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.

-

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.