Teaching and Watching

So it's the summer, right? And you're already bored, right? And it's inevitably going to rain, because it's England, and that's what it does, right? So, get yourself on Amazon and order up a load of DVDs, and being a teacher, or that should possibly be being a Teacher (it comes capitalised with your NUT membership) you inevitably can't leave your job behind, so why not take a hint from the Calamity Teacher Brand (tm pending) guide to what to watch when you miss school a little too much, but don't want to get off the sofa/out of bed. I have included OFSTED-sanctioned summaries of every film so that you're absolutely sure of what you've learned from the experience before you even begin.

1: Dead Poets' Society
A man breaks every rule in the staff handbook then encourages students to go against their parents' wishes until one of them commits suicide. Hilarity ensues. 

2: History Boys
Overweight paedophile teaches young student the value of their holistic education while indoctrinating an NQT into his own way of thinking. Lovable paedo gets caught fondling a student and is saved from a disgraceful dismissal by his untimely death. Hilarity ensues. Also on the AQA reading list so it's like doing homework.

3: The Breakfast Club
Five bad boys with the power to rock you students demonstrate their diversity through the medium of forced ubiquitous punishment. They are badly supervised and this causes negative behaviour to propagate. In the end no-one learns anything. There is also a musical montage.

4: Coach Carter
Inspirational educator is accidentally hired as a sports coach instead of a Principal. School sport is presented as being unfathomably important and this is why Ashanti ends up pregnant.

5: Harry Potter
A consistently failing and dangerous independent school is followed in a unprecedented 7-year study where the school consistently resists academisation by a clearly more organised and benevolent power. A student council raises its own private army in fierce defiance of Voldemort the DfE. IN THE LAST FILM THE SCHOOL IS TURNED INTO AN ACADEMY AND EVERYTHING IS OKAY THERE IS NO NEED TO WATCH THE LAST FILM. NO NEED AT ALL. GO BACK TO SLEEP. EVERYTHING IS OKAY.

6: Teachers
Precursor to Educating Essex makes a household name out of Andrew Lincoln. longitudinal study shows why Labour was always wrong about education. Always.

7: Donnie Darko
 Parallel universe parable demonstrates why teachers should always STICK TO THE CURRICULUM; a number of teachers go off-curriculum to teach dangerous texts and non state-sanctioned theories. This torrid arrogance leads to deaths and destruction. There's another paedophile in this one, too.

8: Perks of Being a Wallflower
Boy deals with worrying relapses in mental state by studying extra-curricular core subjects. Quality teaching

9: Summer Heights High
A drama teacher, a independent school exchange student and a youth delinquent are the centre of this reality-tv expose of the failures of an Australian school system that doesn't have the EBACC.

10: The Inbetweeners
Series follows four sixth formers who are consistently supported by an excellent head of sixth form and a supportive, enriching, school experience and all go on to excellent post-18 opportunities in the worlds of work and university. Hilarity is abundant in this riotous coming-of-age drama. There is also a paedophile because, well, of course there is. 

Enjoy your summer kiddies, because I'm watching films.

There will be a story there.

I have always assumed that the birth of a school followed a secular immaculate conception. That schools just sprang up, or had always been there. I find it hard, still, to work out where one finds the space to place a fully formed school in a town, or village, or extra-urban part of Hounslow.

When I left teaching last year, I wasn't sure of when I would return, but I told myself that I would only come back to do something that I could really get behind. I had one ill-fated interview at a very prestigious school, but it didn't feel right, and they didn't like me, so the choice on that one was very much taken out of my hands. But then something came up.

When I left my last school, another teacher (among many) left at the same time. This teacher was also taking a break from classroom teaching (although he did little of that in his role as a director) but he wasn't off to study, he was off to plan. Plan and build. He was off to put a school where there had previously been no school. But, more than that, he was off to answer a question that we all think from time to time; 'What would I do if I was in charge?'. And his, most wonderful of answers?

'We're going to change education.'

I offer my insincere apologies here for the mixed pronouns, but it was necessary to facilitate some inconsequential gravitas. 'We're going to change education.' it's a wonderful phrase. It's brave, it's possibly stupid, but it's all that is right. As you can probably imagine, that sort of statement sought me out from my high-brow literary malaise. I was convinced. I wanted to be part of this, or, at least, I wanted to find out what 'this' was. Turns out 'This' was the 'that' that I wanted the 'this' to be.

In short order, I had an interview, I got the job, I started becoming something. I started co-writing a story. Others were involved. Others are involved. We are becoming something and that thing feels gorgeous. A lot of what we're doing in September isn't totally defined. A lot of it isn't set in stone, or fleshed out or down on paper, but that is so wonderfully exciting. There is no set way of doing things yet, so the teachers get to define how things are done We are not encumbered by history. When we looked at the options for what to teach, we decided on what we wanted to teach. As in, what interested us. When I chose set texts for GCSE, I made a conscious decision to choose what excited me, not what was easy. I chose texts specifically for their wider ramifications; the opportunities to teach off-field. Off-spec. Off-kilter.

