughter to be found even as a river of effluent is sluicing down the pipe.

Leseprobe

To my father

A friend of mine read this manuscript and asked me if this was all true. I quoted Picasso: ‘We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realise truth.’ ‘Look,’ said my friend in response, ‘Is it true or not? And never mind all yer ol’ bollix.’

1

17 JANUARY

SONNETS

So far, this unit of work hasn’t been working with 9H. It’s an old unit. Decent classes have always responded to it. 9H couldn’t see it far enough away. I started with ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ and ‘Futility’, Wilfred Owen, because they’ve just finished reading The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and I wanted to segue seamlessly into the poetry unit while continuing the war theme.

‘Anthem’ was disappointing. The class on ‘Futility’ was an absolute bitch. I’d have got more of a response from the war dead themselves. Jane, the brightest in the class, closed her eyes at one point as if falling asleep. It was first two on a Monday morning but, fuck, that’s no excuse – except if it’s my excuse. I kept her back at the end and let rip at her and two of her mates. I needed someone to shout at. I paraphrased ‘Futility’: ‘I felt like moving you lot into the sun to see if it would bring you back to life.’ That wasn’t bad as 2teacher sarcasm goes. Aside from that it was the usual shit. Bark but no bite.

Now, it was Shakespeare – ‘Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?’ Told them it was the most famous sonnet in the language. Is it? Don’t know, but I needed an opening. Ten minutes in, they were starting to get it. What was it about this and not about Owen? Was it just a different day, a different mood? What about my mood? Every lesson has its own biosphere, to be measured on a scale of disappointment. But I think 9H liked that it was a love poem; here was someone supposedly writing to someone they loved. I sprinkled this with the conjecture that the loved one might have been a young man, that Shakey might have been a bit of a paedo, which wasn’t as frowned on back then. Contemporising, always a good idea: some zeitgeist controversy. (Maybe that was the problem with Owen – so, war is bad. We know that already. What else you got?) Yeah, they liked that. Lapped that up. Even if Shakespeare was a kiddie-fiddler, at least it took him out of a textbook and made him human. They also liked the simplicity of the idea of comparing someone to a summer’s day: the poem as a bit of a game. I hesitated to use the word ‘conceit’ and talk about John Donne and George Herbert and all that crew. Didn’t want to balls this up. ‘So, summer days can be too warm, too cold, too short; they can have rough winds, be overcast. They’re not all they’re cracked up to be,’ I said.

But what about the rest of it – ‘thy eternal summer shall 3not fade’? ‘Death shall never brag thou wander’st in its shade, when in eternal lines to time thou grow’st’? He’s never going to grow old? He’s never going to die? What’s that all about? Has Shakespeare lost the plot?

I had them. This was one of those moments a teacher must cling to that almost – almost! – make up for the rest of the shit. Here was a group of young people, and me and William Shakespeare had got them interested in a piece of literature.

‘OK, he’s better than a summer’s day. I can buy that. But how can he never grow old? How can he never die, people?’

We read the last two lines again: ‘So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.’ They looked at those lines, every set of eyes in the class. Some mumbled the lines to themselves. I pointed to ‘this’ on the board. ‘What is “this” – “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee”?’

It was Emily who put her hand up, God love her. ‘The poem!’ she said. ‘“This” is the poem!’ ‘Go on,’ I told her. ‘Explain.’ And she did. ‘So long as people are still reading the poem and thinking about this young man, he will never die. He’ll always be alive. His memory. How he was young and beautiful when Shakespeare wrote the poem.’

The moments teachers must cling to!

I expanded on Emily’s answer, telling 9H that Shakespeare was eulogising Art itself, that great art like Shakespeare’s own, or da Vinci’s, or Michelangelo’s, or Dickens’s, or Joyce’s will be with us for ever. It will withstand the caprice of the seasons, 4the march of years, time itself. Political leaders will come and go, empires will rise and fall, but great art will always prevail. I could feel my blood pumping, feel myself getting all misty-eyed. I got up from my seat and swept my arms across the classroom as if across the stretch of centuries, the tide of ages. I could hear stirring music in my head.

Christ, I was good. What am I talking about? I was bloody great! Getting all Robin Williamsy and ‘Captain! My captain!’ and all that horseshit! Anybody listening in would’ve thought, this guy certainly knows his iambic pentameters from his glottal stops. Fuck, where are inspectors when you need ’em, the bastards?

