Racism: 1

There are so many taboos in teaching that it's hard to know where to start mapping out the unspeakable truths of what can be said, heard and seen, let alone to take some sort of interventionist approach and start confronting what you find therein contained. To intervene (and writing this is some sort of interventionist act) is to feel instantly mischievous and to run up against the main body of teachers for whom political correctness is as a birthright. Of course there are good reasons for this PC; any attempt at equality requires some ignorance of the finer details, and to encourage honesty in schools is to risk genuinely strange results and dangerous compromise. If honest the teacher suddenly becomes something other than that the media of learning and becomes human and therefore fallible.

Teachers play a role to set themselves apart their students. Teachers are bent out of shape by the huge tasks of compromise which confront them every day. Teachers manage, they survive, they protect themselves; they don't take risks. It is because of this and their superhuman endurance that I sometimes wonder if they are alive at all. 

It is the kids who are alive and teachers who sacrifice themselves everyday for the sake of youth. Teachers form a self-effacing ministry, ciphers, gatekeepers at the transaction point of generations.

A consequence of my refusal to accept teaching death means that in my reflective hours I weigh what happens in my teaching day endlessly, the thousand interactions, the sharp little human incongruities working me over in my mind. I take great joy at the odd words said and the happinesses, the morals  enacted. I cringe at simple life, vicious and exact.

The problem is always in the retelling. There are always so many versions of the truth creeping around.

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I covered a year 9 class period three Friday and i'd been warned in advance that they'd be a handful.  They were in fact fairly docile and just needed a friendly goading. The poems they'd been writing on the Holocaust were engaging them well enough. It would be my job to marshall the sticking of poems onto bigger bits of card and try to keep them in their seats.

Two characters in the class I'd also been warned about beforehand. Of one autistic girl I was told in a workmanlike tone that, 'You'll know her 'cos she's weird and never says anything' and, 'Best just to leave her alone'. When i saw her in the classroom, huge and inert, avoided by the other kids and isolated on her own table, i realised I'd seen her earlier that day. She'd been walking across the playground and been wolf-whistled by a couple of boys who'd said 'J---- you're sooo fit'. She didn't seem to hear them. 

The other notorious character comes in late with a textbook swagger and i've seen him around the school before, specially dangerous eyes beneath a shifty wide-brimmed baseball cap. Two teachers used the same word to describe this kid in warning - 'Arsehole'. As he goes past he whips his top t-shirt off to show quite a cool snowboarding multicolour and i semi-ignore him while i sort some other kids out. 

You always have to do a certain amount of extra work with the most difficult kids because they are often the lynchpin holding the rest of the group together. Also they often just need the attention. 

I pick my moment and go over to shifty and his bunch of goons and strike up some fast conversation. They are harmless. they are the sort of people who in the future will spend a lot of time sitting sadly in the pub trying to recreate the banter of these lessons. One of the kids, who soon soldiers on with his poster, flashes me a simple, brilliant smile when i take a tactical over-interest in his poem. I am made to feel like I am the first one ever to receive this smile. 

Somehow we start chatting about earning money, how much I earn, how much the Headmaster is probably earning. This is probably taboo but it's the sort of little intimacy which, if delivered in good light spirit, serves to ingratiate you with the rudest of schoolboys. Soon the shifty chap is telling me about snowboarding while chopping out his Holocaust poem and his little gang are feeding into the conversation. He occasionally stabs the table with some scissors for emphasis.As the group are working another boy (A) chips in with a girl (C) and the following dialogue occurs:

Boy A:                  I'm black you know sir.

Teacher:              You're not black.

Boy A:                  I'm from Africa.

Teacher:              Which part? Where's your family from?

Boy A:                  My surname is Yusseff.

Teacher:              Maybe north Africa. Algeria. I used to teach a Yussef but that was his first name?

Boy A:                  My Dad's black [Pause. Grinning, looking at Girl C, who is black.] You can't see him if it's dark.

Teacher:              I don't think that's any measure...

Girl C:                 [Earnestly] You can't see my dad if it's dark neither.

      [Pause]

Boy A:                  That's 'cos he isn't there.

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The problem came when i tried to relay this conversation to a group of teachers sat around in the staffroom. 

For me the story just shows how weird these kids attitude to race is, how uninformed, depoliticised, how ignorant of the care we as adults apply to all things racial. It references some awful racist simplicity somewhere in its depths but this is beyond the knowledge of these children who were just following a simple thread. I suppose in hindsight i should never have pursued it to its curious denouement. 

My retelling in the staffroom was met with stony looks and a silence it's difficult to define. I felt like my two listeners were immediately suspicious of me, like i'd done something wrong, like my moral barometer had broken. In short I felt like Blanche Dubois. 

Back to school

Any talk of teaching can be terrifying, especially for teachers. It just tends to be a load of interior gossip about students you might/might not know, or a pile of acronyms, or just pure complaint. Teachers in the state sector especially are very good at looking run down.