Going away from the teach-to-the-test rubric is the point of the school. The point is to teach. to actually teach. Not to check boxes in ever-decreasing circles, but to take steps in ever-increasing bounds. We want to engender a culture of wanting to learn. Not being tricked into it. We seem to have an obsession with 'tricking' children into learning, and that we have to 'complete' sections of education. The education is something that can be 'finished'. Screw that. Lets change the ethic. We're trying to change the ethic.

There is a lot of top down dictum in education. A lot of people making their own decisions and a lot of people below them just 'doing their best' is spite of this. Is it your best? Is it the version of you that you want to be? Be your own hero. We are. We are trying to change education one student at a time, one school at a time. Part of it, though, is who we are surrounding ourselves with; Passionate people who believe in themselves and their causes. People who question the status quo and value their own learning as much as their students. This might sound horribly arrogant, but I am starting to realise that teachers easily become very negative. It is very easy in staffrooms for teachers to enter spirals of negativity that effect our working lives. Instead of being proud of what we do, we surround ourselves with people who bring us down. The school that I have been temping at as a cover supervisor is quite close to the new school, and I have been innundated with negative energy about what we are trying to do in September. We are seen as a threat and a risk and a group of people playing at education. It has worn me down at times and given me undue doubts, but then the moment I have conversations with the other September teachers I am instantly filled with excitement. It's been fiercely dichotomous. I have found myself feeling displaced from both. But then I started to ponder, then wonder, then with enlightened wonderment filled myself with hope. Then I realised it wasn't hope. It was the feeling I should have.

I Love This Job.

I have missed it, and being a cover teacher has just entrenched this by showing me a pale imitation of what teaching is. I want to be around other people who aren't curbed by some underhand need to whine. Now I whine a lot, I know, but I will never tell anyone that I don't love my job. And, I reckon most of you do, too. You are reading blogs about teaching. You are on Twitter. You care. And most of you seen to want to change teaching so that it is more teaching, and less bullshit. So get the people around you who believe in what you believe in and start changing what you want to change at the ground level, and make sure people know what you're doing and how you're doing it. Don't suffer dictum in silence. Build narratives between teachers and other teachers, between teachers and students, between students and students. Make your own environment. Talk to each other. Come out of your classrooms and share practice. Don't be afraid of being observed by your peers, or of collaborating with other subjects or other schools. Don't be afraid to take ownership of yourself.

Be a heroine. Be a hero. Be the teacher you want to be. Don't be afraid to be positive about things you believe in because, you know what? You believe in them. Be the most positive person you can be about what you want to be positive about. This process of preparing to open a new school has taught me to be proud of my ideas and proud to be positive. It's a strange thing, but I feel like much of the education system, both as a profession and a public service, rewards a lack of ingenuity. I want to stop that. I am with other people who want to stop that, and we're stepping up to the plate. Fancy going up to your own?

Planning backwards

I read this blog post this week, and I thought about one of the major points, that is, planning backwards from A-level. In September, I am going to be Lead Teacher of English at a new school where I am the only English teacher (Department nights out are going to be wild (or, alternatively, just me, in the pub, on my own, crying, into a half drunk pint of absinthe.))


Anyway. I like this idea of planning back from A-level, but I also thought about planning forward from A-level. As in, I want to plan the student that I want to leave my department, so I sat down and started to think about that student. I asked myself a very simple question: How will I describe the eighteen year old student graduating my school? Specifically, a student with an A-level in English. I jotted down a few traits before a reasonably important realisation:

The Student:

• Well Read 
• Respectfully Outspoken
• Creative
• Pragmatic
• Confident
• Respectfully Cynical
• Able to Find Perspective
• Positive.

I thought, not a bad list. The student would be able to stand up for what they believe in, and root their beliefs in an appreciation of others. They would be calm and confidant, speak well, but not try and overly control others. A great, and it was here that I found a word that has fallen a little out of fashion recently, citizen. A Great Citizen. An Ideal. My Ideal,yes, and therefore fallible and imperfect, but an ideal adult, to an extent.

This is not, then, planning back from the qualification, this is planning back from the person. This is end-result holistic planning. Notice how many of those goals are achievable in English. Go on, have a look, I'll wait.

Back? Good, let's begin.

Planning has become an exercise in filling time. Or times maybe (S operative.). It is an exercise in picking out nice neat little Lego blocks and lining them up to make a perfect shape. But that isn't really planning at all. What that is is filing. Filing children away. Planning in order to place children from the future through the present and into the past. That is not, though, how things really work.

