moving north

I told the Head as soon as I had written confirmation of the position in Edinburgh. Not because I felt I owed it to her, but because of the situation as it was at school what with voluntary redundancies etc. She shook my hand and said, “it sounds like a very interesting position.” Walking away from the office I at once felt relieved, as if I had a safety bubble around me.
Do I feel like I am selling out on Teach First and the mission I’d so passionately bought into? A little, yes. I am not going to be able to directly address the mission as directly as I could. As I run home each evening, I cannot help but feel that I will miss the urban grittiness of South London. However, as soon as i thought about the lessons and conversations i had had with students and staff at the school in Edinburgh, i was energised and enthused by the opportunities, expectations and the value placed on manners: it was cool to achieve (see blog on Berger’s book) and for boys to sing in the choir and study English Literature A level. All of the SLT that had interviewed me had put their children through the school. I couldn’t say the same for the Teach First School.

Another school

When I was offered a position in Edinburgh, I did have to question whether I was being realistic. If my current job was full on, this one would certainly be living on the job!
“You’ll always be able to move up and get these leadership roles when you want them,” my girlfriend said. “You’re busy enough as you are and we need to enjoy being in London with our friends while we’re in our 20s.” I delayed in making the decision and as much as it perhaps shouldn’t have been, my girlfriend was the tie keeping me in London.
Nonetheless, I’ve always had the desire and passion to do a job like this. I was told by many that it would all be too much, that I couldn’t be expected to juggle this role with a girlfriend, friends, family, social life etc etc. But I couldn’t be told: I could do it all, I thought, and I took the job calling the Headmaster on a Saturday afternoon after our joint birthday party, hungover and shattered at the end of a long school week and a long, cold January.

outstanding students

There are two students that stand out for me over my two year’s teaching. These two seemed to have something over their peers: a precocious understanding of how valuable an education would be to them. I suspect it came down to their knowledge of more of the world than just one London borough—towards the end of year 11, this one student had the confidence and respect of her peers to spin yarns about her experiences all over Africa.

My Voice

Another thing that drove me from my students was my voice—with rounded vowels and consonants in more or less the right place—but this wasn’t the voice of my childhood. I picked it up at public school and then even more so at university, along with a penchant for cider! Perhaps this is just a bald case of social climbing—but at the time i thought this was the voice of the intellectual people and if i didn’t have the voice of the intellectual people i could never really be an intellectual. A braver soul would have stood firm, teaching his or her peers a lesson par exemple: not all intellectuals should be of the same class or speak identically. I went the other way, though. This was partly a reflection of my personality—an eagerness to please—and probably some cowardice too!

Day to day

The daily grind of term time made me feel like I was falling into an inexorable tiredness. I couldn’t understand why my best mates from uni—working long hours in the city—could still play rugby on Saturday afternoons, drink all afternoon, night, recover on Sunday and go back to work at 6am on Monday. I came to the realisation that I was not invincible. The morning of my 25th birthday I plucked a grey hair from my head.

Apathy

I never gave up on those that didn’t want to learn but too often it took me away from those that did—that broke my heart. What bothered me so much was that they just did not care: a handful of students just didn’t care whether I helped them or not, whether I marked their essays or not, whether they achieved or not. These students were sometimes rude and aggressive and couldn’t see the point in working ad learning. Though I had faith in them, these were the students that undermined everything I stood for and believed in.

Year 11s

I did promise my year 11s that whatever work they did for me I would mark and turn around within 24 hours since they were my priority. This was in a vain attempt to get them to redraft coursework and do practice exam papers. It didn’t work. So often I wanted to shake them and say, “stop wasting time!” It still feels like a failing on my part that I couldn’t get them to see the need for urgency.
The start of one lesson was so bad I spent half an hour adding up all the late minutes to every lesson and explaining how many extra lessons that gave other students in other schools. They stared on blankly.
I resorted to having mocks every Friday and I would do an hour’s marking on Sunday evening ready for Monday but when I put the exam papers on the desks in front of them the boys would stop for a second during their animated discussions about computer games, glance at the grade, blink, and then return to their conversations, deaf to anything else going on in class.

moving on...

