Bribery by another name

This article was originally written for the TES some time ago, but it never saw print. I think it's probably okay to put it online now.

Have you ever seen one of those cop shows where someone tried to bribe a detective without mentioning the bribe by saying something like; ‘How about we talk about this over free lunch?’ Or, ‘is that a lump of cash in your pocket or…?’ And the whole thing is so awkward and awful that you just want to escape the room you are in and throw the DVD/TV/Talking Box out of the window and watch cars run over it until it all goes away.

Over the past week I have been walking around with a reasonably-sized yellow folder in which is contained all of the year eleven coursework that is to be sent off (probably to Cambridge) to be moderated because apparently if you put an extra lowercase letter in front of a qualification then you can apply some utterly stupid ideas to them, such as telling the teachers which bits are going to be moderated before the students have even written them. I assume that their moderation process is also run by mice. Maybe stoats. This folder has traveled, backpack wrapped and back-muscle snapped from school to train to home to room to train to school ad infinitum over the past week because we, as a department, pride ourselves on our exceptional levels of paranoia and accountability learned the hard way- through prior ineptitude. I, having been nominated as department gremlin for this particular task have turned my weary eye again and again over low-band, high-band and should-have-been-banned idioms and grammar errors until I nearly stripped naked, painted myself with war paint and danced around a massive coursework bonfire chanting I G C S E I G C S E until, thankfully for everyone involved, I would have been taken away. Unfortunately, It is pretty difficult to find war paint of any quality these days so I just moderated them myself and neatly organised everything ready to be sent away before I celebrated with a couple of glasses of single malt before rocking back and forth in a darkened room, crying, and listening to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road on repeat.

It appears that what I have written is the introduction to the wrong article followed by me lamenting over how hard my life has been for the past week (really hard.) But, in all honesty, I just had two paid weeks off so one grimy week isn’t unforgiveable. What is unforgiveable is an event on the day that the folder was due. SLT had asked for the grades and had been duly given them by the little Pavlovian dogs that we are. Having looked at the data they came back with a response. I was not, at the time, aware that a response was needed. Their response: Can you take a look at the essays of those on the D side of the C/D borderline and see if there is anything that could be done?

(Awkward pause)

Perhaps I am far more cynical than I ever thought. Perhaps that cynicism has spread way beyond just my concerns for Star Wars VII. Or, perhaps, what the department was being asked to do in the final hours before submission was, without actually using the words, improve the incidence of C grades by hunting down marks that did, and would never, exist.

If you feel physically sick at this point then I would like to assure you that this is natural. It merely proves that you are human.

There is an unspoken acceptance that if a student’s figures are likely to ruin a school’s data then they should be adjusted through any means possible. Now, of course, we weren’t told to change the figures, and no member of any senior leadership anywhere would admit that they ever said anything that would even insinuate this but I believe that I am right in my reaction and that this is not confined to a lone school. The pressure on the C/D borderline encourages foul play, especially in subjects where there is coursework or speaking and listening elements where, for the most part, the marks are taken on trust. What is one mark here and there between friends, especially if it happens to knock a student over the predicted C boundary?

This is appalling, surely, but what can normal teachers do? They are screwed worse than a bottle of vintage Cabernet at the hands of a tired, undertrained and barely functioning Sommelier. They are taught to preserve their integrity and uphold teaching standards but they are also judged on their data and, especially in the case of academies, this is what determines pay rises. I know teachers who could not do more in schools being denied pay progression because the pass rate or C rate of their department is not good enough.

My Head of Department and I held our resolve. I firmly asserted that every mark in the folder was correct and that all had been done and I am right. I stated to my Head of Department that I was ethically opposed to any further re-marks. Hundreds of hours of teaching, revision classes, extra intervention and support went into that year group’s body of work and in one implied instruction it may have well been turned to toilet paper. The constant assertion that, regardless of effort, mitigating factors or expertise, a D is never enough is a dangerous corruption of our profession that damages everything that we should stand for as teachers. It is also prejudiced against students who have worked very hard. There is no parity in provision because there is no equal waiting in the importance of results. I am sure that I am not the only one to have been put in this situation.

There are huge curriculum reforms on the horizon of secondary school teaching and one hopes that this fabricated win/loss scenario will fall slowly into history under one of those boxes in textbooks headed with something like: Can You Believe They Did This? But, realistically, there will always be this line because people just can’t resist. They can’t keep their little minds out of the concept that schools should compete with one another because, in the end, that is all that this comes down to. Why did our leadership want this done? Because they want to look like the best school. Why do they want this most arrogant of appearances? Because by extrusion and association they themselves look really good. This is not education because education is childcentric and not egocentric. It is not about proving what a bloody good chap you are it is about proving what bloody good kids they are and it is accepting that some years it is just not going to happen. You will not climb the podium; you will not get the medal or kiss the Queen’s foot or get a framed portrait of yourself put up in the Vatican because, simply enough, this isn’t about you. Forcing others to hunt through an essay to ‘find’ two extra marks to push your average over doesn’t make you good at your job. Go teach instead.

Leaving Speech Honesty, or how I learned to stop worrying and start panicking instead.

