Those who can, do. They who can’t…..

I haven’t formally taught in a classroom for almost two years but, the previous 36 of busting my board-pen, I feel, qualify me to have a go at defining why the hell teachers do it. And why it’s fabulous when done properly and how torrid when not. Teaching is obviously a tango, a team of two involved in the steps. For it to function well and glide smoothly with minimal slip-ups, both the teacher and learner must be fully involved, in sync, paying attention to the steps and rhythm of the groove.  I take you this way, you follow me, you react that way, I adapt myself to your steps and pace. And when the dance ends and has been a success, the results are plain to see. The dancers beam at one another with mutual gratitude and respect, the audience (happy parents) applaud, and the judges (senior management and governors) are satisfied that they encouraged the dance in the first place. Job done. But, my God, what very few people get to see are the preparations involved, the behind-the-scenes rehearsals and hours and hours and hours of relentless chopping and changing to prepare the dance for optimum impact and a bit more than a 4 from Craig.

When I qualified back in the days of cave dwellers, we did not use technology to enhance our lessons. I had a board-pen (I did actually use chalk at one point so maybe it was pre-caves). I don’t remember even having access to a photocopier. There was a bander machine and carbon copy sheets you could spice up by using four different colours so that your worksheets looked marginally more attractive to the discerning, stimulation-hungry, youthful eye. I made crate-loads of flashcards and over-head projector acetates and bought fancy rainbow pens so I could twentieth century pimp my language games. And I read books on methodology and created box games and amassed no end of ‘authentic’ materials to be used to book hotel rooms, order albóndigas en salsa de tomate and catch the train to Madrid. Authentic. That was the buzz word of the time. Tedious, impractical O Levels were being dumped and GCSE was to introduce students to the real world of language. Forget your never-ending grammar lessons and vocabulary lists. Language was to be about the real world. I loved it. The drama, the real foreign noisiness of it, the jumping about the classroom trying to explain in the police station that you had left your bag on the bus or to the hotel receptionist that there was a dead mouse under your bed. It was fab, completely exhausting but I could not have been happier. Of course, what this new approach did not tackle properly was the fact that teaching kids a phrasebook is no way to produce a linguist. Your average bod might be able to ask where the post office is but beyond that, and more importantly, understanding the response, is no guarantee. My take has always been a blend of both. Get them talking till their throats hurt but give them the grammar tools to build the language independently. It is also a much better brain work-out. The stuff we teach them should not be on temporary  loan to be regurgitated in an exam, it is for them to own permanently. A fantastic, life-long skill.

And talking of brains, I am entirely convinced that the BOYD movement (Bring Your Own Device or perhaps better put – Distraction) has done very little to enhance a pupil’s ability to think, deduce, imagine, analyse and create. Oh yes, they can easily bypass the school’s firewall system because, well, they are clever little suckers and many attempts by schools to provide on-line safety, under law, to ensure that children under the age of thirteen cannot access social media platforms, means that schools are constantly battling to keep up with the razor-sharp wit and tech savviness of those in their care. Never has there been so much bullying, and I don’t mean the ‘your mum’s fat’ bullying, I mean the insidious, paranoia-inducing, friendship-crushing, personality-disordering, loathsome-rash-spreading viral cruelty that a single text or inappropriate picture can unleash on a beautiful, young mind. The food chain of form tutors, heads of year and senior management line up on a daily basic to pick up the debris of mobilephoneitis. Ban them in schools. They are the work of the bloody Devil. Yes, I may be a dinosaur but I am a well-meaning Antiscreenasaurus who just wants kids to look up and smell the board-pen. Well, maybe not smell it but at least rest their eyeballs from the constant flash-bang-wallopry of unnecessary fruit machine life. And I am sorry but if you are going to tell me that kids will now only respond to mega-stimulation, then you are missing the point. It is the over stimulation and the development of new diseases caused by uncontrolled and unconscious use of technological devices that is stunting their capacity to learn. And those who poopoo the use of a pen, well, here I despair. Writing with a pen leads to better and longer-lasting recognition and understanding of letters. Writing by hand also improves memory and recall, leading to a better conceptual understanding of material. Gadgets are the new nicotine choking our youngsters’ minds. I am a firm believer that the teacher is the main resource in the room and should be able to Mary Poppins a lesson from a piece of paper, a whistle and a maraca unless it’s the end of term and you’re too knackered to string a sentence together.

