Was Geneva Wrong?

 Was Geneva Wrong? The Positive Effects of Cruel and Unusual Punishment in School Children. 

Dr Callum Mittie III, MA PGCE Kitekat BAGA 4

IT HAS LONG BEEN ASSUMED that part of the role of the teacher is to be an ethical guiding light and a pastoral carer towards the children in their charge, but what if this so called 'nurturing instinct' is, in fact, totally wrong?

The first difficulty of this study is defining what actually constitutes a child. What is a child? I ask, and it is a difficult question, because no-one really knows (Serafinowicz 2002). The latest edition of the Wandsworth English Dictionary defines 'A Child' as being a creature between 3"2' and 5"6' in height and with a Geiger counter reading of (+/- 2%) 10x108 (Wandsworth 2014). All of this is, of course, the sort of mundanity that is well known in the teacher profession, for what sort of teacher, in these days of accountability and data-obsession, enters the classroom without their handy personal Geiger counter? So the real question here is what makes a child a child outside of just their physical attributes. This, of course, is where Serafinowicz falls short, and not just literally.

If you were to dissect a child, and I'm sure most of you have, you would find a confused jumble of string-like organs, each of which contains an individual 'emotional trail' of hormones. It is now well-understood that only one of these 'emotional trails' can be connected to the organ loosely described as a brain (or 'think-box' in popular Daily Mail nomenclature) and so the trails consistently vie for sustenance from the think-box housed above it, thereby causing the child's infamous mood-swings. Of course, during the cocoon stage, the child's body chemistry will change dramatically into the well-ordered innards of the average human. Some, of course, will not experience this transition and it is for these anomalies the process known as the 'X-factor' was developed to screen them quickly and efficiently into the care and support of the affectionately-named Big Brother house, where caring older 'Siblings' would look after them.

But how do we make sure that our children grow into their cocoon stage in the most productive way, both for them and for society? It has been the way for a number of years now that they should be nurtured and encouraged, but is this really working? Freedom is only causing a spiral of increasingly negative social interaction and aspirations (Bragg 1984). Students no longer aspire to the top of society, instead relying on the quick-fix-comfort of instant celebrity. In fact, the whole X-factor process has changed from being a sad indictment of our failings as a society to a lauded process with a viewership that, I can only surmise, challenges Autumnwatch as the country's favourite programme. And so, where is nuturing getting us but further and further into our own troubles. To borrow a phrase from the educational pyschologists Belle and Sebastian; There is too much love to go around these days.(Belle, Sebastian et al 2000)

There has been significant movement in this new 'Cruel to be Kind' teaching movement already. For example the popular programme 'Mr. Drew's Last Chance School' where students are given a final chance to succeed before they are terminated, has been met with riotous applause. In America, where they are always at the forefront of sensible and effective educational reform, the 'Hunger Games' has promoted creativity amongst selected underachievers in order to facilitate active learning. The 'Hunger Games' is reminiscent of Montessori's dogma of learning through play and experience. (Collins 2008) The Japanese system entitled Battle Royal is less well known, possibly due to its tumultuous beginnings, but must also be considered as it is very much the spiritual predecessor of the American system.(Takami 2007)

In short, this study will focus on a number of the so-called 'Free' schools, which are of course the schools were student behavior has degraded to the point where students are 'free' to do as they please. In charge of each of these will be placed an overseer, or games-master, who will be responsible solely for discipline. It will be their job to set difficult tasks that should foster competition, creativity and ingenuity in order for students to succeed and then to prosper in the difficult adult climate because, after all, aren't children just little adults after all?


References

Belle Sebastian et al., Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant; The Fallacy of Nuturing in Secondary Schools, Jeepster Press, Glasgow 2000

Bragg B, The Saturday Boy; A Cross-Cultural Study of Teenage Attachment and Workplace Aspiration, Godiscs Press, Barking 1984

Collins S, The Hunger Games Theory; An Exercise In Learning Through Action, District 12 press, The Seam 2008 (Vol.2 2009, Vol.3 2010)

Serafinowicz P, Look Around You, Volume 1 Issue 3, BBC Press, London 2002

Takami K, Battle Royale, Gollancz, London 2007 (first published 1999 in Japanese) 

ed. Tolkein J R R, The Wandsworth English Dictionary for Schools and Outhouses Sixth Edition, Wandsworth University Press, Wandsworth 2014


Appendix A: Premise


So this happened:

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...