In November one of the VPs asked me about next year and made some murmurs about possibly helping to run the student commission on learning with her. In principle I wanted to stay. However, I didn’t feel as though I had figured out whether I could really do the inner city school thing. I wanted to continue to work with some of my colleagues who were truly inspirational. However, by February, the thought of doing another January seemed like self-flagellation: I couldn’t be the best teacher I could be at the school and the increasing pressure on eeking out C grades at GCSE was getting me down. Pressure from above was growing: a result of pressure to hit the government target of 30% A-C and the English Department, more than any other, was being hit with more and more strategies: data, mocks, data, after school revision classes, data, intensive revision sessions (all paid for by the school while the funding elsewhere was so tight that the school was looking for voluntary redundancies) and more data. I now realise that the increasing pressure may well have always been there but I only became more aware of the academy’s agenda. And I didn’t like it.
I realised that the feeling I’d had back in September when the sun still shone and I felt on top of the school year had long faded away. I started to dream of teaching in a school of well-rounded individuals, classes where I could make 100% of the minutes count.

Despondency

I recall having this conversation with a teacher one year ahead of me and then being on the receiving end of the question this year:
“Does it really get easier?” and the response was the same both times,
“It will never be as bad as the first!”
Indeed, as I started my second year, I had been at the school a good deal longer than a large chunk of the staff. I knew that the school was very territorial and whereas before I was very much coming into their “endz,” I could probably say that I was now “rep’ing the same endz” (sic). Further, two of the most important people to have on side in a school—the secretary and the caretaker—I knew fairly well. September was a dream, reinvigorated by the summer, I would be in school by 7am to return my year 11 work quickly and I would work on my form’s self-esteem blasting them with quote after quote from Mohammed Ali. In early October I was definitely thinking about staying on another year and trying to take on some extra responsibility.

Turning point

All through my first year I’d waited for the moment when it would suddenly get better. I kept promising the next landmark: Christmas, Easter as the watershed with behaviour. It wasn’t until the summer term, though, that I noticed I was much calmer in front of the students and they were calmer as a result. I still tried my best to perform for them, though: telling them stories, telling them about my weekend, playing a role and my favourite classes quickly became malleable. My most tricky classes, however, I still had to bamboozle with clips, powerpoints, music and quick tasks. I never really shook off the horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach before lessons with one particular group. It was the unpredictable nature of their mood which I found difficult. At the end of a Monday—when I taught solidly back to back, including 30 minutes of tutoring—I would be visibly frazzled and the bin would be overflowing with packets of junk food the students has surreptitiously being eating.

Festival of Education

I came across adverts for a "Hay-style-festival" of education in the papers this weekend. The line-up looks impressive with speakers from the worlds of education, culture and entertainment. I'll certainly be heading across.

http://www.festivalofeducation.org.uk/

This one student...

He has a benign face when he is not scowling; he has quite a round face and a spattering of freckles across his nose which do an awful lot of diplomatic work for him. He is a strange juxtaposition of anger and embarrassment. He talks consistently, always politely apologetic, but always talking!!

His class always listen carefully to the text I am reading them but when it comes to listening to each other, proceedings fall apart. Several separate conversations strike up while individuals try to share small observations. The pattern goes something like this: I apologise to the person taking, turn to the students talking to each other, ask them to stop, explain that it’s rude to speak over others, they stop while I am talking to them before turning back to continue their conversations the moment the firs student started sharing his/her observations again! Grrr!!!!!

A secret

I told my year 8 class a secret today but made them promise not to tell anyone else. I told them they were my favourite class. I know this is wrong but, to be honest, there isn’t much competition. Theirs are the lessons that I really look forward to. We have also been on trips to the imperial war museum, they have written, produced and directed their own play, raising nearly £300 for Great Ormond Street in the process. I arranged for them to perform for the Teach First office before Christmas and then for a big city firm where I’d previously done work experience over the summer. Recently the lady from Great Ormond Street came in to thank the students and tell them about where their money would be going.

Glasses

Gradually, if not intentionally, I’m giving up contact lenses. At the end of a long day’s teaching the world looks like a 3D film without the glasses. Even my vanity can’t hold out against this level of visual confusion. I realised today while running a half term revision class that every so often I pause to push my glasses back up my nose. I have come to think of this gesture not as a practical necessity but as a pedagogical affectation worth cultivating, a way of underscoring salient points!

Saying one thing and meaning your mother...I mean another!

At a recent careers event in the city, I found myself hustled by circumstance into spaces that I reject politically, personally, aesthetically. And somehow I said, looking around, ‘This is great.’ Why does my instinct blurt unsolicited exactly the opposite opinion to the one I hold?!