My leaving speech from the school that I have worked at (for?) for the last two years was entitled 'Reasons You Should've Fired Me'. It was completely honest. I listed reasons that I should've been fired. Including my live twitter feed from parents' evening and the words "I have never planned a lesson. Never.". Amazingly, this speech was met with good-natured joviality. It is amazing what telling the truth can do. Most people don't even notice. Half of each of our lives is probably fiction. It's all quite fun though.

I should backtrack, and I will, because that first paragraph was never intended to be the crux of this post. I have not posted here for a long time. Fundamentally, the reason behind this is that a few too many people, and by people I mean students, had found my twitter account.. Anonymity is great, and for the last two years I have done a decent job of, if not remaining anonymous, certainly only being known by people I want to know. It could be worse; One of my friends is the lead singer of a prog-rock band as well as being a languages teacher. When his students found his music videos online they went viral across the school. He said to me recently that the low point was being asked to sign a copy of his band's album at parents' evening. Actually, that doesn't sound that bad; I thought the whole thing was pretty cool myself.

I don't resent students finding me on twitter, I actually see it as an inevitability. The ones that have found me are also good kids. We are not meant to have favourites as teachers, but as it is the holidays, and I have left the profession anyway, they are among my favourites. The problem that they probably don't realise with themselves and my blog coexisting is that some of them are mentioned. Not by name, not even with an accurate description of them, but even with the layers of facade that coat their stories, it is obvious that they are the subjects of posts. After all, if you write about your experiences as a teacher, it is inevitable that students will be part of the collateral.That is not to say that I was offensive towards them. I just don't want them to believe that they were exploited for notoriety or some sort of gain. Their stories were told either as catharsis for myself or because I believed that their experiences could positively effect others. Of course I enjoy a level of infamy from my blog and my twitter account and this has led to a couple of TES articles, but I like to think of that as a pleasant side effect. I would share my meager earnings with the students in question, but I spent them on trinkets.

And so, what I have missed blogging about in the last couple of months is why I am leaving teaching and, therefore, why I came to stand in front of a canteen of other teachers telling them how many chances they had missed to fire.

I am leaving teaching because mankind is selfish. Or, I like to tell myself that mankind is selfish in order to endorse my own actions like a favourable Amazon marketplace review. I am leaving to go back to uni. Not to study an Master of Education or anything useful like that, but instead to study English. Again. In fact, I am going to study one of those courses which makes people instantly regret asking you what you are going to study; An MA in Modernism and Contemporary Literature. I am doing this because, well, to coin an out of date colloquial idiom, the sort of colloquial idiom that makes me feel genuinely ill to think of let alone to use but in the grand tradition of teachers using out of date hip slang, I am studying for an MA in Modernism and Contemporary Literature because, well, YOLO. (yeah. I'll give you a second to get over that one.) I want to do it and I am at the age where I can and it won't completely destroy my life. Why uni again? Because although I am a pretty decent autodidact, I just love learning stuff from people that know more than I do. Teaching is an excellent profession to constantly challenge oneself, but I want to work out of my comfort zone of knowledge for a while. Put me on the other side of the desk and squeeze my brain until it drips out of my nose like a bad children's toy that uses the word 'gross' or 'gooey' in it's name.

This rambling mess of a post isn't really about me though. This overgrown monster is about the students I am to leave behind. It is, in a way, an apology. I know that a few of them will end up reading it because they have enough internet acumen to find these sort of things and spread them around. It's not easy to leave a school. I have doubted myself consistently since the day I first put in my application for the course. I nearly rejected the offer. Handing in my notice was terrible. Telling students, however, was by far the worst thing I have done but, perversely, the most life affirming. Why? Because it reminded me that teachers do good work. There aren't many teachers that leave school that don't receive a barrage of cards. Mine are all along the bookshelves of my house. I have become a Rupa Mehra; reading over and over the comments in cards and being brought near to tears, and when reading some particularly thick, black and returnable cards, actual real tears.

There is this tragic sense of abandonment because, deep down, teachers have a sense of ownership over students. It is in the nomenclature of the teacher to use possesive personal pronouns: 'My year 7s were terrible today' 'Oh my form were really sweet this morning' 'I think my students need advice. A lot of advice.' Perhaps this is the failing of teachers; to believe that they are responsible for the welfare of students, but I struggle even to form that sentence with any sort of conviction. Of course they are our students. For a lot of these children, during term time we are in contact with them more than their parents are. Leaving them behind to go and do something that interests you feels like abandoning them to the unknown in favour of a flippant whim. It feels like casting them off in the vague hope that their next teacher might do as good a job as you arrogantly believe you did. There is also a sense of fear perhaps; that their next teacher might be better; more knowledgeable, more compassionate and all round a better person.

So children are fragile and messy. They also forget. Teachers are transient moments in their lives but, just as the mercilessly dumped teenager thinks it's the end of the world, the abandoned child thinks, also, that life is ending, with no perspective on how fleeting the idiot in a waistcoat is to their existence. I certainly can't remember all my teachers. I imagine in a decade or two I will also be consigned to the part of their brains that gets rotted  first, by time or booze or both.Yes, an excellent teacher can stay with you for life, but most blend into the sea of mediocrity that swooshes aimlessly against a metaphorical boat without even a 'Captain, my Captain' to steady the ship anymore.

