Digging

I wrote earlier in the blog about the Head of English at my school and drew her briefly as a sort of oafish stereotype from The Office. After a few weeks of solid supply work in the school, and with me now as ratty and knackered as everybody else on the staff, Richard-Castle-as-Novelty has left the building, any lustre i might have shown having rubbed off through constant contact with abrasive kids. I am now everybody else. 

I can see now that the bulldog Head of English is entirely fitting for her milieu, is in fact a grand personage. Richard is just too lightweight. 

Waking up this week with that kind of caffeine vacuum which just demands a boost in the morning to get going, tired even before getting to work. Consequently I haven't been able to rely on my personality (such as it is) in the classroom. There's still been a lot of grandstanding on my part, gag-cracking and leaping around and overt praise being dished out, all the cheap stuff which floats around the actual business of the kids doing any work and which is basically just tailored vanity. But there's been some breakdown of this.

Intractable children, devious children. I had a Year 11 class, sixteen year olds being notoriusly fickle. 

I think as a young male teacher you have to depend to a greater or lesser extent on being some sort of role model/masculinity testing-post for the boys and some sort of sex object for the girls. The girls are curious as to who this man is, he being the same age as dirty men who try to chat them up when they go to the bad clubs in the town. This is especially true if you are dealing with my current demographic. While the white working class boys seem vaguely impressed by my passion for language and try to give it a go, the girls give me short shrift. 

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One year 11 class this week, the boys listening and gamely trying to follow my thread as i compete with a growing volume of chat coming from the heavily made-up girls sat in a row over by the window. I instantly move the two main culprits and one of them tells me to fuck off under her breath and pulls a face like a bulldog chewing on a wasp. I let it go in the interests of harmony. 

We get back to our exercise on Seamus Heaney's Digging (bottom of blog) and as a starter i have them write down their father's line of work, their grandfather's line of work and their desired line of work. While there's always a certain amount of risk involved in bringing this sort of personal into the classroom, i thought it was perfect here considering the fact that, with it being a working class area, some of the jobs written down might not be considered 'prestigious' jobs. Why might they not be considered prestigious? If there were continuities, great; if not we could talk about that too. We could then discuss the ideas of dignity and continuity and identity and thereby introduce the themes of the poem.   

It didn't go too badly. Lewis wanted to be an engineer, as his father and grandfather had been before him. We talked as a class and they seemed to get the idea that some jobs might on the surface of it appear more prestigious than others, but that you could find dignity everywhere.

Daniella had her hand up and, despite the fact i wanted to keep the class attention focused, i went over and she told me plainly and loudly that she didn't have a Dad. I must have looked puzzled in a polite, quick way because she then said, 'Of course i had a Dad', and I must have said something awful like, 'I'm sorry, sometimes this er, exercise doesn't work', and then there was a silence and smiles. I then said, 'Do you mind if i ask you how he died? - somehow this was the right thing to say - and she said 'Leukemia', to which i didn't really have a response. This episode strangely passed without hard feeling. I was focussed on the fact that the exercise was failing.

Bethan called me over to say that she also didn't have a Dad, but that she thought there was continuity between the women who went to work from her family. Relieved I went over, and she told me how her mum was a stripper and how her grandmother before her had also been a stripper and how she thought she might become a stripper too. This of course was a wind-up and people around her laughed heartily, but looking into her flashing eyes i did believe her. 

I kind of reeled from this and took stock of the situation in the classroom. The two girls who hadn't chipped in from this side of the room were diligently layering on make up and i lost it and just said, 'Christ girls! How is this the right time to be doing your make-up?', although of course it was exactly the right time, because it had ended a spectacular performance from these young women. 

The boys in the class I saw now were to a man all slumped over their poetry anthologies; i guessed they saw this sort of thing from their classmates regularly. I struggled to set them a simple task which required that they do no more than read the poem and pull out a few quotes, but the lesson never quite recovered and the finer points of Heaney's work were lost. 

At the end of the lesson Lewis covertly stayed behind alone, taking longer to pack his bag than the others, and said on his way out that the girls were testing me out and if he were me he'd get Ms P (Head of English) to sort them out. 

Humiliating to take advice from a student? No way. I went straight to Ms P and she shook her head and looked angry and said I needed to mail her the names and she'd get them out next lesson. She hadn't wanted to mention it to give everybody a fair crack of the whip but there had been issues with these girls before. Yes their teacher this year had been away a lot and last year they had a succession of failures with people also coming and going, but it was no excuse.

Next lesson i was getting the class in and Ms P was there too, holding the girls on the listback  outside. As i got the remainder of the class going we listened to fierce shouting from outside, though it was only Ms P's voice we could hear. 

I was called out in due course and paid witness to this woman, who I'd been a bit cruel about before, really showing her mettle. These fierce girls all plastered with their own brand of war paint were being savaged in a way I could never have managed (when i try to shout at kids they tend to laugh at me and I therefore don't use it much). From Ms P it was perfect. Some people just need a fucking good going over, some people understand nothing less. 

The girls were cowed, leaning against the walls looking away, as she told them to drop the attitude, told them how they were on thin ice, told them how if I wanted it they could be removed from English permanently. She also layered in some praise: she had them tell us the A-grades they had been predicted.

And this was the issue. Bright students mucked around by absent teachers and absent fathers exercising their frustrations on some poor bastard trying to do a job filling in. Their priorities were not their education but rather justice. For all their brightness they could not see the longer game. What teenagers can? 

Ms P made her point with a sledgehammer. 

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

Seamus Heaney 

from Death of a Naturalist (1966)