Then I had a brainwave. There was half an hour left of a double class. The plan was to give them a comprehension exercise on the poem. But I didn’t want to kill the thing. There’s that line in the Charles Causley poem: Timothy Winters ‘shoots down dead the arithmetic-bird’. Well, this was a Shakespeare bird. They very rarely fly. I didn’t want to hack its wings off. I decided to ask 9H to write a poem entitled ‘Shall I Compare You to a Winter’s Day?’ I tried this before, a few years back, with a pretty good class, but it didn’t quite come off. At the time, though, I didn’t put in the necessary prep. I needed to brainstorm ideas about winter, cover the board, let them pick and choose images, think of how they might turn them into metaphors, similes – skeletal trees, frozen lakes, roaring snow blizzards, leaden skies, the cold white sun. Think of someone they didn’t like and eternalise them in verse. It was a good differentiation 5exercise. The brighter ones would try to write a sonnet, try to put in the same beats as Shakespeare, use the same rhyme scheme, maybe even try to change the tone and mood halfway through as in a real sonnet. The less able would cobble together ten, eight, maybe even six lines. But even that was something. There might be a good image or two in there that I could praise them to the rafters for.

So, ‘Shall I Compare You to a Winter’s Day?’

I set them to work. Write it out rough in the back of their books. When they were ready, write it out properly in the front, not forgetting to rule their margins, write the title, add the date. Can’t forget margins, title, date. When I started out as a student teacher, I told my classes that stuff didn’t matter – didn’t matter what their work looked like, it was the content that mattered. I used to talk some shite. I still talk a lot of shite, but I know now that presentation is king. To anybody who picks up my books – especially parents – it has to at least look like their offspring are learning something and not like a blind drunk’s teaching them. Rule number one: protect yourself at all times.

And there they were, writing away. A class that I hadn’t been looking forward to suddenly had taken off. Sometimes happens when you wing it. Other times you spend a lot of time preparing and the thing just falls flat. Life, what?

Five minutes left now. Packing-up time. They would have to finish for homework. But had anybody got anything so far? Anybody want to read anything out?

Jeff’s hand went up like it was a Nazi rally. I like Jeff. He 6keeps a ferret at home. The ferret’s called Nathan. Anybody who keeps a ferret named Nathan at home is not a bad lad in my book.

‘OK, Jeff, away you go. What’ve you got? Gimme your soul, baby!’

An expectant hush. I didn’t have to tell anybody to belt up. Jeff cleared his throat – ‘Shall I compare you to a winter’s day … Your ginger hair is so gay.’

It’s the hope that kills you.

18 JANUARY

Caught a smoker today. Well, not so much caught him, more… well, let me explain.

I was on ‘escort duty’ after school, which involves going out of the exit doors, down the back steps and accompanying the pupils along the path that leads to the buses. I didn’t even make it to the path. Coming down the steps – this about ten metres from the exit door – I noticed a lanky boy, with lots of acne and huge owl glasses, with something small and white wedged in the corner of his mouth. It looked like a filter for a roll-up cigarette. Nah, couldn’t be, I said to myself. No one could be so blatant. Then, sure enough, to my astonishment, this boy took a packet of tobacco and Rizla papers out of his blazer pocket and proceeded to make a rollie. As I approached him, and as he saw me approaching him, he continued in this endeavour.

I was thinking only one thing: this is a headcase looking for a fight; exercise extreme caution.

The school, like any school, has its fair share of smokers. At break-time they are seen bolting out the exit doors – it’s 8usually the only time they are animated all day – and racing for the far side of the all-weather pitches. There they will form a huddle, about twenty of them, and slobber over a few butts. For the most part, there’s no sanction, unless they are totally flaunting it. If I’m the teacher on duty I’ll look in their general direction. They’ll see me do so. Then I’ll move at zombie pace. I remember an Italian zombie movie where a guy had time to change a tyre before the zombie made it twenty yards. Well, that’s my zombie pace, giving them plenty of time to get a last puff and then sidle off. That’s not cowardice; it’s experience. Life’s too short to get worked up about smoking. Or it will be short if you keep doing it, which is punishment in itself. That’s what I tell myself, anyhow (hypocrite and twenty-a-day man that I am).