So, I'm sorry. Sorry to all the students who think that I have abandoned them but it is my life. Teachers have lives. We do things. We have hopes and dreams and actually want to do things in our lives. We get finally worn down by endless bureaucratic doctrine. We get fed up with the sort of pay review meetings which remove every single part of your job and reduce your entire function as a teacher down to numbers. I wrote an article for the TES entitled, snappily, 'Success is a lifetime, Not a letter on a page.' I am leaving teaching because when analysing the success of teachers this is the most ignored sentiment. The moment I decided to leave teaching, at least for a little while, was when I sat in a pay review meeting and my head teacher (who never teaches) told me 'You couldn't do anything more for the school but your department's data is not good enough.'. I was revolted. Give me goodbye cards that tell me that I made a difference to a child's life. I'll take being poor over chasing endless data through endless gerrymandering and blatant lies. I'll take a single child writing 'You were there for me' or 'Thank you for helping me' or 'You inspired me' over all the 4Matrix data sheets in the world.

Cheers,

C. Mittie.

Books.

The books that I think should be on the English GCSE syllabus:

A Clockwork Orange
The Forever War

Catcher in the Rye
Jack

Romantic Poetry
'The Movement'

The Glass Menagerie
Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme

The Obligatory Shakespeare

And yes, I am an English teacher. Just not a very good one.

The Leaver's Assembly I Want to Give

Hello Year Eleven.

Today is your final day of school. For many of you your exams are an open door that you only need to walk through to access a world of opportunity and happiness. A world where you can be anything you want to be as long as you work hard enough and accept that sometimes, in order to be what you want to be and do what you want to do it is going to get a little rough and uncomfortable. Sometimes you won't get eight hours, or regular three courses or 20k starting, but that's how it works. You have to grind to be good at things. Sacrifice and discomfort is the craft table for the model of who you want to be.

We will miss those among you that have accepted this. Those of you that have skipped a party to revise or spent lunchtime researching or who come and speak to us teachers after school to get the help you need. You. All of you we will miss, and the school will miss. I wish those of you this applies to the very best to the very last and you are always welcome back to visit us; we would love to know how you get on with life. If you choose to start families I hope you raise children in your image. If you don't have families then it is a loss to the gene pool, but possibly a gain to your happiness.

There are, however, those among you we will not miss. You are those that have skipped lessons, opted out of everything and decided that nothing we can do is good enough for your overinflated sense of self importance. To you, I address the rest of this speech.

I will not miss you.
This school will not miss you.
The further education that you will not get will not miss you.
The business you won't start won't miss you.
Your beautiful houses, all of them, won't miss you.
You fortune won't miss you.
Your incredible life partner won't miss you.
Your children will not miss the person that you are not.

They will instead watch grow old a horrifying waste of vacuous, foetid flesh that forms, just, the shape of someone who should not have been born because you barely know you were.

Year eleven, we as teachers are not allowed to tell you what we really think of you because it would probably cause you lasting emotional damage but, in this most final of non-final moments I just want you to know what utterly despicable human beings some of you are. You have bullied, aggravated and cajoled your way along a stretch of time where your caretakers are employed to help you and what have you done? You have left teachers crying in classrooms, head in hands. You have made them want to punch things, you have had them in late night phonecalls of inadequacy and despair. You have made them feel worthless. You have damaged the people who would never damage you.

Here is a truth: Not every teacher wants every child to do well. When you turned up, fresh-faced and full of life, we did. We wanted all of you to do well but some of you, since then, have been constant insults to yourself and, although many would not want to think it, we lost interest. You lost us and we stopped caring because there are hundreds of kids out there that need our care. You lost because of your arrogance, your self-importance and your simple inadequacy to recognise that people care about you and, even more simply, that people are actually people. We don't ask you to enjoy our subject, or our company, but we draw the line with your active attempts to ruin our lives. We're done with you and thank whatever deity cursed you with life for that.
I grant you a Good luck.
Don't come back. We don't care how you do.
Try not to breed.

[Applause and Jeers]

Interviews

For the first time in my teaching career, I got to watch a prospective teacher deliver their interview lesson. It was horrible. The person observed was a PGCE student and it all just felt a little awkward because, essentially, he looked terribly under-trained. I don't know where he was studying (I don't really want to) as I wasn't heading up the interview, but it was a little bit embarrassing. The candidates were asked to teach something in English that they are passionate about. I took running internal monologue notes. I will repeat these, now.

• Passionate about persuasive writing? Really?
• Underpitched and nervous.
• Cross-curricular (tick.)
• Seemed to go off task early
• Tone almost too pushy. 
• Am I bored? I think I'm bored. 
• Pace slow
• Overtalks
• By the book. 
• Developed confidence
• Class very quiet (not sure if this is a good thing)
• Some explanations very vague. 
• Not a worksheet. Please not a worksheet. 
• Oh shit; it's a worksheet. 
• Good classroom prescence
• Students on task (note to self: Do they like worksheets?)
• What have they learned at this point?
• Feedback a touch weak and underdeveloped.
• Is task too easy here?
• Could be trained into a good teacher
• Would have liked to see evidence of subject knowledge. 
• Keywords? Spelling? Modelling?
• Questions from class? Have they been taught any developed techniques?
• Resource heavy. No individuality until 30mins in. Why? (Bad PGCE teaching maybe?)
• Is this better than my interview lesson as an NQT?
• Lacks confidence in own skill.
• Potential but trained badly. 
• With confidence, shows personality
• Missing unpicking of learning
• Plenary is quite nice but inherently rubbish. 