The visiting writer and role models

I was mad keen to get a friend of mine from university to visit the school—her play, ‘Eight,’ had recently won awards at the Edinburgh Festival and she was about to go off to New York for a run there. I thought this a perfect opportunity to let my students meet a role model. Quite early on in my first year, I had no control over the majority of my classes and Ella, I fear, had a horrid experience. I was hugely grateful to Ella for giving up her own time to come and work with the students. However, the experience made me reflect on role models—Ella and I were both white and public-school educated—I concluded that this ultimately drove me from my students. I still think that class and race matter when it comes to being a role model. The next visitor I arranged to the school was a gangster rapper by the name of Napoleon who used to rap with Tupak and more recently converted to Islam. This seemed to go down a lot better.

A great day’s lessons

When it goes well it’s so easy. I feel balanced and like I could do this job forever!

Standing up for the hoodies

I recently took my students on a trip and was amazed by the reaction and obvious misgivings that people had for teenagers. These misgivings were not only apparent through body language but general rudeness! Why are our teenagers so maligned?

When we got on public transport, there were a good number of adults who moved away from us—we were not noisy--I can only assume it was because they thought the teenagers were trouble. Later in the day, we walked into a shop where the students were to buy their lunch. Students were only allowed to go in on their own and were followed around the shop by a security guard while they bought their lunch. Assuming that they were going to steal from the shop angered me.

Being a teenager isn’t all that easy. Some of course do steal from shops and this is wrong, but let’s ask why this happens. I suspect that the fact that they are being told about the latest must-haves being the source of happiness cannot help. I got one of my students to record an average school day for me:
Up at 6.45am; leave at 7am for school; basketball training at 7.15am; lessons at 8.40am; out again at 3.30pm, football practise until 5pm, home 5.45pm, couple of hours of homework, say, takes you to nearly 8pm. This leaves about an hour to eat the 5-a-day, relax, wash, catch up with friends/family and do chores if they are to get the recommended 9 hours’ sleep a night!

Then we give them grief when they want to chill out at weekends or holidays. Further, we have created such a horrible world, who can blame them for wanting to stay home and watch TV all day? As a result they get castigated for being layabouts and label-mad consumerists. As if the messages we are giving our teenagers through the media aren’t confusing enough, the struggle for maturity is no picnic.

Grades

Grades are good. They offer prompt feedback to students about their work, letting them know WWW and EBI. Further, everyone understands the currency of grades even if they disagree with the logic of the system. What’s key is dialogue with students about grades, the criteria used, and how they can be achieved.

At the moment, though, I feel that there is so much focus on grades that we are beginning to miss what we’re all about. The focus is very much on measurable outcomes and the pressure for results is high. Instead, we should strive for an environment in which students constantly reflect:
Who am I? What do I care about? What kind of a person do I want to be? What's my responsibility to others? What do I hope to accomplish? How can I do that? Etc.
We are currently having some real trouble motivating Year 11 students in the run up to their exams but I truly think that if we were engaging students in these types of questions all the time questions of motivation would be made redundant.

Culture and ethos

In 'An Ethic of Excellence: Building a Culture of Craftsmanship with Students,' Berger argues that ‘students adjust their attitudes and efforts in order to fit the culture. If the peer culture ridicules academic achievement—it isn't cool to raise your hand in class, to do homework, to care openly about school—this is a powerful force. If the peer culture celebrates investment in school—it's cool to care, this is just as powerful. Schools need to consciously shape their cultures to be places where it's safe to care, where it's cool to care. They need to reach out to family and neighbourhood cultures to support this’ (34). Perhaps this is patently obvious but it captures everything I have been thinking this year: that culture and ethos is more important than teaching and learning. That is, as important as teaching and learning is there is something that must come before it. Too many of my students have, underneath, a fragile sense of their own ability. Berger goes on to argue that it is through their work and focus on it that their self esteem will grow.

Texts without context

We seem to increasingly value ‘metaness’ and prize the ‘mash-up’ more than the original source that was ‘mashed’. Reading the work of Andrew Keen and Nicholas Carr, it would seem that new technology is to blame: the former argues that the internet is creating mediocrity and swapping ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise; the latter argues that our growing attention deficit disorder and susceptibility to information overload is impeding our ability to think deeply and creatively.

I am a firm believer that the web empowers us through equity and equal access: twitter is used by Iranian dissidents and Facebook helped coordinate the aid work in Haiti. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to dismiss these sentiments as coming from luddites. This concern about the way new technology is reshaping our world stand as insightful and useful counterweights to a techno-utopia.

