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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