The child that turns up in September is just a version of a later adult. That later adult exists in a plural form and is irrevocably linked to the child. It will be affected by a million unforeseeable circumstances, but if it is guided by an expectation of it being exceptional then the negative versions of itself will slide away. When was the last time you thought about the potential adult that your lesson was effecting? When was the last time you really thought about long term planning in the real long term? A lot of schools are happy to paint words like 'Success' and 'Resilience' about their doors, or write it under the crests on their blazers, but how much does that influence the actual teaching? And what does that mean? I would think that for most schools success means something that arrives in an envelope in a few weeks time, not a moment of clarity in thirty years.

Planning is not about lessons, not about blocks of time. Think of it more as painting a model. When you paint a model you have to lay down the basecoat, and it has to be right. If it doesn't quite stick or is the wrong shade then later the model will be a mess. As you go on the areas of work become smaller and smaller until you are dotting the eyes with a brush with a single hair. The thing is, that all the way through you are painting the same model, and working with the same ideal, it is just that you do the basic things first and work towards an end result that is incredibly complex. Planning is this. Plan for the best adult, and the student will become that.

Maybe. 

It's all in the name

I am an 'Outstanding' teacher, in an 'Outstanding' school, and I am being bullied, day after day, by a group of year seven students.

When I ask them to do something, they ignore me.
When I ask them again, they ask me why?
When explain, they tell me that they don't have to.
When I tell them they do, they tell me they don't.
When I threaten them with detention, they tell me they won't turn up.
When I tell them to move seats, or leave the classroom, they laugh in my face.
When I send for on-call, they are suddenly silent, obedient. The on-call teachers, for the most part, look at me as if I'm mad. They look as if I have no idea what I'm doing. I ask for detentions; no-one turns up. I ask for sanctions; nothing happens.

Perhaps I make too much of a job title, but I know this truth to be self-evident: I am a cover supervisor, and for a great swathe of students this very fact obliterates my face and replaces it with a target. Teaching, at its very core, is a balance between behaviour management and the ability to convey information. There are many other factors, but at its core, these are two essential traits. I am not here to talk about conveying information, ideas and skills, for that has become nigh on impossible for me. I am here to talk about when behaviour management becomes impossible. because a single thing is broken: Not hearts, nor minds, (although mine are beginning to unravel) but the facade of repercussions.

You are more than welcome to disagree, but in my opinion behaviour management is based on a lie, and that lie is the the teacher somehow wields a power over the students that is unbreakable. Students fear things. Some fear detentions, or their parents, or being shouted at, but when it all boils down and dries out to the white grainy stuff that really screws up non-stick pans, students wield an overpowering amount of, well, power. Any class is only a smidgen of self-awareness away from breaking the spirit of a teacher. There is a moment when the class becomes the mob. They realise that the teacher is, essentially, powerless; that they cannot stop everyone at once. That, if their transgressions are spread wide enough and loud enough, there is no way that they can be controlled. In short, you can't kick a whole class out.

The cover teacher, then, is an easy victim. They rarely know names, rarely know systems and protocol, and regularly have to deliver boring textbook work. The cover teacher has difficulty building any positive relationships because their job is profoundly to tell students what to do. For students, the pervasive culture is that the cover teacher is a target, and they turn as entire classes towards this. Detentions are hard to set without a classroom, or names, or any knowledge of protocol and escalation. Other staff are too busy with their own work to adopt classes from others and so minor transgressions go ignored and this escalates. The next time a class is covered they ratchet up their behaviour and have no way back. There is no reset button for children gone feral.

So I'm another cover teacher being treated like shit by student after student, day after day, and I just put up with it and do whatever I can to make my life a little easier, all the time knowing that the students' time is being wasted, partly by themselves, and partly by a system which fails to support. But I think what is behind this is a tacit acceptance that a cover lesson is allowed to be wasted. This, surely, is indicative of a pervasive culture; that learning, and work, are only valued and accepted by students when they are told that they are in an environment that they are conditioned to appreciate. How sad is that? That we have engendered a culture in students that they only look to learning in little blocks. I (probably irrationally) blame learning objectives. This is learning, we tattoo on their little faces. This is it. I am the lord of teaching and listen up, we shout at the top of our teaching voices, because I am about to show you measurable learning. Look at my almighty powerpoint, for looking into it's depths will reveal to you the secrets of your future. Now go and write a fucking poem in groups.

And then, all the while this happens, it is children that suffer. Their wonderment is worn down and worn away until their belief is such that value is only placed on these things that they are told are important. And then beyond this they become fixated with the same culture of accountability that we do. They only listen to the people that tell them to listen to them the most. They only do what they think is directly related to their grades. They are being receded into something basic, and ignorant, and unthinking. We feed them only the food that we think they need, and this dry boredom means that any change is feared and becomes the catalyst for real nastiness. The mob only likes the driest of chicken, and if it is not fed it, it will gladly roast piggy, glasses or no.

Perhaps I am over thinking this whole affair. Perhaps I just keep seeing a class that is genuinely nasty. All I know is this; In my former job I pressed the dreaded on call button twice over two years. I the last six months as a cover teacher I have pressed it almost every day.

