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Film Yourself

Dubious level of maintenance on the blog recently and for that i can only apologise. This is the last post on teaching at my previous school. 

In the past I viewed the use of film in the classroom as being a cop-out, something the teacher does when he's got too much else to do or is all washed out on a Friday afternoon. I was scathing in my first job about a young teacher who'd always show his riotous Year 8s The Simpsons, my techist idealism rather he be delivering something, anything. The fact that's he'd also be shouting at them a lot did nothing to make this resemble a real lesson. 

In truth it scared me. The suggestion that teaching was in fact just babysitting, a youth club, that you could strip away the business of objectives and syllabus and be left with what? Text messages and children touching one-another under the tables?

But I've learned to let my worries go on this one, learning that you can make a pretty big impact squeezing decent film into the curriculum wherever possible, or slipping it under the radar. Here's a (short) list of films which work with teenagers:

• What's Eating Gilbert Grape (all years)
  
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (aged 15 up)
  
• The Shining (14 up)
• A Room for Romeo Brass (14 up)
• This is England (15 up)
• A Clockwork Orange (16 up)

Clever kids also like Rosemary's Baby.

(Kids will watch any film of course. One boy in my class recently, when another was moaning about having seen the film before, piped, 'Shut Uupp! At least it's something', meaning they didn't have to do any writing or reading.)

But I'm talking about real films in which kids have a real emotional investment. If you look at the list above you might conclude that this means films: a). with children in them; b). with Jack Nicholson in them; c). that deal with mental illness (are a, b, and c therefore synonymous?); or d). directed by Shane Meadows.

Most modern film is shockingly bad, or at least most of the films most kids see are shockingly bad. They are also not about them in any way. To show them good cinema is often to get that sort of naive, unrestrained response which is somehow glorious. Standing up and shouting at the screen, refusing to watch a scene, deep enraptured silence, This all sounds terribly romantic but it all actually happens, and I really like sitting at the front and watching all their dropped faces, their bulging eyes, as much as I like the film.

That sounds a bit creepy. 

So the East Midlands. I decided that i wanted to show the East Midlands Youth, This is England: Shane Meadows was brought up just around the corner from where we are in this school. 

If you haven't seen the film you should. It's rough and provincial and glories in this, a paean to the fashion, attitudes and accents of the working class, up to a crucial point. Past this point This is England, like all his films, descends into violence, the sad corollary, Meadows suggests, to all that rough provincial character. The film is a superb exploration of what causes people to join right-wing political groups at a grass-roots level.

My Year 10 were rapt, the bullying theme and recognisable millieu really working them over. I was however nervous showing the film as there are some really dodgy bits in it, and these bits usually coincide with a senior member of staff walking into the room. I was therefore aware as we approached the scene, a racist attack on an Asian shopkeepers, and kept a close eye on the door. 

Sure enough, as on screen a fat man starts to take a dump on the floor of the shop, I observe the door handle slowly begin to turn: a flashback from my youth, smoking out of my bedroom window, overpowers me. I jump out of my seat and make for the door and just about manage to bar the view from the door to the screen as one of the characters screams, 'I'LL SLIT YOU FROM EAR TO EAR YOU FUCKING PAKI CUNT!' in full Dolby Surround.

She says, 'What's this?' It's the bulldog Head of English. I have managed to pause it by this point, the image flickering on the screen that of a terrified shopkeeper, in close up, having a machete waved in his face, her words ringing out to the class in the silence. She has taken a step into the room to look at this; but the thirty children are doing their job. If not angelic-looking they certainly look serious, suspiciously serious it must be said. They look to her, then to me, then to her expectantly. To say I am red-faced would be classic understatement. One boy is grinning at me from the middle of the class and I implore him with my eyes to stop. 

Helpless, she asks me what this for and I finesse, finesse, getting her out of the room as i do. For a moment she looks irate. She shakes her head as if clearing it, wants to ask me something about what poetry I have done with the class. I am calm but still an indecent shade of purple. She enquires what i am showing the students. What is it for? I say we've finished the work and i wanted to show them something, I tell her what she wants to hear about poetry and field no further questions about the film. She seems to accept this and leaves.