It's a roller coaster eh? I don't know what it is this year but it seems impossible to find good teachers to hire. Seems like everyone is leaving and there is a substantial lack of quality in the new students, in this case, seemingly, because they are badly trained and don't take risks. No life. I dunno, maybe something is putting people off...

My Darling INSET, What Have They Done?

Oh INSET, you poor thing, what have you done to yourself? Why did you give up on life? Why did you let yourself be turned into such a shadow of a creature, permanently leashed by half-baked policy and forced into submission by top-down, unintelligible doctrine? Oh my darling INSET, it was never meant to be this way, you were meant for us to learn but… oh look what they’ve done to you. They stand up there in front of all of us and they just use you as a hammer to drive into us the rusty nails of some VAK crap or Thinking Hats or some other archaic junk that they found on the internet last night all because the head teacher/principle/overlord said that they had to lead an INSET so that it shows that they do something in the school which explains why they can afford a new house/boat/houseboat/boathouse. I thought it was our career progression and development that you were about but it looks like it’s really about that man pressing play on the video and telling us that we should be more like some school in Korea or Japan or Scunthorpe that has embraced technology and inspired a hopeless generation and then it ends. Puff. Bam. Just, be better. Oh INSET I’m sorry to make this personal but all they do is tell us to be better by showing us people who are better and where are our iPads for every student, or huge reform from the leadership team? They don’t exist. Be better, they tell us while standing on you and ignoring our objections. We’re people and we are as fallible as students. I don’t want tot be taught a lesson by someone whose only enthusiasm is because they have to qualify why they drive a better car and have a bigger house and can send whole staff emails. INSET, darling, please don’t cry, because I will too.  

Oh INSET, it’s happening again. I sit here at the back of the theatre amongst those for whom cycnicism is easier than breathing and I breathe, myself, a sigh of pity for your very name. As I sit I see a man stood up besmirching your supple, fragile form and upon it paint his policies and I look and I simply cannot believe. I cannot believe the money spent on the useless wasted time. He tells us that this is not about empire building, but then why are we a multi-academy trust? He tells us that he trusts us to do the right thing, but then why, after lunch, will there be an outside speaker on a new system that is being put in place by a company that we are paying for? INSET, I know that this is not your fault. You did not want to do it but you could not resist. They sang sweet words of a ‘community of learners’. They dripped ‘every child matters’ down your throat while they showed you ‘the path to outstanding’. You are not the first victim sweetheart and I know that doesn’t make it any easier but don’t cry now; we’ll sort something out. We’ll get it back. We’ll stop SLT from just telling us what we need to do better and instead maybe they could lead, properly. Maybe they will stop just manipulating those teachers that actually teach. They will think about INSET and do more than just show us a video produced by a great school. Perhaps we’ll have a chance to contribute in a way that is not just token acceptance that we are actually people. Maybe they will talk to us, one day, about teaching, not data and accountability and tracking. 

No INSET, it’s not hopeless. I know that there are people in here that will buy this bullshit every time because they know; deep down, that the only way to move up is to join in. And they will happily bend over and smile as policies are rammed… Sorry darling, I know. I’m crude. It’s true, I see things badly but what hope is there when even what is meant to improve me makes me think I’m getting worse at this job. I think it might be good that I see things badly because maybe that’s the start of a revolution. Darling, remember what we need to; it is always the day before the revolution. Yes, you are right. If we begin in the classroom then their ridiculous initiatives will be to blame for our student’s successes and then when we eventually give up hope they will continue their policies and then a yeargroup or worse will be abandoned to the chopping board of crass educational consumerism. So yes. You’re right. I’ll just be quiet and get on with it. And I’ll work the extra hours and love my subject and watch everything I do well get twisted rung into dirty waters for all it’s worth. And I’ll sit here and I’ll watch the video and I’ll look into your eyes and watch the hope dwindle but when someone in the pub asks me what I do, for some unknown reason I will be proud to say that I am a teacher because I know, away from all this, that I do good things.

An Open Letter To The Subway Franchise

Dear Mr and Mrs Subway,

I am afraid that this letter is a complaint. It was an event during my commute home that has compelled me to place pen to paper and bear this letter as one would an unwanted child left outside a hospital, and it saddens me so to see it here on the page, only now in its very first sentences but indicating a difficult life to come whose very inception indicates the universal sadness felt towards all of human nature that this very event has happened.

I am not, alas, a man who regularly frequents your franchises, but this had been a particularly torrid Monday and I required a considerable snack on my journey home to alleviate some of the ennui that the grind of a teacher's life had imbued me with at this time. As I wandered chartered streets I passed a number of other stores and found myself, eventually (and after a number of rejections even after entering the glossy doors of another eatery before dispensing with its services rapidly as being not up to my desires) at the gleaming, semi-reflective glass of your sandwich provider. And this was where my troubling experience began.