I am an 'outstanding' teacher in an 'outstanding' school, and I cannot control a group of year sevens and I don't know what to do about that anymore.

Inspire me, I dare you.

It has become the opium of the masses for those who gaze with longing eyes on the pay packet of the Senior Leader. It's perfect little form must fit, must be the right size for the pre-formatted box, or as I am seeing increasingly, it must fit between the windows of the corridor, to be read once by a proud director and then forgotten to the slowly abrasing elbows and shoulder of a thousand rushing, barging, ignoring students. It is that haven of soundbite; the inspirational quotation. It is the Quote of the Week. The appropriated gobbet that holds within its words some pervasive message of peace, of hope, of hard work paid off, but it really just sits still, bathing in the blissful ignorance of one long dead. I told you I was ill, he said.

But alas, If the opium of the masses is the (in)famous quotation, then I am on harder stuff. I am the smoker with the hand-rolled cigar, the craft bear drinker, and I wear a tweed cap. Ironically, of course. I love a quotation, but I can't stand the humdrumery (definitely a real word) of so many of them. They are chosen and presented without thought, without care and without any student consideration. I apologise if this next statement pulls tears into the eyes of some aspiring Ministers for Education, but painting quotations on walls and putting them on boards during form time to sit with little to no acknowledgement doesn't make students cleverer. It doesn't make them more conscientious or aspiring because for the most part the quotations that swill around the hi-tops of students on their diurnal passage look as if they have been saved up from Christmas crackers.

I like quotations that come from unlikely places. I love those that are challenging to preconceptions. I adore those that are unique. Anyone can find a quotation that talks about how hard you have to work to be a great success, or how every child is a unique little butterfly. So how about showing your students a different angle? Perhaps the gravitas of:

  Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. – Arthur C Clark

Or maybe, to counteract "It'll be okay" syndrome:

This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time. – Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

 Why not use these moments of un-curriculumed freedom to have a look at events from a alternative perspectives:

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another. – Robert Oppenheimer, Inventor of the Atomic Bomb

But these are perhaps too conventional still. How about any of these:

Who was the first man to look at a house full of objects and to immediately assess them only in terms of what he could trade them in for in the market likely to have been? Surely he can only have been a thief. – David Graeber

You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been. – Ursula Le Guin

If you want to watch telly, go watch Scooby Doo. That programme was so cool; every time there was a church with a ghoul, or a ghost in a school, they looked beneath the mask. And what was inside? The janitor, or the dude who ran the water slide. Because throughout history, every mystery, ever solved, has turned out to be not magic. - Tim Minchin

When I went to the Yellow Cab Company I passed the Cancer Building and I remembered that there were worse things than looking for a job you didn't want. – Charles Buckowski

If they give you lined paper, write the other way. – Juan Jimenez (also the preface to Fahrenheit 451)

I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form. – Will Self

Being God isn't easy. If you do too much, people get dependent on you, and if you do nothing, they lose hope. You have to use a light touch. Like a safecracker, or a pickpocket. – Futurama

 

My advice is stand firm for what you believe in, until and unless logic and experience prove you wrong. Remember, when the emperor looks naked, the emperor is naked. The truth and the lie are not "sort of" the same thing. And there's no aspect, no facet, no moment in life that can't be improved with pizza. Thank you. – Daria Morgendorffer

 

I had to look in the dictionary
To find out the meaning of unrequited
While she was giving herself for free
At a party to which I was never invited

- Billy Bragg

1. You can't win. 2. You can't break even. 3. You can't even get out of the game. – Ginsberg’s Theorum

I have never found anywhere, in the domain of art, that you don't have to walk to. (There is quite an array of jets, buses and hacks which you can ride to Success; but that is a different destination.) It is a pretty wild country. There are, of course, roads. Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction — you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart. – Ursula Le Guin

Most of the wind happens where there are trees. - Paul Muldoon

Look at all those things. Lovely ain't they. But my greatest advice? Find some of your own, from people you respect, and then you can talk about their words to your students. All of the aforementioned will be used from September, along with trucks and trucks of others; an ever changing cloud of words that turn black and rain and snow and then open up to the sun but never fail to have an impact because they are part of a dynamic conversation.I think that the current teaching ethic is one that rewards stasis. Despite its outspoken chagrin of coasting, it rewards systems that stay the same. But ideas that put things in place. Hmmm. Putting things in place. That is a vile little goblin in itself. Stop putting things in place, because that just means that they are to be left. If you paint something on a wall it will be ignored because that is its inevitable function. Talk, change, EXIST AS A CONVERSATION.

Just, in all this quoting and quothing, remember:

A witty saying proves nothing. - Voltaire

Oh, shit. I think that's just formed a paradox. 