Back into the class the kids are silent and looking at me, one girl (rosy heart-shaped face) with raised eyebrows. I say how scared i am of that woman and that disarms them. They chuckle. I explain how I'm not sure I should be showing them this, bluster, pacing around the room scratching my head and making earnest statements. For there part the students make all the right noises, saying they've seen this film/worse than this before. They are clearly amused by the whole thing.

The problem is you never know what somebody else is really feeling or thinking. I know what i take from this film, know i am shocked and wrenched by it and sensitive to it's excesses, and i tend to assume, up to a point, that people will take it the same way I do. I have to be the most nervous or sensitive person in the room in order to justify this project. 

But who knows where these children's sympathies lie, who knows where they hold on to the story? The key question seems to be 'Can they tell good from bad?'.

I always attempt to check this with these films, good films in which it is sometimes not easy to identify black and white, goodies and baddies. Where do our sympathies lie? Many of the films on my list resist easy dissection, with anti-heroes prevalent and traditional institutions  being challenged. 

But sometimes you have to take a risk on the film conveying it's own message and leave it to speak for itself. I'm not PG after all. Just let the film work and trust.

Controversy is an obvious thing for a teacher to pursue.

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. 

Where He Finds Out The Truth

Her brother died in Iraq.

SHADY, PARANOID, CONFINED, ANONYMOUS, VERTIGO

Nine hours' sleep for the second consecutive night and, although i woke up feeling like somebody else, I am magisterial in the classroom. 

It's not just me of course; lots of currents wash you to this point. Good planning gives you nice periods of calm, although you cannot have this all the time. Same for good things happening to your charges outside of the classroom, things you can't control but which work in your favour, like kids not having being able to afford a can of Red Bull for breakfast or the sun shining on the playground.

Either way, this morning, things fell into place. I was so comfy teaching Period 1, playing the buffoon and enjoying myself in what must have been spot-on diction because everybody was working very hard and in good humour. At times i could afford to sit down and chat about work in a very leisurely manner. I notice that one girl has a very pink heart-shaped face; a couple of others are wearing so much make-up they look embalmed. Tom down the front has written nothing in his planning boxes but chats quietly to Chris who is working on his special needs mini-computer.

Period 2 turns up, some littler kids, and they too are very jolly. They look pleased to see me and come in and are keen to do the stuff after practically no persuasion. It's a task to do with constructing really interesting sentences in response to some 'Spy File' images, from a bunch I put up on the board and have them copy into their books. 

They like the words and we ad lib about the meanings for half an hour, people talking about their own experience of the words. The words include SHADY, PARANOIA, CONFINED, ANONYMOUS, VERTIGO and the images are of helicopters seen between high buildings from the street below, of shadowy carparks under neon lights, of a blurred figure walking away down a corridor. 

The kids are all listening respectfully to one another so I roll with it. The are some decent expositions. I'm not sure which word gets this girl talking but I remember it comes after a number of the kids in the class (i take a straw poll out of interest) tell me they have brothers or fathers in the military, which we come to because, i now notice, many of the words on the board have military connotations. 

This girl tells me her brother went to Iraq and how he took his mobile phone with him. She tells me how he he was captured one day and how his phone was taken and how his captors used the phone to speak to the family and then they hung him. 

I feel the room enter some sort of descent but then get a grip and find myself pursuing this helplessly, whether infact she just said just that. The rest of the class aren't sure either and from listening they move into a phase of careful listening as she retells the story and there's like a clench and i find i'm pinning myself against the whiteboard as somebody asks, 'But they didn't kill him right?'. To which she says, 'Yeah, they killed him.'

We pause: there is very little anybody can muster for at least five seconds before, unbelievably,  somebody wants to trump this and some boy brings up fucking Joseph Fritzl. It is then that i draw a line and stagger on into the planned part of the lesson where there is some excellent work done.

I bring this up in the staffroom as soon as i can and the first advice from The Old Hands is: 'Doubt'. I don't want to doubt - why would anybody lie about this sort of thing? - but when i voice this concern somebody says to me plainly, 'They do it for the attention.' 

What does this mean? This girl doesn't strike me as the grasping sort. Somebody tells me that she doesn't have much self-esteem. 