Perhaps my expectations were too high for an overcast late afternoon, but I see the creation of a sandwich as the creation of a work of art: the bread is the canvas; the topping is the paint and the sauce, oh the sauce, is the very signature; applied as it should be with a smile and a flourish. Now, although the breaded delicacy at the heart of this analogy is important, what is more important, nay, essential, is the artiste that creates the wax-paper wrapped masterpiece of culinary perfection.

My sandwich artiste was no more proficient in artistry than I am, and I can assure you that the most exciting art I create on a daily basis is quickly flushed away.

I will further explain the iconoclastic process that took place: I opted from the laminated board of water that hung above my head with all the promise of heaven for a foot-long meatball marinara. A full foot of meatballs in tomato sauce wrapped in my choice of bread from the, frankly mystifyingly eternally unblemished by mould, bread selection display. So there it was, I would receive, if everything were to progress on task, (which I can imagine, my reader, you know it would not) Nearly 30cms of steaming hot meaty balls on thick, doughy bread. My heart skipped a beat and the prospect of the sheer beauty of it. The bread was cut, haphazardly but forgiveably so, in front of me. I was stood waiting, salivating like one of Pavlov's unfortunate canines, for the ladlefuls of meaty orbs and rich sauce when my world was shattered by a voice with so little compassion that I thought it a joke at first. I was disarmed, thoroughly, by it: 'No Meatballs.' it said. To think upon it now is to return to a dark place.
'No. Meatballs.'
'NO. MEATBALLS.'
Not 'I'm terribly sorry Sir or Madam but I'm afraid we are out of our delicious meatballs for today, would you like me to suggest an alternative from our diverse menu.'
No. There was not that. There was only 'No Meatballs.'
I am a simple man, Mr and Mrs Subway. I lead a simple life and I believe in honesty. You promised me that I could have my sandwich my way. That promise was broken but, being a simple man, I chose there and then, to allow your franchise the second chance that I myself would like to have received. I selected the substantially less saucy, but no less meaty, Italian BMT. In order to help relinquish the earlier disappointment I opted for the enhancement: Double cheese. (Enhancement: Toasted is such an ubiquitous option that I feel it warrants little further comment than this acknowledgment.) I should intercede here to mention my love of cheese. I don't know who first event cheese and what they thought that they were up to at the time, but I am thankful every day for there apparent deviancy. This unhealthy obsession may explain my aghast horror at the mistreatment of the little triangles of celestial manna by the hands of what can only be described at this time as the daughter of Lucifer himself. The cheese was flung. Yes, I can almost hear your gasps reach me across the aether, my dearest reader, flung. The disrespect of it. Cheese flung haphazardly by someone for whom the words sandwich artiste are now merely a sobriquet and not the honorific title that they should be. I have seen more care taken with dog food than that which stunned me as perfectly tessellating triangles of cheese were left overlapping both each other and the edges of the bread. My mouth refused to close, so shocked it was, as the sandwich was nearly thrown into the high-speed oven. (this, I must infer, is a grand invention, however.)

And then she walked off.

In the thirty-four seconds it took for my sandwich to receive a grilling sterner than a twelve-year old miscreant receives from an angry teacher, my sandwich attendant disappeared. I was stood, alone at last, alone and aghast. Where was the friendly banter? Where was the 'how is your day?' or 'Nice weather last weekend.' I do not expect a treatise on Nietzsche delivered for my education but I feel that when you pass over more than a small note for a sandwich then you should have enjoyed some sort of experience. A sandwich of any repute should come, in my opinion, with two things: High cholesterol and a smile, and mine seemed to believe that having the former in abundance negated the latter. How very wrong this is.

I dreaded the reappearance of the sandwich. (the pronoun here is entirely justified. This was not my sandwich. This was so far from being my sandwich that it was like looking at your first born child and realising that they look awfully like the postman.) I wished the high-speed grill would not beep because I knew that when it did the horrors would not stop and the horror awaiting it in plastic tubs and plastic gloves was that of optional salad distribution. My fragile little mind, however, could not contemplate the massacre that was to come. It was a sort of salad genocide where only very few items made the cut and even those seemed pretty traumatised.

I asked for a simple list: Cucumber, lettuce, jalapenos, sweetcorn, gherkins and olives. The amount I received of each of these could have appeased only the most anorexic and weight-conscious of gerbils. I received, in total, six slices of gherkin. Imagine that in your mind if you will. It is piteous and I believe you know that. It is not even half a gherkin. Probably not a quarter. This is not the eating fresh that your advertising campaign attests to Mr and Mrs Subway. A tear graces my eye as I consider it. Then came the final indignity of sauce. Without the Marinara that would have constituted their eponymous filling option there would need to be significant saucing. I chose southwest and a stripe of hot chilli and in my mind the two combined with all the beauty and grace of a wild zebra. My mind was torn when the greatest of sins was committed: With both sauces the stripes were not contained to the limits of the bread; they extended beyond their bready target and onto the wax paper. They were wrapped so quickly that I could not register an objection and as I paid and left I had an ominous taste in my mouth for I knew that there were hideous ramifications of what should have been internal to my 'sub' becoming external.

By the time I had boarded my train I had, to eat, a sandwich where the ends of the bread had been permeated entirely by the sauce of disappointment. What coated my hands however, was not just sauce but indignity. I felt as if my sandwich experience had been, and i hesitate to use the word here, raped. I felt violated by the careless attitude of your workers.

