Silent and Angry

Maybe it's not true of other professions simply because you don't get that pure turnover of numbers; but in teaching, the way the kids just roll in ceaselessly year after year, draft after draft, you begin to notice commonalities, the beginning of stereotypes perhaps. There are always exceptions, but it seems that the sheer numbers who come through the system tend to somehow shake out into definable types. The pressure of such closely shared institutionalised experience must do this to people because amongst teachers types are also discernible. 

The embattled Head of English, once a sexpot; greying, divorced (with lovers), smokes, taking on everybody's burden. Ray with the Seventies lapels: quiet with a hint of defiance, journeyman; also embattled, drinks.  Youngish Second in English, fattening, takes on too much responsibility, shouts a lot or otherwise seems to be repressing anger; smokes a lot of weed.

-

Coming towards the end of my time at this school and not sure how i feel about this. I've been there just long enough to get my feet under the table and develop some good relationships with pupils and teachers. I therefore feel a certain responsibility towards the place. It's the sort of place where the spectre of 'making a difference' frequently rears it's ugly head to haunt your selfish ambition and attempts to tie you to the dangerous business of changing people's lives.

This is at the heart of why i had a brief row with R on leaving school on evening last week. I was telling her how I'd sat at the back of my class (them all watching a movie) and had a series of premonitions as to where this particular bunch of twelve year olds would end up in thirty years time. It was the Types again, I told R. 

I could see newsagents, chipper mechanics and good dads, a stoic mum with a ripe sense of humour.  There were also the more worrying cases where the crystal ball went all murky and I had to stop thinking about what would happen to desperate, fatherless Dean, and heavily made-up, haggard Rose. 

These guys were falling off the sheer face of history.

More worrying perhaps to me was what would happen to Laura and Liam, Liam with just that great balance as a boy, boyishness plus seriousness and a careful intelligence. What would he do with his qualities? And Laura, hugging a plastic chair to herself as she watched the film, a curious tiny girl with dead straight hair and painted fingernails, her intelligence was so dextrous that she'd finished things before I'd finished setting it up, but was never bored, always patient. Extraordinary with words, brilliant light humour. 

I like these people, these were valuable people! And what, I said to R, what the hell would she have to become here? A lawyer? This was the end of the earth! What this school needs is aspirations, people to show the kids the world outside, to shake the cage...

R was silent and angry. 

She then told me so what if they were going to be newsagents and mechanics? And why was I being so negative about lawyers? What did I want them to be anyway, artists, to which i said 'Yeah!'; and then I used the word 'diversity', and possibly 'system'. And then I saw that she had a point. 

R told me off before for what she sees as anti-real world sentiments; but then she is the most conventional person I know. Her point however - that you can't just waltz in from a psychological South America and start pontificating about people's failing aspirations - this holds true.

Tony Harrison's 'v.' is all about this, the boy-done-good coming home to Leeds with his airs and graces, educated and disgusted, confronting people for not having the aspirations he has, for not having the vision. In the poem Harrison meets his alter ego, a disenfranchised skinhead who abuses the poet for his misplaced art idealism. 'Uplift beyond all reason and control' can sit uneasily with unemployment and broken families. 

So whilst I'm patting myself on the back for being so worldly and offering the relatively radical alternative I also have to accept that I am not staying in the East Midlands. Maybe it's all very well to come places like this and leave.