So there’s no problem, not unless they’re practically blowing smoke in your face and telling you to fuck off.

Now here’s yer man.

I looked around for any other teachers. There weren’t any. They’d be on duty out the front of the school. I didn’t know this guy at all, y’see. Rule number two: know your enemy.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, nice as pie. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

He looked genuinely taken aback. ‘Wha?’ he says.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Farquhar.’

‘And your first name?’

‘That’s my first name.’

‘Your first name’s Farquhar?’9

‘Yeah. What’s wrong with that?’

Somewhere in the back of my brain I remembered a Billy Connolly joke about Farquhar and Tarquin and Rupert and the rest of the Oxford Boat Crew. Somebody christened this child Farquhar? I wasn’t surprised he wanted to die before his time. Farquhar! Why wasn’t he lying in a pool of blood? Why hadn’t a few bullies kicked the living shit out of a guy called Farquhar, with those big glasses and that acne? But Farquhar had other surprises.

‘OK, Farquhar,’ I said, beginning again, ‘what do you think you’re doing?’

‘Rolling a cigarette,’ he said, as cool as you like.

Ah, fuck, I thought to myself, he’s a lunatic. Any moment now I’ll be showered in a mountain of furious acne.

I attempted sarcasm. ‘You do know you’re not allowed to smoke in the school grounds, don’t you?’

For the second time, he looked nonplussed. ‘Whaddya mean?’

Teachers get used to repeating themselves. It’s not a problem. ‘You’re not allowed to smoke in the school grounds, Farquhar.’

‘You’re not?’

He was serious. I could tell he was totally serious. The acne on the lines of his forehead reddened as these lines creased together in a display of thought. This boy must have been fourteen or fifteen and he didn’t know that it wasn’t permitted to light up as soon as you stepped out of the school doors.

‘In my old school it was OK.’

10‘Was it really?’ I continued rhetorically, in that annoying, sarcastic, sing-song tone teachers adopt. ‘Well, it’s not allowed in this school. You’re not allowed to smoke on these school grounds.’ I pointed to the eight-foot fence at the other end of the all-weather pitch. ‘That’s where the school grounds end.’ I tried a gambit. ‘But even then, Farquhar, even outside the school grounds, you’re not allowed to smoke, because it’s illegal for you to smoke until you are eighteen.’

I awaited his response. That forehead was going again, the acne flame-red. The wait was worth it, because Farquhar finally said, ‘That’s a bit shit.’

He said this not like the law was an ass, but like this was news to him.

I looked deep into those muddy pools behind his thick glasses. I never call a child stupid. I’ll call them plenty of other things, but I avoid that word. I avoid it because, for the most part, I don’t believe it to be true. I’ve taught plenty of children who didn’t know a consonant from a hole in the ground, children who were semi-literate. Then I’ve met them years later and they’re running their own businesses and filling in their own tax returns. They weren’t stupid; school simply wasn’t for them. Education, in the way we hot-house them and make them sit still for hours on end and recite Shakespeare, and try to convince them that Philip Larkin wasn’t a dirty old man in a mac but a really important poet: well, they’re not buying it. There are a few exceptions, of course. I remember Malcolm. Malcolm’s class had to sit 11an exam to assess their ability relative to age. The pro forma on the front of the paper asked them to fill in their name, sex and date of birth. When I looked at Malcolm’s front page he had only filled in his name. I asked him his date of birth. It was something in April. I told him to write it down.

‘But which month’s that?’ he says.

‘Sorry?’ I says.

‘Which month is that?’ he repeated. I was silenced for moments. Was this some higher form of questioning I was unfamiliar with? Then I got it. He had to write down the month as a number and didn’t know April was the fourth month of the year. That done, he now had to fill in his sex. He looked blankly at me. I didn’t want to say ‘sex’ because that would only send a titter round the class. I smiled. ‘Male, female, Malcolm – what’s it to be?’ Malcolm’s pencil hovered but still he didn’t fill in the box. But this wasn’t some protest at the rigid oppression of sexual signification. Rather, it was incomprehension. ‘Male, female…’ says Malcolm. ‘What’s that mean?’

There’s no way around it. Forget not knowing April is the fourth month of the year, to get to secondary school and not know what male and female is… that’s stupid!

Or is it?