In my embryonic years, Differentiation was also the stuff of we-can-do-it dreams. Streaming/setting has enjoyed a very hornet-nesty past and mixed ability teaching had to be the way forward. Yet how do you teach a group of Year 7s  the same lesson and guarantee that pupil A who can’t tell the time at all on an analogue clock in their mother tongue and pupil B who is heading for NASA and can record the hours and minutes by looking at the sun or smelling the air, will grasp the same content, firstly, in a different language and secondly and more importantly, remember it for the next lesson? It is exhausting even recalling the steps I took to ensure that each pupil in my lessons got their pre-euro pesetas’ worth. I would have felt a complete fraud if I had failed even one.  I had a cooking buzzer that would go off at 15 minute intervals to move four groups of eight from one activity to the next, reading, speaking, writing and listening tasks all prepared separately with incorporated levels of difficulty. We used a cumbersome Coomber box with eight sets of headphones which never got tangled of course (!) and a Spanish assistant or myself leading the speaking group with a practice clock, plastic fruit props or a suitcase full of goodies from the Early Learning Centre. I should have bought shares in that place given that much of my pittance salary found its way into their till. Fifteen minute slots. Brrrrrrrring!  Vamos! Uno, dos, tres…… they had until diez,  sit, start. It worked like clockwork but only because I had trained them like performing parrots. It only wobbled when a new pupil arrived with no English half-way through the term or when a scrap broke out because ‘she called me a slag, Miss’. Could/can teachers truly differentiate their lessons to provide each pupil with a personalised programme of success? I suppose a teacher can/could/would if the day were twice as long and they had a bionic body and brain that could cope with the demands and stress of it all. What constitutes success anyway? One of my major breakthroughs came trying to teach a less able group how to talk about sports they enjoyed and practised. We jumped about and mimed swinging rackets and scoring really belting, top right corner goals and sang sporty songs penned to the tune of Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel and chanted and marched in time around the room and finally, my lovely lad (I do remember his name but the world is a handkerchief in Spanish, i.e. small) finally produced ‘mee gangier naggickaction’. I have never forgotten it. Bravo, tesoro mío. You’re…. you’re so close. Casi, casi. A couple more cracks at it and you’ll have nailed it. Me gusta la natación. I like swimming. He had sunk but that was a Channel crossing for him and me. We were both very buoyant that day.

Schools have changed in so many ways since the ‘Dark Ages’, as some would call them but I am not convinced that Enlightenment covers what we have today. Progress comes in many guises. At my first teaching post, you could smoke in the staffroom. It was disgusting. It was finally agreed that smokers would at least sit in one corner but it was still gross.  I count among my early achievements the lobbying which led to having it banned where we drank our cuppa at breaktime. Having a big mouth means people push you from behind to start the fight because they know you will speak up for them and do their fagging.  Most people loathed the smoke and the stink but the die-hards who had been on the staff for a hundred years and who made up the majority of the puffing billies were not happy one biddy bit. Any change would have meant them hiding in the maths office to get their fix which thankfully for us, yet regrettably for them was what resulted from the vote.  It also meant that I was black balled by the smokers but lauded by the antis. One step forward for non-smoking teacher-kind. In stark contrast to this progress is the now relentless, nowhere-to-hide ‘contactableness’ of staff. I look back with glossy eyes, thinking about my beloved pigeon-hole which I would check when I arrived in school, then at break and once again when I left at the end of the day. Hand-written messages, some run-of-the-mill (we are out of board-pens in the stockroom), some ‘trivial’ (fancy a drink after work on Friday?) and some more pressing (need to talk to you urgently about pupil X) but not so pressing that you had to find two more days in the week to deal with them. Email has undoubtedly improved communication, but it has ruined the teacher’s day and peace of mind. The working day and the holidays are no longer the protected time or space of any teacher because it is like being on call at A and E. To some demanding pupils, marking a revision essay is a matter of life or death and you are the antidote, the bandage, the bleeding red pen they now crave. You are their lifeblood, and they will suck your veins dry like an insatiable Dracula because that’s what you’re there for, isn’t it? So what if it is the middle of the Easter holidays!

