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.