Now, Mr and Mrs Subway, I am a teacher. It used to be a noble profession but over time it has simply come to represent the growing bureaucracy of our society. Gone are the days of the charismatic teacher who goes the extra mile and in are the days of the piteous bean-counter only out to ply their bosses with numbers and figures, constantly in fear of 'doing something wrong'. This, however is an aside. I take pride in my job and I take particular care in the standards I expect of my students. I insist that they are well turned out and that they, themselves, take pride and care in everything that they do. They berate me for this at times. They call me old-fashioned and I tell them that my advice may harken from a different age but that if they take pride they will go far in life. With this in mind Mr and Mrs Subway I ask you this: How can I expect these students to go into the world with pride and their heads held high when in your franchise a worker cannot even take the time to chat a few words with a customer? Or take the care required to finish a sandwich in a manner that provides an engaging and consistent taste experience? I am deflated by the very experience that I was the victim of because is demolishes the pillars that I encourage my students to climb. I can no longer teach them standards with any level of conviction in the knowledge that they may visit one of your franchises on their way home and receive the same service and believe, in lieu of anything better, that six slices of gherkin are acceptable in a sandwich measuring, more or less, a foot. You are stamping on our work as educators and you are doing it without any style at that.

I am saddened to be writing this rebuke but I feel it is time for me to stand up for what I believe in and that is responsibility, pride and care. And if those three factors can't be found in the food service industry then I don't know where they can be found any more. If sandwich making has no integrity left then I don't know what there is left in this world to believe in. I guess there is nothing left.

I hope you have a nice day Mr and Mrs Subway, and I hope your next lunch experience is more fulfilling than mine.

thank you,

Calamity Teacher. 

Stop it. Just stop it.

My favourite days of the year are those that are really horrible because they give so much ammunition for this blog. I was worried a few weeks ago that I had writers block and that maybe my streak of acidic, acerbic, caustic and other -ics was at an inglorious end. Thankfully, or unthankfully, this block has ended with an abrupt lurch because yesterday I was exposed to a presentation that was so utterly full of things I hate that at one point I looked around to find the hidden camera. In my mind I sort of hope that it was all a big test and that we're all going to be berated for not going to town on the flaws in it. At least in that I would be assured that education has some sort of morality/scruples/integrity/anything, anything at all.

What stood up in front of us on some grimy afternoon in late April was a salesperson, and there is utterly no doubt about that. The thing is, is that she had already sold the product and we were forced to sit there and listen to a service being described to us that had already cost our school money and was also useless as only a bad INSET can be. Most of the teachers sat in utter shock as what was explained to us was that the school had bought a resource that was an internet dictionary which, surprise surprise, is actually already available free. On the internet.

Consternation abound, there was time for questions, and questions came. Some of the teachers, unlike most of our little darling students, had done their homework. One Science teacher had looked at the word lists and oh was she not happy. There were, simply, not enough words, and what were we told? To submit any that were missing. Shock and awe were more abound than an attempt to stamp communism out of the north of a split country. Or something. So we have bought a resource that isn't actually finished. We have purchased a service that as its marquee product is a big tent full of absolutely nothing and what we are meant to do is take a look inside and throw shit in it for the company to use themselves by selling it to others. This is not a community of learners; this is a collection of self-indulgent dickheads taking the piss out of schools and getting away with it because schools buy this crap. And what will they do with our contributions? We were told, and I believe this is verbatim, that

'We even have a teacher in head office to define and categorise the words.'

'A teacher,' I thought, looking around the room, 'A teacher?' silence. 'Well, Well done mate, you have a teacher? We've got absolutely loads of them. Look at them. Count them. Bloody loads of them.' I was as incensed as incense. I was watching someone effectively tell me that the entire room's collective subject knowledge and learning ability were made drastically obselete by one teacher in a London office with a dictionary and a vapid penchant for the highlight button.

Included as part of the all-encompassing service, and here I use the word service as one might use it to describe that provided by an STI-ridden hooker, LSAs are trained to deliver the companies own particular brand of reconstituted crap to students in an intensive six-week cycle. They showed us results and then I thought to myself if you by-passed this company and added the money to budgets and staffing and developed this system in-house then we would get exactly the same results and we would have an enduring system we could be proud of. And that's it, isn't it? Schools are bought by glossy brochures because they have no faith in their own staff's ability. Teachers are overstretched because budgets are tight but if this money spent on outside agencies was turned internally and spent on overstaffing then maybe staff would be able to execute this sort of thing. It escapes me why schools are taken in by the glistening brochure of a third party. There is no magic bullet. Schools are so desperate for results that they have no faith in their own staff. There is a horrendous tacit implication that staff are doing a bad job and I don't think a lot of senior management realise this. They see that the stats are not befitting of their brogues and they throw money at a situation to make it better. They look for the quick fix. There is no quick fix. Just a quick way to disgruntled staff and wasted budgets.