And what of school trips? Well, these have now become the stuff of nightmares.  In the days before hyper-helicoptering parents, risk assessments, GDPR, crisis management, wide-spread food allergies, mobile phones and social media, to name just a few of the positive developments regarding our children’s safety and well-being (?), a trip was arranged, pupils were invited, you took them, you brought them back in one piece and everything was hunky-dory. Staff signed up because a week’s skiing was beyond the average teacher’s pocket and you might never get the chance again. A craic. Kids in ski school in the morning, on the slopes with us in the afternoon, supper, bit of a disco, bed. Glorious. Then a cheeky beer in the bar to make sure nobody went walkabout, which of course they did. However, every problem was solved with minimal fuss and very little paranoia. Hannah necking between the sheets with a fourth year from another school, George trying it on with the vodka because his mum had told him to bring a couple of cheap bottles back, Christopher blocking the girls’ loo with an almighty poo on the last day room-check as the coach waited for us to depart, sugar-highs from too many sweets smuggled in their luggage from home. Sounds stressful. This was nothing. Common sense, good humour and a stern tongue lashing sorted everything. I never once felt nervous, out of my depth or concerned that I might lose or kill one of them though I could have throttled a couple quite easily. To run a school trip in the current climate is a major military operation of gargantuan proportions. The preparation involved is akin to cabinet war-room planning although now, instead of a long wooden stick to move the bits about on a big table, it is a digital brain-ache of box ticking and crossing. Anna needs three Epi-pens and don’t forget to check the date on them. The school nurse and heads of year will give you a list to check over all medication details. Four asthmatics, a bed-wetter, a loner with no mates but ‘this will do him good’, a selective mute, a very distressed kiddy whose parents are going through a divorce and aren’t sure they can now afford it, a pupil who has never been abroad and is anxious beyond words, a handful of vegetarians, a few vegans, one who survives on bread-rolls and will not be trying out the local delicacies, a known bully who refuses to share a room with ‘him’, a spoilt kid who has brought too much cash despite being told that there is a limit on pocket-money, the mobile-phone abusers who will insist on using it even on the dodgy streets where pick-pockets are salivating at their touristy gullibility and the girlfriend/boyfriend frictions of he fancies her but she fancies somebody else etc. When did being a teenager become so bloody complicated? How can you plan a ‘simple’ trip to broaden a pupil’s horizons when their normal existence is now so complex? Social media follows every child around like a predatory animal. The everyday potential toxic cruelty of it travels wherever they do and teachers must deal with it abroad and at home where the more solid and familiar foundations at least provide them with some sense of protection. Away from home, children can be naturally unpredictable and hedonistic. Daniel giggled when I saved his bacon from a passing bike as he stepped back right into its path. The cyclist nearly took my arm off but Daniel was too busy cocking about with his mates and flashing his new fridge magnet to bother looking around him. I saw my life flash before my eyes as his solicitor parent nailed my ‘careless’ arse to the wall. And then there’s the admin horrors and health hiccups. Out of date passport may not arrive in time, American dad will not have renewed his visa so one of the staff will have to wait in customs for hours, Soft-Ollies (affectionate term for pain in the arse kid) who will lose his boarding pass and passport in the departure lounge just when we are ten minutes from boarding the plane for home. Oh dear. It is not a British passport. Short straw as to who will have to remain behind with him and sort that shit out. So what if said teacher has her own family waiting at home. And a wallet will be stolen and an emergency contact number will be wrong and some numpty will get chronic belly ache from stuffing their face and somebody will fall and break a leg because they expect pavements to be smooth like at home. School trips for me became a little shop of horrors. I did not sleep for weeks before the impending date and I needed a holiday once back. Thankfully nobody died but INSET on crisis management and how to deal with the press when one in your charge has been eaten by a shark or kidnapped is enough to put anybody off especially if you have your own kids and a mortgage to pay. Sadly, the halcyon days of racing down a piste with twelve hyper kids because it seemed like a fun idea at the time are no more. Now, teachers are like eight-eyed, radar-head-spinning, personal bodyguards to their flock. Taking a register and realising one sheep has wandered off is enough to give any pedagogue the heebie-jeebies. Fear of being fleeced by parents or the press are never far away.  And as for Brexit and exchange programmes and CBR checks, best not go there.