 

Out of order

I've been hearing this phrase a lot recently:

That's well out of order

and it's been grating on me. I hear it a lot from students, and very occasionally from staff about students who say it a lot in some kind of reflective ironic joke. The staff will grow out of it, but I'm not sure that the students will, because they seem to be indulged again and again, not just in my school but nationally. Perhaps internationally, in the Anglo-centric forum at least.

What grates me, as if I am the most sweatily warm of own-brand cheddars, is that students appear to be confusing truth with unfairness. Or, perhaps not truth, but honesty. An example, I hear you cry from the orchestra pit, well: I was wondering through a school recently, when two teachers walked along the bottom of a stairwell of whose stairs I was, well, walking down, behind two unbeknowing students, chewing. One teacher said to the other

'I'm so frustrated with him. I've put on revision classes after school every day and he always says that he is coming and never turns up.'

to which the other, their line manager, replied:

'You've done everything you can. If they want to fail, then let them fail.'

The students in front of me, bedawdelling their way down the stairs, piped up at this point.

'Did you hear that? That's peak that is.'
'Yeah, well out of order.'

I stopped, then, on the stairs, and waited for the students to go. It was lunchtime, and I had no need to enter a convoluted defence of an ethic that the students clearly didn't care for. I was, however, galled. Disbelieving.

Perhaps it is just me who sees the fundamental issue at the core of this little anecdote, perhaps it is not. I believe, firmly, that teachers have a duty to provide as much as is possible for their students, but I also believe that students need to learn that, for most of their lives, very few people will go out of their way to help them. Life is a tough old place, and people lose jobs and go bankrupt on 'That's out of order' attitudes.

I feel like this entitlement to a teacher's daily misery is propagated by the unrealistic standards set by government on achievement and that this in some way reflects upon teachers. To illustrate, there is that old idiom: You can't do the exam for them. Unfortunately, it would seem, teachers are being forced into a scenario where they feel like they have to and students are beginning to get wind of this, and it is creating a cancerous, damaging attitude of entitlement, as if many students know that their teachers will be judged on their progress and so assume that teachers simply will not let them fail. The adage of failure not being an option has been inverted from an expectation into a student-led tacit threat. You can't do that, you're not allowed to let me fail, is becoming a rousing chant of an increasing number of lacklustre students.

To finish: A friend of mine rang me recently. (Yes that's right, I have a friend)He is a sports coach at a very big and successful club. I asked him how his team were going to do this year and he said, quite nonchalantly, we'll do okay, but we just don't have the personnel. I was awestruck; what a refreshing attitude. Sometimes you don't get the students, and it's not your fault as a teacher that all their parents seemed to have only drunk Lead-Based Sunny Delight while pregnant. (unless it was, of course, and then you should be rightfully ashamed.)

If they really want to fail, who are we to stop them? All we can do is explain the consequences, teach as best we can, and afford the opportunities. It is their life to live.

You Can Be Anything You Want To Be

I would like you all, as a class, to imagine that you are all grown adults and, as we have told you that you all can, you have achieved all of your dreams. So, close your eyes now, and think. You are waking up on a wonderful day in perfect town, where you all live. You have got up and dressed and you are now on your way to work. Now, remember, each of you will be different in your goals, but you are all on your way to work. Some of you will walk. Some of you might ride a fancy road bike. Others will have an expensive car. Maybe you'll drive it, maybe you won't, but your on your way to work. You've left your lovely house, perhaps it's in the suburbs, maybe it contains a wife, or a husband, or two cats and a dog. Maybe it's up a private track behind a set of ornate gates or maybe it is high up at the penthouse of a skyscraper. Sorry. I sidetrack. So, you are on your way to work. You have a smile on your face and it is a wonderful day for you to be alive and so you think; what better way to get to work than with a nice fresh coffee, or tea, or maybe a hot breakfast and so you check your watch but you know that work won't mind because, I imagine, most of you own your own companies, or work for yourselves, or maybe you don't work but, hey, you're going out for a coffee anyway. So you, living your perfect life, amongst other people living out the dreams we've told you that you can all work hard and have, walk up to the till to buy a coffee and my question to you is:

Who is serving you that coffee?

Which of the other students, other dreamers in this room doesn't get to live out their dreams because they have to serve you your latte? Who stands there, and smiles and secretly hates you and themselves and looks, jealously, upon your perfection and serves you your coffee? Whose dream is in the dust amongst the floor?

But you don't worry about this, because you got your dream. Someone didn't, but that wasn't you. You're doing fine. So you get to work, and you turn in your projects, and everyone loves you and you're doing just cracking. So you say to everyone that you're just popping out to grab some lunch, and so you pop into the supermarket to grab a few things and maybe one of those nice sandwiches as a treat. And you pick up your things, and put them in a basket, and you go up to the till and there is another person, sat there, passing things she can't afford in front of a scanner, because she didn't get her dream. But don't worry: your teacher said that you were going to get your dream, so you did. But. Wait. Her teacher told that to her as well. And she worked, didn't she? Or did she just think she was working? Did she just want her dream a bit, whereas you wanted yours a lot. You wanted yours more than anything else.