Technology is certainly accelerating certain trends: first, news and entertainment is blurring. We are over stimulated to the point that only sensationalism and hyperbole grab people’s attention. I smiled when my students asked a visiting speaker from a national newspaper whether news editors were just people that slacked off at work and surfed the web for ‘stuff to write about,’ as if news was about the latest and funniest ‘You’ve Been Framed’ clips!

Second, there is an increasing deconstructionist view of literature and a growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses, which means that readers are not immersing themselves in another world of reading in the same way they might. Reading is no longer a solitary act but social. Further, in our emphasis on speed and efficiency we are increasingly choosing the immediately available product over the more thoughtfully created one. Instead of embracing a whole novella, speech, film, for example, my students want to jump to the summary, the clip, the sound bite—overlooking the importance of context and nuance.

And third, mash-ups and bricolage are now everywhere in our cultural landscape. The cut and paste aesthetic inevitably results in tired imitations, like Lady Gaga who is omnipresent at the moment but can be seen as a third-generation Madonna.

In learning communities, then, we need to think very deeply about what this means for the future of our education system. We are at a very ambivalent time. Just today I confiscated a student’s phone and asked his parent to come into school to collect it; and yet, I run my life through a smartphone.

Dealing with the most challenging

In measuring the distance between first and second year, I reflect on how I deal with my most challenging students. In the classroom next to me, I am so fortunate to have a truly superlative teacher: watching very carefully the way in which she deals with her most challenging students gives me wisdom. I have lost count of the times I have marched luckless students into my colleague’s room next door. With the youngest she has them nodding along. I get another heavy weight at the school to deal with the older ones. They answer her questions in a matter of seconds before she ends the grilling with a quip or, better still, a nod to their family or friends that she knows from outside of school. This always makes them good-natured and repentant.

I am always grateful to these colleagues for their support straightening my wayward students, albeit makes me feel despondent sometimes!

The hoody girl

A new girl arrived from a sister school down the road. She arrived at my class wearing a hoodie so I asked her to take it off. She simply stared blankly. I told another student on the other side of the classroom to take his hoody off. He did and so the correct behaviour was modelled for her. “We don’t wear hoodies in this classroom,” I said politely. She still refused to remove the hoody and sat staring blankly. However, next lesson, no hoody.

Cussing

I lost my rag with one of my classes this week. I have recently tried to enforce a complete ban on profanities with one group in particular that cannot seem to stop cussing. They didn’t take too kindly to this. Their argument was that anyone heard venomously bellowing “fiddle sticks” in moments of pressure might be deemed slightly eccentric rather than commendably restrained.

My problem with it is the fact that familiarity breeds out the shock value and most of my colleagues are now far more familiar with four-letter words than we might choose to be. As I walked through corridors, I imagine that if the expletives were deleted from everyday conversations that I overheard, there would be very little left. Student hangouts are not the place for those of nervous disposition or aural sensitivity.

In response, one of my students wrote me the following note: "You can't take words away, Sir. Language controls us through what we say. Even if the words aren’t there, we're still thinking it. Besides, swearing may help us let off steam, which maybe prevent us banging each other up! I'm just saying that if you banned cussing completely, every thought and frustration would still exist – new ways and means of expressing them, such as physical violence, might escalate."

Change should be disruptive; if it’s not, it’s not doing its job!

Sometimes those at the top are so out of touch that they think things are as they are and always will be, that nothing can be done and everything has been tried. This reminded me of the following passage from Winnie the Pooh:
‘Here is Edward bear, coming downstairs now bump, bump, on the back of his head behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment to think of it.’

The challenges

I think schools are facing more challenges than ever before and certainly from a broader base too. The most obvious is the way pupil attainment is measured in raw terms by the very explicit reporting mechanism of 5 A-C including English and Maths. I question whether the National Challenge initiative helps. Other challenges include: the recruitment challenge and the incompetence challenge in a system that seldom calls anyone incompetent; the financial constraints, unlikely to let up anytime soon in the current climate; community cohesion; attending to emotional wellbeing, promoting healthy living, tackling parenting weaknesses etc etc. However, these challenges must be seen as fruitful opportunities as we lead beyond our authority...