Or is it rather a colossal state of neglect? Did nobody ever talk to this child? Did nobody ever read him a bedtime story or sit him down and ask him how he was doing? I’m talking normal human interaction. Love and all that shit. The kind 12of shit where you get an idea of who you are, and what the world is, and what’s in it, and how you might try to negotiate it. Was his home life something I had no conception of?

Back to Farquhar. Jesus, I still couldn’t get over that name.

‘Didn’t you know that, Farquhar?’

‘Nobody’s ever said anything.’

‘What about your parents?’

‘Me da buys me fags.’

‘Does he now?’ I said, and ventured another gambit. ‘What about your drink?’

‘Aye, that too.’

23 JANUARY

Today was a good day.

One of those blessed days.

I had a double with 10P. We were finishing off Robert Swindells’s novel about homelessness on the streets of London, Stone Cold. The book is award-winning, though Christ knows why! It’s filled with ludicrous plot holes and characterisation as thin as Farquhar’s fag papers. Yet kids respond to it and that’s good enough for me. Rather shit that they’ll read than not-shit they won’t read. So screw you, Michael Morpurgo and Frank Cottrell-Boyce, give me Robert Swindells and David Walliams any day!

Anyway, we finished Stone Cold then watched an equally terrible BBC Two dramatisation of it. In fact, terrible doesn’t do it justice; excruciating, more like. Peter Howitt – whom you might remember as Joey Boswell from Bread and who also wrote and directed the film Sliding Doors with Gwyneth Paltrow – plays a serial-killing ex-army sergeant. It’s a performance he will very likely have banished to the furthest recesses of his unconscious if he has any shame. The other 14actors aren’t much better. So why watch it? Kills a few periods, that’s why; keeps a difficult class quiet, that’s why; while they’re watching it, I can prepare other classes or get some marking done, that’s why.

Rule number three: when you’re getting it easy, take it easy.

Then I had two frees. Lost one of them to cover a lesson, but that was OK. The nightmare with a lost free is that you get a class of head-bangers who haven’t been set any work by the absent teacher. Thankfully, this was a bunch of reasonable fifth years who had been set some work. They didn’t do much of it but at least their books were open, if not their minds.

After that it was a double with 8D. This class had become a real pain in the ass over the last month or so. Always happens with first-year classes. New to the school, they take about three months to work out the lie of the land and then around Christmas they start to raise their heads. That means January and February are usually spent trying to make them lower them again. I say three months, though I remember one notable class of first years who threw their heads up from day one. They had been in my class fifteen minutes when a blonde-haired girl called Roisin put her hand up and straight out said, ‘I want to take a piss!’ At least she put her hand up. ‘What – right there?’ I says, quick as you like. In response, Roisin whinnied like a horse that hadn’t seen fresh grass in for ever. Didn’t need Nostradamus to predict the shit she and her mates were going to cause.

But, anyway, as I say, 8D were becoming a bit wearisome. 15Dislikeable, too. A class very short on manners. I can put up with most things, but a lack of manners makes my teeth grate. I’m a bit like Hannibal Lecter that way. If I lend someone a ruler, I expect a ‘thank you’; if someone needs to use the bathroom then an ‘excuse me’ and a ‘please’ would be nice. Not so with 8D; they were just rude. Not all of them, but enough of them that I was beginning to be rude back, or sarcastic when I didn’t need to be. I had to get a grip, change my approach. Who was it who said that it’s the teachers who do the learning and not the pupils?

I greeted them with a smile. I asked Jason at the back how the football game went against the rival school a few days previously; asked Damien why he didn’t make the team, that I’d seen him playing on the all-weather pitch at break-time and he looked decent. Louis was on time for a change and I complimented him on that (though it was hard not to be sarcastic). All standard stuff, trying to create an atmosphere that suggested we were all human beings together, that it wasn’t me against them. And today it worked. I wanted them to look at two poems in preparation for the assessment the following week. One of them was ‘First Day at School’ by Roger McGough. I’d removed the title from the photocopy I gave out and I asked them to consider where the poem was set. They identified ‘the bell’, ‘playground’ and ‘uniform’ in the first stanza. So we were in a school. I asked them to think about whose voice they might be listening to as we read the rest of the poem.

It was Robert who got it.