But there's, perhaps, another story behind this. Maybe that Coffee guy is living his dream, just not yet. Maybe he's at night school, or he's writing a book. Maybe that till girl is working so she can pay for uni. They are doing this because they value their education. They value their dreams. Their dreams change things. They fulfill their operators and they make the world different. Maybe Coffee guy is a volunteer lifeboat man, and checkout girl is a thesbian in the evenings, or she's researching something minute and underfunded but fulfilling.

So is your dream really your dream or is it just a bit of a concession? And, and here is a dangerous thought, does your dream actually matter? Does your lovely dream job contribute to anything? Does it make things better? does it make you better? What has happened in this wonderful dream day that has changed the world?

Your teachers are increasingly preparing students for lives where you either fail to live up to your own expectations, or live up to expectations that are, frankly, useless. You will graduate school to get jobs that allow you to do exactly the same things that you are doing at school; performing the minimum in tasks in order to spend the rest of your hours browsing the internet and documenting your humdrum lives for others to browse. You will participate in a great amorphous mass of perpetuating nothingness. You will be happy, sort of, but you will be doing jobs that have been created, essentially, so that people have jobs. Our economy is the preserve of the service industry. Most people don't really do anything except move things around so that other people can move them back.

Most of you will be perfectly content with this. You will stop doing arts, and sciences, and humanities and you will lose interest in pursuing anything. There is an interesting term: Pursuing. Pursuit of learning, of fulfillment through personal improvement is, surely, the point of life (in lieu of having any concrete theological solution (If God in any form suddenly appears and tells us the point of humanity was achieved in 1981, with the invention of the potato waffle, then I will gladly rescind this post*)). It doesn't need a label, it doesn't need anyone to qualify it with an EBACC or a sticker or a sew-on badge. Your dreams are consistently pigeon-holed into sensible twenty-first century friendly boxes: I want to be an accountant when I grow up. I really want to work in sales. No-one wants these things. Not really. These things barely exist. Every one of should want to change the world. Content is a dirty word. Content is a word sold to you by people who can profit from your quiet obedience. You should want to live without dead time. You should aspire not to be cogs. The problem, of course, is alluded to in the start of this little talk. Not everyone gets everything they want or, what they want is useless. So, what is there to do? To do, is to remind you that life isn't a desk. Life is in your heart. Life is in your head. Life is your own fulfillment, not your teacher's or your boss's. But please, for your own sakes, be ambitious. Care. Give a shit how your insignificant spark of life on this tiny planet in some backwater of the galaxy is spent. You probably only get this, and your dying every single second. To quote Fight Club, This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time. Go out and be a revolutionary. Go and, to quote Whip It, be your own hero.

Here endeth the assembly.

Teaching With Epilepsy

One day, about three years ago, someone said something very strange to me. It was quite a simple statement and, oddly, I cannot quite remember it verbatim. I can tell you where it happened; on the steps leading onto the Mall at the bottom of Regent Street. I also can’t tell you who it was that said it. I know it was a man, and I know second hand that they were an off-duty paramedic. What they asked me, pretty much, was how long I’d been epileptic. This was strange for two reasons. Firstly, because I didn’t have a clue where I was, or what was going on and secondly, because the only thing I did know was that I’m not epileptic. Well. I wasn’t epileptic. Or at least I didn’t think that I was.

I was diagnosed with epilepsy soon after I developed it at age 23. I had a couple of seizures; it would appear, before the above mentioned one had me taken by pure chance to St Thomas’ hospital in central London. It was quite a worrying time, especially when my neurologist told me what it was that had caused those seizures; Reading. I am allergic to reading. Not Reading (the large Berkshire town (which wouldn’t, actually, be a terrible thing to be allergic to. (Although it does have a sizeable HMV and a really good Waterstones)) But reading. Books. I am allergic to books. I was told this mere months before starting my PGCE in Secondary English. Oh doesn’t life hand us the greatest of ironies?

A note, A little deviation: I do not suffer from a particularly bad variety of Epilepsy. I average about a seizure every few months. Effectively, I have the Epilepsy version of a badly sprained ankle. Many people don’t really have the first idea what entails epilepsy. They think that if you stare into a flashing light you have a little twitch on the floor. I stare into flashing lights all the time. I’ve even done the doctor’s test for photosensitive epilepsy (it’s horrible) and I am most definitely not floored by flashing lights. A decent book on a long railway journey however, and the entirety of the First Great Western railway network is all kinds of flashing delayed signs.