The challenges

I think schools are facing more challenges than ever before and certainly from a broader base too. The most obvious is the way pupil attainment is measured in raw terms by the very explicit reporting mechanism of 5 A-C including English and Maths. I question whether the National Challenge initiative helps. Other challenges include: the recruitment challenge and the incompetence challenge in a system that seldom calls anyone incompetent; the financial constraints, unlikely to let up anytime soon in the current climate; community cohesion; attending to emotional wellbeing, promoting healthy living, tackling parenting weaknesses etc etc. However, these challenges must be seen as fruitful opportunities as we lead beyond our authority...

Beyond authority continued...

Schools cannot and should not operate in silos, but need to increasingly look across and outwards. I recently came across Albert Schweitzer’s book Memoirs of Childhood and Youth. In this he has written:
‘We must not mix ourselves up uninvited in other people’s business. On the other hand, we must ot forget the danger lurking in the reverse which our practical daily life forces upon us. We cannot possibly let ourselves get frozen into regarding everyone we do not know as an absolute stranger.’
Schools cannot be ‘hot houses’ but places where ‘melting’ goes on—of dogmatic attitudes, of stubborn wills and of iron fists.

Leading beyond authority

Julia Middleton and Common Purpose have coined the above phrase and it has really resonated with me; it is about seeing the bigger picture, about taking responsibility for problems other than our own within society at large and sharing emerging effective practices. From my very little experience, I also believe that the community need to do more to instil better behaviour in students. I’m an advocate of members of the public picking people up on anti-social behaviour.
Julia Middleton talks of leaders who can create their own legitimacy, that see further, wider, deeper. It is crucial for our leaders to know how things work in different worlds and bring them closer together. Boundaries are blurring all the time—why can’t independent schools team up with challenging inner-city schools? It is not about right and wrong or about individuals but about making the world around us better.

January

It was drizzly, the wind howled; hail happened now and then and Thursdays dragged their heels: time crept and no light came, the air was full of water. Journalists bashed out their tired articles about the grimmest month—even day—of the year. The snowy chaos of early January just prolonged the agony when it came. Does anybody truly love anybody in January?!

Back to blogging...

A Child of The Dales, Gervase Phinn

From the classroom window rolled the great expanse of the Dale. The sad child in the corner stared out like a rabbit in a trap.

‘He has special needs,’ explained the teacher, in a hushed, maternal voice. ‘Real problems with his reading, and his number work is weak. Spelling is non-existent, writing poor. He rarely speaks. He’s one of the less able in the school.’

The lad could not describe the beauty that surrounded him, the soft green dale and craggy hills. He could not spell the names of those mysterious places which he knew so well. But he could tickle a trout, ride a horse, repair a fence and dig a dyke, drive a tractor, plough a field, ilk a cow and lamb a ewe, name a bird by the faded feather, smell the seasons and predict the weather. Yes, the less able child could do all those things.

Is anyone out there listening? continued...

As an experiment I got one of my classes to record—either with their mobile or good old fashioned pen and paper—the sounds in their home. There was the expected tv; siblings fighting, screaming; radio; sirens, traffic noise; however, what was so unexpected was the blaring volume of some of the audio clips that my students had recorded. It was worrying.

Surely a greater focus on listening would really increase literacy rates, not to mention the social benefits of listening to each other. Too often listening skills are pushed aside. My dad always says that we have one mouth and 2 ears and that we should therefore listen twice as much as we talk. From a teacher’s perspective, surely it is the most important of the five senses? Without truly listening to our students how do we know what they know? How do we know what they feel?

Is anyone out there listening?

This is a question that I would very often ask myself last year with my most challenging groups; however, I have recently become so concerned that we—staff and students—are fast losing the ability to listen—really listen—to others and the world around us. How many people do you see plugged into headphones on their daily commute?

Adults have always been concerned by children’s playthings: television, we used to be told, would turn our eyes square. Psychologist Sigman argues that time spent in a virtual world is displacing time that would once have been spent socialising. As a consequence, young people are not developing as they should and cannot make eye contact, they do not understand personal boundaries, they have a lack of respect for authority as well as ADD and other problems that come with sitting down for too long. Semantically, playing games used to mean going outside; now it means settling down in front of a screen.

I feel we must be wary, though, of assuming that using mobiles and laptops should be any more harmful than reading the latest bestselling book--Manga (look it up!). Increasingly, that’s the way we will read: as a download on a phone! Further, with spellchecks and predictive text that write for us, one might think that this will exacerbate literacy levels. However, listening to my students, they also do a good amount of writing when blogging and messaging each other--perhaps more than any generation before--we must, then, better harness and tap into these developments.