First, let me tell you about Robert. He’s sitting at the base 16end of a Level 2. To the layman, that’s around Primary 3, i.e. Robert has the communication skills of a seven-year-old, and a limited seven-year-old at that. He is able to read only the most basic sentence; his writing is an indecipherable mix of whorls and jagged lines: imagine yourself drunk and trying to write a paragraph in complete darkness, and that’s Robert’s scrawl. Besides this, I have yet to hear him laugh. He’s smiled the odd time but mostly he looks like he’s going to cry. Not once since the start of the year has he come into class with all of his books; he’s either forgotten his novel or his homework textbook or his exercise book. This isn’t deliberate. The child has no organisational skills. So mostly he sits mute. On a few occasions, I’ve asked him to read a sentence from the class novel, Roald Dahl’s Boy. At this invitation, his entire body would spasm, he would seem to lose control of his arms and they would flutter by his sides like he suddenly wanted to dance. That’s how scared he is. Again, think of yourself, day after day, being forced to do something you are really terrible at and that you hate.

OK, forget that, that’s your life, right?

But anyway: today, Robert was sensational, for whatever reason. Discussing the first poem, an exercise in simile and metaphor called ‘Fireworks’ (I didn’t know the author: I should have but I didn’t), he was his usual self. Not a word, not a flicker. He was looking at the board but it might as well have been a window. Then we moved on to the McGough poem.

‘So who might be speaking in the poem?’

Robert’s hand went up. Slowly, tentatively, like a drowned 17man’s arm lazily floating to the surface, gradually emerging from some aqueous depth… but it went up.

‘Yes, Robert?’ I asked, hoping I’d kept the surprise out of my voice, though I probably hadn’t.

‘It’s somebody’s first day.’

‘First day where?’

‘At school.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘It says all the children are bigger.’ His arms were beginning to jerk.

‘Maybe it’s just a small child. How do you know it’s the first day?’

He gulped like he was coming up for air – like he hadn’t drowned, like he was just a bad swimmer. ‘She doesn’t know what a teacher is. She thinks a teacher makes tea.’

‘Brilliant,’ I said. ‘Anything else tell you that?’

‘She doesn’t know what a lesson is. So she hasn’t been in one yet.’

‘Brilliant,’ I repeated.

His arms dropped and he put his head down as if this had all been too exhausting.

Why had he responded to the poem? I don’t know. Maybe the fear the child felt in the poem was akin to the fear Robert felt every day. Maybe this place was as alien to him as it was to the child? Maybe he remembered his own first day at school, something seared indelibly in his memory like a trauma.

But I come back to a point I made in an earlier entry 18– Robert is not stupid. Rather, his mind is not functioning as it is supposed to function. Answers on a postcard as to why.

I am a cynical bastard. I curse my profession daily. There are many, many days when I can’t see my job far enough away, many mornings when those periods stretch out in front of me like a long, dark tunnel where the light is an approaching train. Yet I recognise my responsibility. I have to try to do what I can for these kids, some of whom are very damaged. Doubtless a lot of the frustration that teachers feel, good teachers – and I would be loath to count myself amongst their number – is that they can’t do nearly enough; that the damage is irreparable.

After lunch, it was 9H and ‘Shall I Compare You to a Winter’s Day’. Jennifer wrote this:

Shall I compare you to a winter’s day?

White frozen ground, under the dead sun.

Bare trees, washed out sky,

Treading on the silver lake –

All these, nothing to the ice in your heart.

Landscape drained of colour,

Blankets of leaden clouds,

Dull brown and greens as far as the eye can see.

Words twisted like branches,

Between your frost-bit smile.

But spring will come

The world will thaw

There will be new flowers

And I will walk in the light.

19It’s got fourteen lines, like a proper sonnet, and that change of tone toward the end. It’s not a work of art but it is a first draft and it has something of what art is supposed to be – a ring of truth about it, an essence of conviction and, most importantly, a beating heart. When Jennifer finished reading it out to the class, there was silence for seconds until Peter said, ‘Wow, that’s dope, sister!’

Couldn’t have put it better myself.

What did I say about hope?

29 JANUARY

The Head came in today to do her inspection. She’s new, and an ex-inspector, and she wanted to spend a period in everybody’s room. She said she just wanted to sit in on an ordinary period, no bells and whistles.

Lucky, that, because she wasn’t getting any.