However infrequent, I have pretty bad seizures; the kind that cause you to be unconscious and twitch and bite the sides of your tongue off. The kind where, when you come to and try and phone someone, you can’t unlock the screen despite the code being your date of birth. (This, I’m afraid, actually happens. I am now banned from having phone pincodes). I read somewhere that having a seizure causes the same fatigue as running a marathon, but I am always pretty sceptical of this sort of arbitrary comparison.

I was diagnosed just before the beginning of my PGCE and my offer had well and truly been accepted. Theoretically, I guess, I could have just rung up the university and explained to them and gone back to the very average receptionist job that I was temping in until the course started and then just lived out a life of being wholeheartedly boring and regretful. I don’t really go in for that sort of avoidance of adversity so I just got on with it without thinking and then, suddenly, on my first placement, people starting making a fuss of me, asking if I was alright and if there was anything they could do and suchlike and I had difficulty in (and even as writing this I can’t quite find the verb.) achieving the humility required to actually admit that I was different in my needs. We tailor so much to our students because of so many things but we are often too proud to admit that we need help. Or maybe sometimes we are just a little surprised that people actually ask if we need help.

I used to talk to my students about my condition. I think that it is important to be an ambassador for epilepsy. There is this great fear of revealing anything to students about ourselves but I don’t see the point in avoiding a situation where students can be holistically educated. I didn’t walk into a classroom and say ‘Hi, I’m your new English Teacher and I’m an epileptic.’ But if a student follows me along the conversational road of why I get the train to school and not drive I don’t see a reason not to explain why the DVLA took my licence away.

It is a central responsibility as teachers to be carers. One of my students asked me once to adopt her and I’m not entirely sure she was kidding. But how can I care for others when I can’t guarantee that I can care for myself? That is the fear. That I should never really have been doing this profession and so, when the post-seizure sadness comes across me and I spend a few days staring into the middle distance because I can’t trust myself to read then I tell myself that what I can do is use my experience to teach my students something. I can teach them what epilepsy is. And what it means to live with it, even in my diluted form. And what is most important is that I can teach them what it taught me: That sometimes life is annoying enough to seem cruel and it’s not personal or, even if it is personal, if you think of it in that way it will ruin you. So all you can do is quote Vonnegut with ‘So It Goes’ and get on with what you wanted to do anyway. And I’ll wear purple trousers on national epilepsy day and I’ll give an assembly or two and I won’t be afraid. Because having an illness is just a thing that happens. And I won’t let it stop me doing anything.

As regular readers will know, I have taken a little sabbatical from teaching to go back to university and study for a masters under the false assumption that I look just about young enough not to be a creepy mature student. I have to read a lot but I know that it is what I want to do. I have to run the risks because if I just coup up and cry about it then I won’t get the chances again. I won’t lie, things are tough. I spend a lot of time worrying. Seizures aren’t nice. When I’m about to have one I lose control of my internal monologue and it just spews words out at random. I can’t speak so I can’t warn anyone what is about to happen. Then I black out. When I come to I’ve normally bitten off both sides of my tongue and I don’t really know what’s going on. I wouldn’t wish them on my worst enemy. I also don’t expect sympathy for it. I can’t change it, but I have had to change me a bit. I still get fed up with people telling me to be careful though. It gets annoying, but I know that they care.

I will go back to teaching, I am sure of it. And I hope that I am surrounded by staff as accepting and kind as those were at my last school. They gave a shit, regularly and compassionately. They gave me lifts, helped me with marking and made sure I was okay. When I did have seizures they covered me the next day and forced me to stay at home. They were probably a good chunk of the reason I never had a seizure in front of children. I never wanted students to suffer because of me.

It’s taken me quite a long time to write this article and I still don’t really know why it exists. It’s part motivational speech to myself, part plea for wider awareness and, I hope, a little bit of inspiration for others in similar situations. It’s amazing how helpful your friends and colleagues can be, and what you can get through if you really want to. Right now I am sat in a university library surrounded by books that I am allergic to, and I couldn’t be happier.

Ali

This post is about fictions, and as such, it is entirely real.

Ali is not a real student. There is a real student called Ali. There are many of them, but there is also one in particular. There are also many students who are fictional Alis. These Alis are to Ali what fiction is to fact; an overlay. Perhaps to understand the fictional factual Student Ali, I must first tell the tale of the factual fictional student Calamity Teacher. I will not call this student Ali, because that would be confusing, yet Calamity Teacher is far too unwieldy and unyielding. Therefore instead I will rename our factual, although fictional, Calamity Teacher key to Ali, Ally.