Which leads me nicely on to new teachers or whatever they are now called because the terminology changes so bloody often, it is hard to keep up even on the inside. Probationers, recently-qualifieds, L plate wearers, learners-on-the-jobbers, Teach-Firsters, fast-track-quick-we-need-morers, whatever we call them, they are the bread and butter of every school and they should all have a statue erected to them after the first year and their salary doubled for surviving. Standing in front of your first proper class, and I mean without the aid of the bouncer at the back of the room, is a tough business. You have to be firm, fair, friendly and ferocious all at the same time. If you are a female, you must not have visible hairy legs or facial hair. If you are a bloke, you must ensure you haven’t left your breakfast in your beard because these kids miss nothing. They will let you know if you have worn that dress before and when, or whether your shirt needs to see an iron. And God help you if you have no sense of humour or gravitas or can’t pull a successful one liner from your repertoire to silence the masses as they prepare to follow the pack in the attack. As a recently qualified teacher back in the day, I lived in a tiny studio flat where the wardrobe doubled up as a cupboard and a bed. All very clever, unlike me that day. In the depths of winter, searching for a pair of shoes in a cardboard box, I retrieved them and set off for the workhouse. Standing outside the science lab ready to cover a lesson for an absent teacher, I began to notice the twitching and sniggering as the Year 9 Physics group waited for me to do my ‘I’m waiting’ speech. More giggles. What the hell. I was employing all my techniques of frowning, eyebrow raising and visibly breathing with my broad shoulders. A sweet kid at the front of the line leant in. ‘Miss, look at your shoes.’ One black, one purple. I had another pair exactly the same at home which is what I told them then laughed my head off. Kids are incredible and can be very, very kind. If I had torn a strip off them for being rude, I don’t think they would ever have forgiven me. They need to know that you are human but not that human. When I joined my first school, there were eleven brand-new, off-the-shelf teachers fresh from PGCE courses which were then free. No debt! Anybody who becomes a teacher, nurse or doctor should train for free. It’s the least the government could do to say thank you because you sell your soul to do the job well. On Fridays, all eleven of us would go to the pub during the lunchbreak. It was five minutes from school and we could sink a quickie and be back, rosy cheeked in time for p.m. registration. I think it was the only way to survive double fifth years on a Friday afternoon when they and you would rather have been anywhere but staring out at the real world. It was allowed. We were not told off. We were not prohibited from leaving the school premises. It was our free time to do with as we pleased just like any civil servant. It has now become uncivil servitude. You are at everybody’s beck and call because if you are urgently needed and something awful happens that requires your immediate attention, heads will roll if you are not there to sort it. Now, if there are kids on site, you can’t even suck on a wine-cork to back-pat somebody celebrating their 40^th year of teaching. It used to be a nice anaesthetic at the end of the week. They have sucked the fun out of falling through the door to a sea of thirteen year olds, swinging your file and falling onto your desk. I loved being a new teacher. It was exciting and terrifying in equal measure but, my God, did you feel alive.