If there are any members of senior leadership reading this then please heed my message: Stop spending money on this shit. Spend the money on overstaffing and supporting the departments that belong to you. Show your faith in your staff by giving them what they need; time. They are good at what they do. Help them develop in order to help students develop by giving them the time to, well, develop. Yesterday I saw two useless systems costing twelve grand in total. That is a part time teacher or LSA. That part-timer or LSA could ease the pressure and give teachers the time to develop the systems that these companies charge a premium to deliver badly. Half of the crap that educational companies peddle is just recycled chaff under different branding completely intended to sell short and exploit. A massive slice of the money that schools pay them is shoveled straight into branding, marketing, shareholders, offices, bonuses and yet we are more than happy to pay for all this instead of losing these add-ons by working the budgets internally. Instead of paying for someone's business lunch with a prospective client from another school why not give your staff the flexibility and time to be revolutionary? Why not encourage your staff to innovate and facilitate this with working groups that have time to actually work. And you know what? Maybe you can sell your own programmes that you've developed in house to others and thereby fund your own excesses. I dunno, use the profits to take your whole school to Alton Towers or some such shit. It's probably about as useful as half the crap you buy.

As an endpoint for my frustrations perhaps this might illustrate to people what this is really about: Do you know what normal teachers do when they go on strike? Most of them don't go out and hold up banners. Most of them sit at home and they plan lessons and mark work. Doesn't that tell you something? I don't need resources to do my job better. I have myself and my department and coworkers and twitter for that. I need time.

Postcript Edit: Although I thought this article finished, I can't help but feel that something else should be mentioned. It was clear that this new system was unpopular with staff so this morning another little presentation was arranged by the member of SLT who is in charge of it. During this the staff assembled were presented with vastly overinflated data about the effectiveness of the scheme that even lied, clearly and obviously, about the reading ages of some students. I still feel genuinely sick about this. Even if they were just tested with a flawed test it is so obvious that these reading ages were wrong that it would take a rank idiot to not notice. If this is education...

The Moment When You Realise It's All Out Of Control.

So there I was, holding exalted court upon the class of bright-eyed and impeccably engaged year nines and delivering to them a beautiful sermon of learning that was both student-led and teacher facilitated. The lesson that kept them so enraptured was both meticulously planned and evolved through the lesson in a free and organic way driven, equally, by every single student in the classroom. So what should happen to this calm eutopia (which is a word, incidentally) of learning, there was, and in some ways, deep in my mind, a knock at the door. I beckoned, reluctantly, a small and nervous looking year seven into the class room.

A deviation: This child is one of those children who you have no choice but to believe anything that they say, at least for the first eight or ten times that they lie to you. On of those students that not only has one of those faces, but also knows that they have this in their possession and seeks intuitively to exploit this at every turn. In your mind you probably can think of a student that fills this template and the many times that they have sought to deceive you with only their innocent smile and enrapturing eyes. You are probably also cursing. This may be important to the story. It may also not.

The oasis of calm shattered indefinitely, I turned to the child and asked them, in my most annoyed tone, what the problem was, or what she needed, or what her exact purpose was in breaking the beautiful stained glass of learning that was being created in my classroom.

A deviation: There may well be some exaggeration in parts of this story yet I assure you that the important bits are true.

She had panic in her eyes and a mere few words escaped her mouth like dying embers thrown up into the dark night surrounding a campfire.

'I think Tina has passed out Sir.'

Now, quite apart from the fact I had no idea who Tina was or what in any deity's name was going on there is one fact that fills the core of every teaching day and is consistently ignored by pretty much everyone; We simply aren't trained for this sort of shit. Since the council declared that any child of mine would be disposed of without remorse lest the insanity spread I have no real parenting instinct. I only know that when a scared little kid walks into your classroom and tells you that then you just do what you know you should without thinking. So I went around the corner and saw the kid lying on the floor. So again, I didn't think, I just did. I told the scared little girl to go and get the most senior and first teacher she could find, and I stayed with the girl and bring her round.

I would later find out that the girl was a known epileptic and that it was all pretty standard and, to be totally fair, I do have a history of looking after epileptics (sort of) so it wasn't as panicky for me as it may have been for others but, when the other staff got there and starting sorting things out I simply returned to the class that I had told the words immemorial of 'Talk amongst yourselves', told them that it was all okay as I shrugged nonchalantly and continued with the lesson. That was it. Incident over.

Later, much later, but still the same day and in the relative comfort of the staff room a teacher came up to me and said to me something along the lines of  'I hear you were up to some heroics earlier?' I didn't know what they were talking about. I had to ask. 'Oh, I heard that Tina had had a seizure.' 'Oh yeah', I said. Thinking nothing of it because it's our job, isn't it. It's what we do. We just do things, regardless of anything else we just do what we have to. We're not an emergency service, or the military, or anyone who could rightly be a hero, but we just get stuff done when it has to be done and when it has to be done we do it with utter confidence regardless of all the little tugging daemons inside of us rattling our hearts like babies' toys and prodding something very sharp and confusing into our brains. I don't think there are many teachers that would have done anything different to me.because I didn't do, well, anything. I did my job, you all do your jobs every day. I don't want a ribbon or a medal or a road named after me, I just want kids to know that it's all going to be okay to the best of our abilities should anything ever go wrong.

The Fear of Falling.

Throughout my life I have been one of those people that, somewhat annoyingly for others, will try something regardless of how terrible I am likely to be at it. I will now anecdote (and yes can I use anecdote as a verb. I teach English and can word in any way I like. (See, there you go. I did it again. Different word worded differently.))