I don’t trust inspectors. This isn’t any inbuilt, irrational, knee-jerk prejudice. I was first inspected two years out of college. The inspectors were coming in Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, writing their report on the Thursday and delivering their verdict on the Friday. Even as I write this, that word ‘verdict’ sticks in my craw. Who are they to judge a school when they’ve never taught in it? That may seem simplistic, but it gels with my experience of them. Anyway, they were coming, and seasoned teachers were shitting themselves. The card table at lunchtime was packed away and dirty pictures taken down. (I’m joking about the latter, but the guy who worked next door to me did take down the ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ banner he had stapled above his whiteboard.) So Monday morning arrived and, wouldn’t you 21know it, an inspector landed at my door first two. The class were a challenging one: very much lower ability. Pearse was in it. The week before he had had to be restrained by the Vice-Principal after a bout of chair throwing, and was forcibly removed from my room while shouting, ‘Put me down, ya gay cunt, or me da’ll fuckin kill ya!’ Pearse was about three foot three and, boy, did he have wee man syndrome. So there he was, along with a few other smiling assassins who didn’t give one sweet damn that my teaching career was on the line.

And… the class went like a dream. I had them organised into groups, each group differentiated according to ability. This was bells and whistles with bells and whistles on. It was like spinning plates, moving from one group to the other, cajoling them and warning them in equal measure, utterly exhausting for an hour and ten minutes, but, finally, at long last, at long fucking last, the bell went.

The class departed and I was left with the inspector. She looked like an inspector; like the last time she laughed was when Bambi’s mother died. ‘So,’ she says, letting that ‘So’ linger, ‘how do you think that went?’

I’d got my breath back. ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Yeah, it was a good lesson.’

‘Really?’ she said. ‘I didn’t see much learning going on.’ Those were her exact words. I’ll never forget them. And with those words, she exited stage left.

I was flabbergasted. I was utterly floored. Panic gripped me like a hand round my throat. I had another class coming 22in, but I told the teacher next door – he of ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ – to keep an eye on them for a minute. I went straight to the Headmaster and explained what had happened; that I had just taught a really good lesson only to be told it was a piece of shit. He said to leave it with him.

He came back to me at the end of what had been a very long day. I didn’t get another visit, but my nerves were shot, confidence gone. If an inspector had walked in, I would have made a genuine balls of it this time. But the Headmaster told me not to worry. ‘Not to worry?’ says I. ‘She’s going to hang me out to dry!’ The Headmaster shook his head. ‘Miss ______ followed that class for the rest of the day. She realises now what a challenge they were. On reflection, she’s upgraded your lesson.’

For a minute or so I was too relieved to think straight. The Headmaster gave me a hearty clap on the back and a ‘Well done’ and left.

Then I could think straight. And I was fit to be carried out of the room like Pearse the week before, only I’d have called that woman a lot worse than Pearse called the VP. What if she hadn’t followed that class for the rest of the day? What then? Huh? And why the hell hadn’t she come and apologised to me face-to-face for making such a rash judgement, and for speaking to me like I was the shit on her poisoned stiletto?

Inspectors!

During a much less dramatic inspection in a different but equally difficult school, I got a chance to sit down and have 23a coffee with a guy who had inspected one of my lessons. He was friendly enough, mid-fifties, didn’t look like the sort to have pictures of Hitler in his bedroom. He talked about his own teaching career – what there was of it. He had taught for a few years in a co-ed grammar school in Belfast. Now, I’m sure even a grammar school’s no picnic, but it’s a different ballgame. I was in a school with 40 per cent free school meals, with close to the same percentage on the Special Educational Needs register. A co-ed grammar school! What, where little girls pissed themselves at the threat of a black mark for forgetting to back a book?

Again, what right had he to judge my work? Sure, he might have inspected similar schools. Then again, every school is different. I find it interesting – no, I find it infuriating! – that inspectors expect teachers to personalise their approaches to suit the needs of children in their classes, but the ETI (Education Training Inspectorate) have the same inspection process for all schools, regardless of the individual make-up, circumstances and requirements of those schools. No, let them come in and teach my classes for a week – a day, even – then I might pay a little more attention.

As it is, fuck ’em!

There’s an article in The Guardian today. (Yes, I am that kind of teacher. I do read The Guardian, and I’ve at one time worn corduroy trousers, and jackets with leather patches on the elbows.) The report states that in England, ‘recruitment targets have been missed for six years in a row … A third of new teachers give it up within five years … Last year, 10 per 24cent of all secondary school teachers left teaching.’ It goes on to state: ‘Inspectors, in future, will take a broader-brush approach, less focused on the minutiae of individual pupils’ measurable achievements and more on the big picture.’ I know what they can do with their broad brush.