To everybody with a normal job teacher talk is probably slightly more interesting than other employment talk, because the classroom seems such an otherworldy place and teachers' work sounds novel in a  'Why would you do that?' kind of way.

'Why would you do that?' is a question we could come to later.

I'm going to start blogging for the layman, partly because of a need to pretend I am a layman not a teacher, for a number of complicated reasons. The first of these reasons demonstrates a need to keep what actually happens in the classroom in some sort of perspective in order that the scenario therefore be subject to normal standards of moral and comic judgement. This is to say that things happen so quickly in teaching that the glorious minutiae tend to escape the frame as you deal with the next hurried batch of demands. In teaching everything is always escaping. 

This is an attempt to freeze and provide an insight into what really happens in state schools.

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The state school community is always warped, embattled.

This one smells much like any other, the base note here typically redolent of a butcher's outbuilding with a whiff of public convenience to top it off. The school site has the disjointed  feel of an architecture cobbled together over many generations of hurried school growth, the general impression being one of planners being taken by surprise.  

The newer buildings have the squalid 1950s tenement aesthetic while the older construction down the way is best described as a dark, tumbledown quad of sagging awnings around a central area of swamp. If you peer through the smeary glass out into the swamp you can see a winter pond and some rough looking tall grass in wet straw hues. A hutch for some unseen animal lurks in one corner. If you use your imagination you can just about imagine this as an interesting if not ever happy place, because you can never really imagine the sun ever shining here. 

My final marker as i go back between sections is a thin tree, one of  a line which fringes a walkway off towards the playing fields. It is so loaded with starlings in the gathering dark of the afternoon that it sounds electric, plugged in, an itchy sort of cacophony which has me break into a nervous spasm of laughter. This being a training day with no kids around i am susceptible to this sort of isolated omen.

 

Back in the staffroom before I go home I sit down to drink coffee with a group of women from Humanities. It's a bit like a hospital waiting room in here but warmer. One woman, who manages to get in that she's fifty, regales her audience with the story of her weekend. This ends with her explaining how she's cricked her neck fucking her boyfriend. Everybody else is very jolly and vulgar and helpful; but soon the Head of English takes me off to explain what i'm expected to cover over the coming weeks. She feeds me a raft of very well organised resources which on closer inspection turn out to be exceptionally poor quality. She really does then say to me, 'We're all mad 'ere'. 

I make a mental note to ignore anything I'm told to teach and work it out for myself.

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First day with the kids in and it all comes flooding back, a full day without breaks and a student body i've never met before who all want a piece of me. This is a 95% white working class school and the kids are a scraggy bunch, the requisite mix of goths and sports fashions and tarts and just plain weirdos who are typical of this demographic. 

I am in to cover for a young female teacher who has broken her leg and therefore have six weeks with her classes. This a strange period of time. It is short enough that the kids might not take me seriously but long enough for me personally to feel like i have a responsibility to make some sort of an impact.

I approach my first, year 10 class full-bore and my enthusiasm seems to give me some room to work. They listen and do the task. I like fifteen year olds and I have the sort of nerves which causes me to crack endless relevant gags and feel like i'm engaging with everybody simultaneously. This is the subject delusion of the excited teacher, but basically this is a result. I teach another year 11 class straight away, similarly hyperactive and interested, and i begin to feel like i'm on something of a roll. For a first day this is going great. Both groups are not so bright yet each time we've ended up with good-to-average classes which sail comfortably between the marker buoys of worst-case scenario (malicious dissent) and best-case scenario (high-fives).  There are definitely smiles, especially from me, and somebody tells me mid-way through one part that 'It's really easy to understand it if we do it like this'. It is with this in mind that i receive my year 8 class, or rather that they receive me. 

They are insane. Soon after a decent start with competitive team grammar games they start to go off their heads. Within ten minutes they have that special untouchable quality of fluent rolling group banter which as a teacher it's almost impossible to get control over. Everybodyis  bickering with somebody, everybody is cussing somebody it happens in the blink of an eye on five separate occasions each second and i'm struggling to follow as the class degenerates into scarcely broken up minute-long sessions of loud, funny, anxious argument. Nobody lets a cuss go, nothing i say will stop them. The main perpetrator may be a boy or may be a girl, kids are out of their seat and somebody has found an iron chair leg from somewhere and i try to take it off him a simultaneously throw him out of the class, and somehow we are having a tug-of-war at the base of the door over this chair leg, him outside and me in. Once he is out we all stop for a moment to hear him bang his head against the wall outside. Now another androgynous child (seriously) called Mac say they want some drugs and everybody laughs. Some nice kids sit and look at me wide-eyed and helplessly, one child even holding a pen. Somebody asks me my first name as a boy with a sunken lower face and flat-lipped overbite (i somehow manage to associate it in this split-second with weapons dealing) stands very close to my face. I start to feel sick and am able to watch myself as if from above the room.

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