Anyway, To anecdote...

I did PE A Level. Stigma aside, I found it difficult. It was very cross-curricular, and it taught me more about psychology, in many ways, than my Psychology A Level did. For PE there was a moderation day. I was to be moderated in my second sport: Rounders. (Don't ask, but, in summary, I was very good at one sport and it didn't afford me much time to do another. The sport picked as the token second sport for me was rounders.)

When we arrived at the moderation day rounders was at the end. First there was football. They were, however, short one goalkeeper. I volunteered. I can barely save money in a sale let alone goals. Somehow (good defenders, most likely) I kept a clean sheet. This is not, however, about my Gordon Banks impression. It is about its reception by a child from another school who I had met (read 'was flirting with') at the moderation.They told me that they would never have volunteered. That they'd be too worried about making a fool of themselves. I was awestruck in the bad way. Who, my eighteen-year-old mind wondered, wouldn't just give something a go? Perhaps I was bought up in a way that embraced giving stuff a go, or perhaps I have just always been that way regardless, but it was always confused me, the attitude of fear of doing things. The most confusing part of this avoidance action is that I have always thought the fear was simply a part of life, and a positive thing. At the time of the aforementioned moderation I was competing nationally (not in rounders or football) and shaking before every race. This is still true of lastMonday morning, when I delivered an assembly and was physically shaking before I began. I've always thought that fear was part of difficult actions. Difficult actions are rewarding ergo fear is a good thing.(this is a bit of a false conclusion, but it has always worked for me.)

Yesterday I was reminded of that student at the football moderation when a student said to me that she would rather refuse to stand up to do a speaking and listening assessment and therefore fail than stand up in front of other students and potentially do badly. I was shocked. I called my head of department and we both quizzed the girl after the lesson. She had her mind totally set on not trying. But it wasn't not trying, not really. She had actually written the speaking and listening presentation. She had written the whole thing out verbatim in fact. This presented a difficulty in that full speeches are expressly forbidden by the regulations. So she was told to reduce her speech to notes and then she could go.

She refused. Twice. On consecutive days. She just didn't want to stand up in front of people and risk doing badly despite the tacit acceptance of failing by not doing anything. It mystified me and mystified my head of department so much that we started grilling her a bit. We asked her about her options for GCSE and they turned out to all be coursework based subjects; in other words, the sort of things you can keep redoing. She had even dropped PE half way through the year after ending up in a class with, in her words, 'loads of really clever kids'. I was dumbstruck that this student had not been noticed as a cause for concern at any point before. How had we missed a student whose confidence in herself was so low that she was avoiding situations where she could be exposed in any matter? But aside from our failings pastorally there was another nagging question in that annoying itchy bit at the back of my head, and I don't even mean the bit with the questionable rash. That question: What have we done to this girl?

The major difficulty with the itching, nagging question was the identification of who I actually meant when I used the pronoun. I knew that I was certainly part of the culpable 'we' but who was I lumping myself in with. The teachers? The school? All of education? X-Factor? Sadly, and annoyingly, the last one is likely to be true to an extent. Perhaps the show itself is not guilty per se but it is representative of a element of the society whose progeny we nurture.

My feeling is that we are part of a youth culture that sees itself in terms of a dichotomy of performer and observer. Students see those who perform as being either exceptionally good or exceptionally bad and both come with inherent problems. Being good leads to the depravity of quick young fame and being bad leads to ridicule. Not a day goes by that there is not a video on the internet of someone doing badly at something and receiving the full force of mob disgust. It even happened at my school. A girl posted a video of herself singing on youtube and it went viral around the school for all the wrong reasons. She crossed the void between observer and performer, risked judgement, and saw it rain down upon her. She is either resilient to the point of being metallic or oblivious to the point of being wooden. I still can't quite decide. 

I think that this fear is ingrained into students and it makes them fear the judgement more than the act. The student that I was so shocked by is afraid enough of judgement that it is safer simply not to take part despite its inherent failure. They wish to remain behind the glass screen at all costs and never expose themselves because it is safe but it also overcomes any aspiration. Students are culturally indoctrinated into believing in the glass ceiling as opposed to trying to break it. So they just sit, and stare, and never believe.

Strangely, this creates quite the opposite effect on some other students who believe that things will simply come their way without work. This attitude seems to be a sort of glass slipper syndrome where they just think everything will be okay because it will all work out. I find this particular attitude most prevalent, somewhat inappropriately, among the young boys who believe they are the next David Beckham, forgetting, of course, that in order to be a great footballer you actually have to practice playing football. Instead, most of them play a bit of football for the school and their aspiration is not to be an excellent footballer, rather to have the accoutrements of booted fame; a model wife, wheelbarrows of money and pure, innocent idolatry. But perhaps this entrenches further my theory. Students either believe they are destined to be spectators or that they should automatically belong on the pitch, stage or ring. There is no middle ground and, for most, no idea of what the concept of hard work entails or solves.

I will finish with this:

A student this week asked me why rappers were so good at rapping when most of them didn't finish school. I told them that there are things that can't be taught but have to be actively learned. The only way to ensure you get what you want is to go and get it, I told him, and then it still might not happen. He seemed shocked at this.