Student teachers have a more difficult job. Surviving the bear-pit of a PGCE and doing your placement at whatever school they throw at you means you are potentially a breather for permanent staff who can off-load their worst class on to you. Obviously, this doesn’t happen all of the time because most schools have excellent mentoring programmes and, sensitivity and realism are employed to give the student teacher a decent chance of not being too bruised. However, there are times when either the mentors can be found wanting or too knackered to give the student teacher enough time or the observing member of staff has to step in to sort out a lesson that is heading for disaster. Occasionally, flashing the big S on your T shirt can quite honestly mean rescuing the trainee teacher from a wasp’s nest or, and thankfully less common, saving pupils from a crazy wasp. I once observed the same student teacher twice. One lesson was Spanish, the other was French. She was so linguistically challenged that I could not distinguish one language from the other. Each was also delivered with a broad Glaswegian accent and she clearly didn’t know her rolled r’s from her elbow. It was excruciating. My little winkies sat through the agony, slowly turning to SOS eyeball me at the back of the room with looks of incredulity and despair. One pupil wet herself, she was so distressed. I had to swoop in to save them, to save my own sanity and to rescue the poor student teacher who was all at sea trying to hold her merde together and was in danger of never being taken seriously again. Unfortunately for her, she had no understanding of where she was going wrong and no amount of support and explaining and boosting and encouragement worked. We honestly tried everything. She went on to her second placement at another school after ours convinced she wasn’t doing too bad a job. That was very hard to watch.

It is always very hard to strike a balance between experienced and new staff. Experience costs more. New, young staff are cheaper. Pupils certainly benefit from being taught by a mixture of both, but only if the teaching is good. Being a young teacher does not mean you are better. It just means that you are younger, hopefully still loaded with boundless energy and closer in age and therefore possibly more able to relate to the recipients of your knowledge and guidance. Being a more mature teacher means that you have seen it all and have a barrel-load of responses up your sleeve but only if you understand the earthquaky and changeable nature of the world of those in your charge. Society has developed at a ridiculously fast pace and it would seem to me now that being an excellent classroom teacher is only one of many feathers that you need in your cap. The use of AI, growing misogyny in schools due to inappropriate exposure to porn and general female-bashing, environmental disasters, global warming and general ‘what’s the bloody point’, the long-lasting effects of Covid, pupils’ sexuality and identity and the exponential rise in depression and anxiety amongst our young means that staff must be equipped and ready to deal with an ever-shifting, eye-watering number of problems and concerns in a day’s work. Oh yes, and teach lessons. And that’s the part that I really miss but not so much that I am on the starter blocks ready to sprint right back into it. I miss being called Miss. I miss hearing my name being shouted across a street when a former pupil spots me. I am now too geographically far away from my old stomping ground for that to happen as regularly as it did though students do appear in very unexpected places. On ferries, in service stations, up mountains and on beaches. I miss using my eyebrow to silence a group. It was never a power-play, it was just something that happened that worked so I stuck with it. It was survival. I had my rules and everybody knew where they stood. Teachers are amazing people. Yes, there are duff ones just as with any profession, but the vast majority are in the job out of vocation, this word deriving from the Latin, vocare, to call. Teachers are called upon to do no end of stuff. They are versatile, generous, loyal, energetic and caring. Just remember not to ‘touch’ a pupil in any capacity. An end of year hug, which for me was the most natural and instinctive reaction in the world, is off the cards. After knowing a pupil for seven years and caring for the little buggers like they were your own, sending them out into the big, bad world requires more than a handshake and a smile. The dehumanisation of genuine affection is hard to accept although I reluctantly understand why it is necessary. If you are cynical, do not become a teacher. If you really treasure your privacy, don’t even consider it. Being approached on U6th parents’ evening by your pupil’s father who, unbeknown to you, was the doctor who inserted your Mirena coil that very week, might just be a step too far.  If you love money, forget it. But if you truly love young people, are amused and nourished by their curiosity, ballsiness and wit, then there is nothing more rewarding. I do not regret a single day of my time in the classroom. Not even when the police came and dragged one of my lads out. That was a particularly good day because he was a tedious little shit.  Those who can, do, but those who really can, teach.