Ally was a good sportsman, and the past tense article there is important despite the very presentness of this article's past. Ally was a good sportsman, and this insured that Ally's presence in lessons seemed more past than present. Ally, though, unperturbed by the tolling bell of exam hell, was safe in the knowledge that he possessed safe knowledge to ensure safety in exams assessing knowledge. In short, he lacked the impetus to drive himself to achieve higher than was absolutely necessary as was mandated by the stern looks of teachers and the government directed scales of improvement. So Ally worked away tiredlessly instead of tirelessly, although with sport sure to prevent a middle-aged spare tire he tired not of dreaming of himself in a future present dreaming of a future present past glory sat among the medals of a schoolboy's present future. So he daydreamed like an innocent Lucia away with faeries concocted, not of real things, but of hopes for real things, leading him further and further way from the concreteness of bits of paper, stamped as were, and instead posted fanmail to himself that read with things like 'you're my inspiration' and 'I dream of being like you' so like a listless wanderer who carries on and on around the world first stepping through ports that look and sound familiar to home but just jar slightly in colour and then sets sail until they cannot see home and lose the concreteness of whether it existed at all and whether it actually happened whatsoever and so lands somewhere that is so different the traveler's eyes lose sense of what they are meant to see, instead preferring to see all that is different as the same and all that is the same as null and void and off through deserts the wondering walks, alone but carried through by ever-fading memories of origin, or purpose, or point, and endless walks the traveller, world-weary yet still walking, sets foot again on boat and finds himself in a new, strange land so different from the one he left he realises that there must be no explanation for it except that it is his home.

So Ally didn't care for school, and nor did school for Ally, but she persevered through testing times and managed through the changes of life, until becoming, average grades in hand, A teacher, not a sportsperson. Because, for all the missing        , and the shouting at teachers with assured, and quite correct superiority, Ally was but a child that didn't know their way and didn't find it until a few kind words from wordsmiths of a certain kind convinced him that he was the talent she always thought she was, it was just for it to work then for it work for it then was the clear and obvious solution. It was realization that mattered so much, not unreality.

So from Ally to Ali and back again to Ally, in a way. Ally falls to Ali as Ali falls to Ally, away from both and still together. Ali was a student, fictionalised in his factuality, that in him Ally saw a version of him so true that Ali could have be Ally, for all he was worth, with a rapacious intellect but not of the impetus to carry through more than just, 'that'll do'. He had that natural turn of phrase that sits and dwells and eats up days in lucid, lingering wonderment, and almost heaven-sent gift of words. And in that package of Ally that Ally saw in Ally he interposed the trueness of his own life. He placed his ever-present past onto the present future of an Ali he saw as Ally, and therefore assumed that this boy who had no time for her lessons, would one day become a caring, compassionate individual, the likes of which Ally saw, or hoped to see, ever day mirrored in the bathroom mirror,because Ali was not Ally, in any frame of mind or time but the obsession had grown and grown bigger and monumental. It became all-encompassing, woefully universal. All Ally could see was Ally, despite the assertions of those that could see only Ali. And, of course, because there is a moral to every tale, Ali did not become Ally. He merely became another Ali, one slightly further into the future of what was now the past but had been the present and this Ali, despite the efforts of another Ally, was no Ally.

Ally's past mistakes were still past mistakes and Ali's present ones did nothing to change this. When Ali did not show signs of becoming a better Ally, Ally blamed Ali for not being the Al that she felt he should have been and blamed herself, her past self, her future self and a trifecta of portraits of a different Ali to that which really existed in the past, present or future. But really it was a mistake to paint an honest face on an already dishonest portrait. It is always a mistake to overlay one's self onto the selves in one's charge because cannot be more than one, as in it can only ever be a singular, and every other singular only a singular and not a plural form and so, either one judges oneself as oneself or one judges another one as oneself; something that is always a fallacy of being. One cannot be more than one man or women, and when children are involved they are not a multitude of ones, or rather, they are each ones in their own right, stood as they are beneath one head and in one's charge. One must remain one, and , that is to say, share one's self by being one's self and knowing that every other self is just as unique and just, but not exactly as unique and just as the self, that is your self, or one self, that views it. Ally thought that Ali could atone for past mistakes, but Ally forgot. The past is past, and the future is a place where other people live.

How To Build Your New Academy.

With all this new legislation, there is going to be an awful lot of new academies and free schools knocking around in the near future, and the rate they'll be getting through head teachers, you never know when you'll get the call up to the Big Chair.

Now we all know that the two most important things for a head about opening a new academy are six figure salaries getting your photo on the front page of the local dishrag and getting to design your own logos. In this heady 21st century world of myBook and friendFace branding is everything. The iPod generation treat their schools like they treat their, well, iPods. Every school needs to have a focus, a specialty, an ouvre. You have to stand out if you want to be on the front page on the TES.

Now, we know that we can't all be out-of-the-box, blue-sky thinkers; that's what we have educational consultants for. So, if you have all the creative talent of that year nine boy whose name you've forgotten, then you can use the table below to create a totally awesome corporate identity bound to impress the Department of Education like nothing you've ever seen.

Just follow the table down, selecting an option from each row and you'll find yourself with your perfect brand within minutes!

Thank you for your time and good bye, I'm afraid I'd write more but I have to go to a very important meeting about the opening of the West Medway Learning Community Multicultural Free Academy.