Big picture?

Let me tell you the big picture. To my mind, and I know I’m biased, teaching is the hardest job you can do. But don’t just take my word for it. The National Foundation for Educational Research found that teachers endure greater job-related stress than other professionals. A 2019 NFER report concluded that one in five felt tense about the job most or all of the time compared with 13 per cent of those in similar professions. So it’s the hardest of jobs. Personally, I’d put nursing up there too. Sure, there’s the casualty department on a Saturday night with drunks brandishing knives and bottles, but teachers are daily confronted with a fair share of the recalcitrant and the nasty and the unhinged and the violent. And we’ve to teach them! We’ve to entertain them, we’ve to humour them. Every day. Day after day. So quit and do something else, you moaning bastard, says you. Unfortunately, unlike, say, a David ‘Just call me Dickhead’ Cameron, who can plunge his country into an ocean of steaming shit and then quit and go write his memoirs in the garden shed he bought for twenty-five grand, I haven’t that luxury.

On a lighter note, back to my Principal, who was coming in to have a ‘little look’ at how I do things. As you can guess by now, I didn’t have many butterflies in my stomach, acid bile 25having killed most of them. Smiling conscientiously, I greeted her at the door and then escorted her to a seat at the back, beside the ‘glory hole’ in my wall. That’s right, a glory hole. For those innocents unfamiliar with the term, it comes from pornography, where a phallus would emerge from said hole to be fellated (or so I’m told). In case there was any dispute as to what it was, ‘GLORY HOLE’ was written neatly around it in an almost perfect circle in black felt-tip pen. The writing was very faded but just about legible. At least the spelling was correct, right? That hole had been in my wall since before this was my classroom. How had it come to be there? What the hell had the teacher been doing? It was probably an accretion. One day, somebody starts digging in the wall with a pen. Another day, somebody else follows up. Soon there’s a hole. Maybe the idea is to dig a tunnel and make a bid for freedom. Hey, maybe it was the teacher who started it?

I had asked time out of number for that hole to be plastered over, for going on five years now, and it was still there. And there sat the Principal beside it. God forbid that some horny sod in the next classroom along should pick this inopportune moment to shove his upright member through it. Something wet and fleshy tickles the Principal’s ear; she looks around astonished, her mouth yawning open… As I say, God forbid!

After the glory hole, I pointed out the lack of curtains or blinds on the windows. This meant that I was blinded on winter mornings with the low sun and on summer days by the glare. It meant that I couldn’t project anything on to 26the whiteboard because the pupils couldn’t see it. Note I say ‘whiteboard’ rather than ‘interactive whiteboard’… gedout-tahere! I didn’t even have a DVD player. I did have a video player; however, this was part of an ensemble TV unit – y’know, those huge thick Dansette sets that were new about the time Jacob Rees-Mogg was breastfeeding on his nanny’s tits (or maybe that wasn’t so long ago). Re: the above, it had a ‘big picture’ and it also had a red sticker on the side to say that it had failed the last electrical inspection. But what the hell, what’s a little electric shock against the furtherance of knowledge and the pursuit of truth? Beside all this, the room was a green-yellow colour, a colour like no other – think of a zit grown to such horrendous proportions that it’s now turning gangrenous – and had last been painted back in the age when classrooms used to be painted (the ’70s?). Seriously, remove the desks and chairs (as someone had done with the blinds and curtains) and splash some blood on the walls and you were in Abu Ghraib.

As for the lesson, it was OK. Mr Chips and Miss Jean Brodie could rest easy. I was giving back books. I’d photocopied a couple of the pupils’ pieces of work. Not the best or the worst, but a few in between to illustrate what people were doing right and what a lot of them were doing wrong. It’s something I always do. The pupils were responsive; nobody called me names.

The Principal said she was giving follow-up notes after each of her visits – when would I be free to chat? Later in the day?27

I told her I’d lost my free later in the day. She said she’d catch me some time. We were all smiles and great buddies. Oh, yes, and she’d speak to the caretaker about the blinds and curtains, and maybe a lick of paint, and the… what was it again?

‘Glory hole.’