What does this mean? That i am credulous, that i am gullible, that i am the sort of person who not only looks like they might be the sort of person to provide the forum for this sort of fantasy to be shared in the classroom and will gullibly take a caring interest in the child after the event? Are children really this nuts? Is this something to do with my fiction, my imagination? Is this actually nothing at all to do with me?

The teachers are right, because they back themselves against the kids all the time. Children are dangerous. 

A woman I do not know from around the school nips into my room to find me from time to time to ask if I've joined a teaching union yet, clutching a raft of papers. When i say i haven't she gives me a look i find it hard to describe but which contains a certain amount of menace and some very grave concern. I know I am meant to read into this the darkest potentialities of the teaching nightmare, the allegations of kid-hitting and sexual abuse, of court cases and demolished reputations; but i at least partly refuse. I am naive. Because children are insane.

I think back. After the class I go over to the girl who told the story and sit down and say how shocked and sorry i am to have heard this news. I think this is the right thing to do. I say how it was a very difficult thing to have had to say in the class and she tells me a little about how difficult it has been but i am basically preambling into asking her if she wants me to get somebody to talk to her about this. 

Some of her girlfriends have loitered and start eating crisps. One of them wants to tell me about something her dad did but she can't because he might go to jail. They seem happy enough talking about this. Something about this is awful. It is now that I pull the plug and brightly tell everybody to leave. 

This is a trap. It is just attention seeking, if you are naive and interested there are significant dangers attached, of course. How could i be so dumb? 

But what if her brother really died in Iraq? I do a little research at home. 

There are a number of dead soldiers from the area, listed on the various sites you can find out this sort of information online. But i cannot find one which matches the grim specifics of the case in question. Or maybe one. I will check with the school properly tomorrow because it is very important.

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. 

-

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)

Drugs into Dialogue

When i was teacher training I sat in on a civics lesson which had a drugs awareness theme. Here were a group of fifteen year old boys (with all the interests that age implies) being sat down by somebody who was basically a well-to-do mum and being asked to create posters which warned against the dangers of drugs. 

One minute looking round at the boys' work revealed how seriously they were taking their project as they chatted away, drawing cartoon reefers and cartoon Rastas with big BANNED signs then going through the work. The whole lesson had the air of a gimme period for all involved and the teacher was ostensibly doing something else. 

For some reason i found the whole thing offensive, mainly because I saw it as an opportunity missed. Surely if teenage boys had anything real to say it would be about this sort of thing, but it seemed that both teacher and students had too much to lose to be honest in this scenario. 

It's a bit naughty of me to want to pursue this with kids of course, but this level of discourse appeals precisely because it seems to describe the grey area where much of the interesting stuff really lies. 

So I asked this bunch of kids what they thought of their task and soon they were telling me about fathers using drugs and how boring this made them, about how they'd tried certain things and how it didn't have any lasting appeal. I believed them. As a trainee I was of course positioned a bit more neutrally than their usual teacher and therefore had a better chance of getting at the truth. But it did leave me with a feeling that you might be able to avoid stereotyping and reductiveness as a teacher if you were subtle and informed.

This is not really the case. If you let yourself go with the drift of the teenage mind troubles await you as you discover or remember that there are in fact no distinctions save the ones you can invent. That's not strictly true - experience counts for something - but as teachers we package knowledge and deliver it much as supermarkets package and deliver foods i.e. economically, sanitary and for the masses.

-

I sometimes think i would have been better of as a youth worker in a school rather than a teacher. True they get paid shit but they were always the ones with joking around in the dinner queue with the toughest kids, holding them in headlocks and bantering about something. These were the same youths who would sit at the end of corridors waiting for a classroom teacher, who would be obliged to try to tell them to move on, so they could get you involved in a row and so assert their thug power. 

There is something about the most rogue element which calls out to something in me,as  something i need to try to understand. Youth workers I knew took this to another level. They were the best people in the school. Sure they were messed up sometimes, as if in order to understand some of the kids' problems they needed to be going through them themselves (I'm talking about drugs and violence and illness), but at least they were alive. Teachers seemed dead in comparison. What the youth workers had was integrity. There was no ugly power relationship, no obligation. That's why they got paid so little. They were not peddling curricula for reasons they did not want to think about. 

Most of all I envied youth workers the quality of their dialogue with young people. Dialogue with young people can be disturbing but is often so revealing, so unburdened and addictive.